Back during October, I had the opportunity to go hands-on with an upcoming flagship enterprise laptop from HP. This was shortly after hearing HP's evolving strategy for AI PCs at its annual Imagine conference in September, too, so I had a lot of thoughts.
Months later, and I just got home from HP's follow-up Amplify conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Funnily enough, the HP EliteBook X 14 (G1a) is the laptop I brought with me (and am currently reviewing) — the very same device I briefly tested all those months ago.
In September, HP had already impressed me with its aggressive yet considerate push into artificial intelligence on our personal computers. In a relatively short time span, that strategy has rapidly expanded — and many of the promises HP made at Imagine have been brought to fruition and were showcased at Amplify.
We're in an era where "AI" feels more like a marketing buzzword by companies desperate to find ways to sell you smartphones and laptops that are no longer seeing the same levels of year-to-year innovation, but HP is the one PC company that's genuinely making a tangible difference.
If you truly want to know what an AI PC can do for you right now, HP is the company to look at.
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is evolving at a nearly inconceivable rate. Endless investment from countless companies has led to exponential growth in capabilities and helped elevate AI to the forefront of technology... But the vast majority of it still doesn't really matter to most people.
As I'll explain in more depth later, AI is most prevalent in the workplace, with many highly specialized enterprise tools and solutions taking advantage of machine learning, vectorization, and more to boost productivity and collaboration. HP is remaining competitive on the front lines of these developments.
Rather than wait on the sidelines while third-party companies attempt to discover how to make AI PC hardware useful to us, HP is actively developing its own AI solutions and creating a platform on which others can innovate and adapt.
Under HP's Advanced Computing Solutions department, a dedicated group of engineers and AI scientists have released the Z by HP AI Studio, a comprehensive platform of tools, models, and resources for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science projects.
Designed to bolster collaboration, the HP AI Studio is enhanced by partnerships with companies like NVIDIA, offering an open and transparent solution for all your AI development needs — and it can operate entirely locally, without relying on the cloud for processing.
There's also the Z by HP Gen AI Lab, an end-to-end solution designed to verify the trustworthiness and consistency of generative AI models by helping Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) reduce hallucinations, or the likelihood of their AI producing made-up results.
Finally, Z by HP Boost allows teams to share unused GPU resources and access those resources remotely to power more intensive workloads. That means a team member can utilize the powerful NVIDIA GPU of a desktop PC in the office to complete heavy-duty AI computing on their thin-and-light laptop at home.
HP is constantly iterating on all of these tools, staying on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence development and all the latest models that release. It's all in the name of reaching the "ideal" of agentic AI, the next step in the evolution.
Artificial intelligence in its current era began with perceptive AI, or models able to recognize patterns within their datasets and accurately parse new data within the same modality. Next, we had generative AI, or models able to translate data between modalities — such as text to video, or voice to image, etcetera.
Then there's reasoning AI, which are models that (hopefully) are able to reach logical conclusions and recognize new patterns without relying on preexisting datasets; that means AI that's able to learn on its own, not just from what you feed it.
HP has its sights set on agentic AI, which are advanced models that can solve complex, multistep problems on their own, both through the data they're given and through their own reasoning skills. Agentic artificial intelligence is the "AI assistants" that have been idealized in media for decades, but never quite achieved.
The development of its own advanced AI development platforms is allowing HP to pave its own path to agentic AI, though, working with trusted partners like NVIDIA and countless ISVs to find creative, innovative, and — most importantly — obtainable AI solutions that are useful today and will become even better tomorrow.
To accomplish this, HP is focusing its efforts where artificial intelligence can make the biggest difference.
A tangible AI PC strategy that starts at the work
A lot of technological advancements start in the consumer sectors, before trickling down to commercial customers after the tech is refined, prices come down to make equipping entire fleets more accessible, and security, privacy, and reliability are assured.
Many companies have attempted to take a similar approach with artificial intelligence, but the greatest innovations are those that pull customers to it — with AI, it feels more like companies are pushing it onto us without telling us how it's actually better than what we already have.
The most successful AI endeavors are those that are traveling in the opposite direction, and HP is one of the companies taking this approach. At HP Amplify 2025, the company had a lot to say about how its AI is already making a difference today, not how AI could be the next big thing.
No, that doesn't mean trying to push its own version of ChatGPT or Copilot onto companies, attempting to entirely replace established internet search engines with tools prone to inaccuracies, hallucinations, and falsifications.
Instead, HP is focusing on ways AI can enhance or streamline our work, building its tools and platforms around employees rather than in place of them.
On the subtle side, you have HP's trusted Wolf Pro Security suite using AI to rapidly respond and adapt to new threats, while offloading important security and privacy processes to the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) of your computer to improve both performance and battery life (without compromising your protection).
You have HP Sure Start and Sure Sense, the former providing end-to-end firmware resiliency that extends beyond the BIOS, and the latter helping protect your sensitive information by automatically detecting and dealing with sudden malware threats.
