HP Is Betting Big on AI in the Workplace. It Wants to Transform Printing and Everything Else

HP’s headquarters are in the heart of Silicon Valley, relatively close to Stanford and the headquarters of other major technology companies. They’re also just a few miles from the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard laid the first stone of their empire.

In fact, this is where the company held its annual HP Imagine event on Sept. 24, which had a clear premise: AI won’t only improve how we work but will redefine our relationship with work itself. CEO Enrique Lores says the company wants to be part of this radical change.

HP has its own Work Relationship Index. During the event, Anneliese Olson, senior vice president and managing director of North America, said that only 28% of skilled workers have a “healthy” relationship with their work. “[It has shown] only a one-point improvement since 2023, but we also learned that people with the right tools and technology have a healthier relationship with their work,” she added.

That’s where artificial intelligence comes in. HP is proposing AI as a transformative tool to correct the imbalance. It does so by targeting the root of how people interact with technology in their day-to-day lives.

AI Companion: HP’s Own Co-pilot

During the presentation, Alex Cho, president of the Personal Systems business, introduced the new line of PCs featuring integrated AI: the Omnibook Ultra Flip and EliteBook X. These laptops promise an AI-driven experience with up to 55 TOPS of performance to enhance day-to-day work tasks.

Throughout the event, the focus was on translating the raw power of the PCs into tangible productivity. The emphasis wasn’t just on providing numerous resources but on transforming them into the right tools for users.

HP’s AI Companion is the company’s generative AI approach. It utilizes several LLMs (although HP didn’t specify which ones) and selects the most appropriate one for each situation based on the context.

AI Companion provides natural language processing and data analysis capabilities at the local level. This highlights HP’s commitment to privacy and security as differentiators in an increasingly data-conscious market. Above all, AI Companion aims to serve as a co-pilot between professionals and their work information, emphasizing HP’s role in providing more than hardware.

Reinventing Analog Processes

Printing technology has remained largely unchanged for many years, but HP is looking to revolutionize it with the help of AI. This may sound like an empty promise, but the demonstrations I and the rest of the attendees witnessed at the event were genuinely useful.

HP Print AI and HP’s new Envy printers enhance print quality. According to Tuan Tran, president of Imaging, Printing and Solutions at the company, they also reimagine the role of printing in today’s increasingly digital offices.

The most impressive part of HP’s new offering is its AI-enabled app. Instead of viewing printing as a final step, it treats it as an intelligent component within the digital ecosystem.

The app allows users to use natural language to request virtually any adjustment they want to make to a document before printing. This includes tasks such as printing a web page while removing ads and other unnecessary elements or printing a lengthy document that has been reformatted to fit onto a single page.

For instance, when printing spreadsheets with graphs, the HP AI app recognizes that these graphs shouldn’t be split across multiple pages, remapping the print document to ensure they always appear on the same page.

Samuel Chang, division president of HP’s Consumer PC Solutions business, discussed AI’s potential for delivering personalized experiences. He said AI enables the company to provide truly tailored experiences: “Through the AI, you personalize your computer [and printer] based on your needs and wherever you are.”

The Workspace as an Intelligent Ecosystem

HP Workforce Solutions president Dave Shull introduced the new Workforce Experience platform, which aims to establish the brand as a key player in the modern workspace. The platform offers more than just hardware–it provides AI-based insights to enhance employee productivity and well-being.

One of the most notable innovations is the remote repair service at the BIOS level, addressing a major challenge in IT support. HP seems to have achieved the right balance between advanced functionality and necessary security.

AI Producer Studio is another significant innovation. If it lives up to its promise, it could make professional content production more accessible, expanding beyond creative industries and corporate communications experts.

According to Lores, “No one is better positioned to put the benefits of AI in the hands of our customers than HP.”

Gaming: A New Frontier for AI

HP is also expanding its AI technology from the workplace to the gaming world. Gagan Singh, vice president and general manager of HyperX and responsible for Gaming Strategy at HP, discussed the company’s strategy for using AI to enhance the gaming experience.

“When we talk to the gamers, they say the biggest, the most important thing that they want is performance on gaming, PCs, on anything related to gaming,” Singh told Xataka On.

This has led HP to develop a strategy around three main pillars:

• Performance
• Personalization
• Play

HP’s vision for AI in gaming isn’t just about horsepower. Singh said, “Our AI tenants for gaming are that [they should be] unique to HP. It has to be relevant to you and to the type of game you’re playing.” In other words, HP’s approach involves tailored AI solutions that are relevant to the specific needs of each game and gamer.

Singh also explained how different gamers may have unique interpretations of what it means to personalize their gaming experience.

In hardware, HP is innovating with technologies such as active noise cancellation, which is finally coming to its new gaming headsets. Singh revealed, “We’ve patented this ANC experience, and it’s required eight microphones in the headset for noise canceling, not for you to speak, but for noise canceling.” In addition, they bring a peculiarity. Contrary to what we usually see for this product line, they’re discreet, elegant headsets, far from the gamer aesthetic.

The integration of AI into HP’s gaming offering isn’t only focused on improving performance but also on creating more personalized and immersive experiences. As the line between work and play blurs, innovations in the gaming space could have implications for the future of work and digital collaboration.

The Future of Work

HP envisions a future where AI plays a crucial role in every aspect of the workplace. Instead of simply following a trend, the company aims to lead and shape the future of work.

This strategy goes beyond just hardware, focusing on creating a complete ecosystem of software and services in collaboration with partners such as Google, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and LLMs. It’s an open innovation approach that emphasizes the importance of not working alone but rather moving forward with partners.

The success of this vision depends on several factors:

1. AI usability: It should be user-friendly for non-technical users.
2. Smooth integration: The AI should seamlessly fit into existing workflows without disrupting them.
3. Demonstrable return on investment: Companies should be able to justify their investments in AI with tangible returns.
4. Confidence in AI: This shouldn’t solely rely on HP’s proposition.

At the Imagine 2024 event, HP proved to be a company with a clear vision of the future of work and its role in leading it. HP possesses the necessary technological capabilities and has established agreements with third parties to expand its reach.

HP’s proposals aim to enhance the way we work together. AI has further enhanced the brand’s holistic approach, covering everything from high-performance hardware to the finer points of user experience.

The company’s significant challenge will be to drive a cultural shift, not just a technological one, in how people perceive work. HP’s technology proposition and understanding of work dynamics will be the starting point.

This vision looks beyond mere efficiency. It’s a commitment to fostering a more harmonious and productive relationship between humans and technology.

Image | Xataka

Related | Nvidia Already Rules the AI Hardware Market. With the Launch of Its Own Open-Source LLM, It’s Now Going After GPT-4 and Llama