Big bet: Microsoft’s “AI PCs” are meeting the cruel market-maker. But customers aren’t buying, and several Windows OEMs are quietly retooling their pitch despite an onslaught of Copilot-branded laptops, as chipmakers advertise strong NPUs. For now, the promise of an on-device AI revolution is bumping up against confusion, wafer-thin use cases, and price-sensitive buyers.
OEMs Pull Back the AI-First Pitch Amid Weak Demand
In a pre-CES press briefing, senior Dell executives openly admitted to a disconnect between AI hype and real demand, talking up an “unmet promise” and mentioning that mainstream shoppers don’t buy laptops because they listen for the word AI. That’s a point several channel partners have made: there’s genuine interest in new PCs, but not due to Copilot branding.
Behind closed doors, product teams throughout HP and Lenovo have stopped dwelling on AI-first marketing and started playing up more bread-and-butter benefits: battery life, thermals, build quality, cut-down bezels. Retail reps want easy-to-understand talking points that translate into everyday results — “40 TOPS NPU” isn’t one of them. In-store demos, which once focused on generative features, are shifting back to more real-world upgrades like webcam quality and instant wake.
The Value Proposition for AI PCs Is Still Fuzzy Today
Microsoft’s Copilot is still a work in progress on Windows, and that somewhat spoils the hardware story. CEO Satya Nadella has been pressing teams directly on product quality after seeing bugs, and betas turning out unsmooth. The big privacy backlash against the Recall feature, which Microsoft paused and then didn’t ship broadly anyway, did its bit to knock confidence in the AI PC story too.
Meanwhile, consumers already have a capable assistant on board with the browser. The generative tools from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic run just fine on older machines, making an expensive new “AI PC” a tough sell. Both lower latency and improved privacy and offline capabilities are promised with on-device AI — yet the features in today’s Windows don’t rely on that NPU in a way that feels must-have. If the thing that is a chatbot you talk to in Edge feels exactly like it did on the four-year-old laptop, yes, the upgrade argument falls apart.
Enterprise Buyers Are Holding Their Horses
Business customers — Microsoft’s profit engine — are being slow to roll out AI workflows rather than pushing them wholesale. CIOs tell analysts that they need demonstrable productivity increases before they’ll sign off on large seat counts and add-on software fees — Microsoft 365 Copilot costs up to $30 per user per month — also known as “eating their own dog food.” Security and data governance teams also seek transparency and understanding of what is running on their local system, what tasks are moving into the cloud, as well as how records can be kept.
Analysts at IDC and Gartner say refresh cycles are bouncing back from recent lows, but AI by itself isn’t freeing up budget. Many of these companies will buy new PCs at regular replacement intervals and think of the NPU as “future-ready” silicon… that is, valuable in the future but not a sufficient justification today. Early pilots demonstrate promising use cases in code assistance, meeting summaries, and on-device transcription; although ROI is conditional on trusted models and deep integration with line-of-business apps.
The Hardware Is Ready, but the Software Isn’t There Yet
When it comes to silicon, the pace of change has been quite fast. Qualcomm’s X platforms, Intel’s most recent Core Ultra lineup, and AMD’s Ryzen all ship with powerful NPUs for running vision, speech, and small language models locally. Canalys and IDC have official “AI PC” definitions focused on NPU capability, and many new premium Windows laptops now fit them.
The bottleneck is software, and the AI-like Windows experiences are frequently powered by cloud inference, while third-party developers are still trying to figure out what kinds of tasks truly benefit from on-device models and which should continue to live in the cloud. Driver maturity, app compatibility, and the realities of x86 vs Arm transitions contribute to friction. Yes, Snapdragon-based systems have good battery life, but emulation weirdness and app holes can be a bit too much for the regular population to overlook AI advantages.
How Microsoft and Its Partners Are Adapting
You can bet that message will become, well, messy. For example, OEMs are including transparent, on-device features like noise cancellation, background blur for video calls, inline captions for real-time transcriptions, and offline transcription that demonstrate the NPU without requiring any user setup. Consumers are hearing about battery improvements, lighter chassis, and quieter fans “with AI thrown in for good measure,” rather than being focused on as the hero. A few vendors are experimenting with short-term software bundles, in response to “subscription fatigue.”
On Microsoft’s end, the way forward is one of consistency and trust: streamline Copilot behavior across apps, spell out distinctions between what happens locally versus on a server, and sprinkle a few delightful defaults with clear messaging that they are running only on your machine. If Windows can automatically translate a video call, summarize a recorded lecture, or categorize all the screenshots it doesn’t send to the cloud without relying on Wi‑Fi — and do so reliably — shoppers will notice.
The Bottom Line: Clear Use Cases Must Justify AI PCs
AI PCs are coming, but being inevitable isn’t the same thing as being urgent. The silicon is showing up; the software isn’t exciting yet. Until Microsoft starts turning NPUs into visible, concrete wins for the average person using Windows, Windows OEMs will sell new machines the old-fashioned way: performance, battery life, and price. The race now is less about hardware and more about giving people a reason to upgrade.