None of this is pushed in your face as using AI, but instead works quietly in the background to secure your PC and your data.
In a broader sense, you'll find HP's AI-driven services in the HP Workforce Experience Platform, HP Managed Device Solutions, and HP Premium Support Services. These are various tools that companies can use to manage entire fleets of connected AI PCs.
Seamless remote access to connected AI PCs for IT departments, detailed and accurate telemetry data, streamlined tools for managing software and firmware updates, intelligent and contextual support for troubleshooting issues and resolving IT tickets — it's all here, and much of it works across HP's entire portfolio of devices (including printers, collaboration equipment, and peripherals) as well as devices from other companies like Dell and Lenovo.
These end-to-end management solutions are using artificial intelligence to aggregate vast amounts of seemingly disjointed data, organizing it in a way that's useful to companies. According to HP, its investments in these areas have directly led to companies saving considerable sums of money on IT support and device management, as well as leading to quicker and more reliable resolutions of fleet-wide issues.
HP can enhance your video and audio with Poly Camera Pro, providing more options and control than Windows Studio Effects. It can make printing and scanning easier with HP Print AI, providing seamless remote access, contextual and intelligent automatic formatting and organizing, enhanced sharing options (such as scanning direct to email), and more.
You even have HP AI Companion, which integrates into your HP AI PC's hardware for seamless control and automatic optimization, but more importantly can parse, organize, and analyze local libraries of data that you create. That information never leaves your device, either, and HP guarantees privacy and security by never using your data for AI training purposes.
There's even more, but that's ultimately not why HP is seeing so much success with AI where companies like Dell and Lenovo are apparently still finding their footing (and Microsoft is continuing to struggle to convince us that Copilot+ PCs actually matter).
Artificial intelligence in its current form shines the brightest when applied in extremely specific, context-dependent situations. Consumer tech often takes the "jack-of-all-trade" approach for mass appeal, but HP is refining its AI development tools, creating its own AI solutions, and working with ISVs to target particular use cases.
The more defined your data set, the more accurate your AI is likely to be. That means developing unique solutions for individual jobs, and HP is doing exactly that. At Amplify, I learned about how the company is designing tools for the project managers, the architects, the nurses and doctors, the accountants, and more.
HP will even tell you all about those experiences at XP.HP.com, a useful resource for learning about what AI is accomplishing for users right now.
AI PCs that are useful to us today, and more so tomorrow
At HP Amplify 2025, the company announced the "world's largest AI PC portfolio" with dozens of new AI PCs powered by Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm silicon. It also unveiled the next stage of its AI strategy, with a major update coming soon to the HP AI Companion app and a host of other ambitious AI projects.
Conference rooms are gearing up to automatically optimize collaboration setups by recognizing attendee PCs, and will even be able to direct meetings to ensure the video and audio spotlights are focused on the right people. HP's AI solutions are also inching closer to the "agentic" ideal, able to reliably and accurately handle more complex workloads.
There's a chance that you're already taking advantage of HP's AI investments at your work without even realizing it, though, and that's where I believe artificial intelligence is heading.
Companies are pushing ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and other AI assistants onto consumers, using "AI" as a buzzword that risks commoditizing the entire category of technology. Consumers still have many rightful concerns about AI that can only be solved over time, through education, the slow building of trustworthy reputations, and the deliverance of AI features that actually make a difference.
A Google search engine that talks to you (and can't reason between "true" and "false") isn't that. In fact, there simply isn't going to be a single "killer app" that sells AI PCs to normal people.
I've maintained for months now that artificial intelligence is the inevitable future of personal computing, but that AI PCs don't provide a lot of reasons to buy them right now beyond wanting to be future proofed for what comes next.
HP is different, though. Rather than desperately and futilely searching for the one-for-all killer AI app that doesn't exist, HP is proliferating intelligent, thoughtfully designed AI across its entire portfolio of products.
Windows 11 will undoubtedly get smarter as Microsoft continues to develop Copilot, and companies like OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and NVIDIA will undoubtedly find new ways to get their AI products into headlines, but ultimately the best AI PC will be one that's simply better, smarter, and more secure than your last PC — without making a point of telling you every two seconds that it's powered by artificial intelligence.
Right now, HP is by far the company that's closest to achieving that in my eyes. It's taking matters into its own hands with a comprehensive, company-wide strategy that aims to marry hardware, software, and AI solutions into "One HP."
HP is the only company that's actually succeeded in making me excited about AI PCs. Given how quickly HP went from making promises to actually delivering on those promises in the span of six months (when other companies are being accused of selling vaporware and empty promises, like Apple and its heavily advertised Apple Intelligence), I'm also more prone to trust that HP is only sharing the visions that it's already close to achieving.
HP isn't the only place to get an incredible Windows laptop, but it is the best place get an AI PC that can actually, truly do what your old laptop can't.
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