This episode of the Six Five On The Road series at HP Imagine 2024 welcomes HP‘s Sam Chang, Division President, Consumer PCs with Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead for a conversation on how the company is harnessing AI technology to benefit everyday consumers. AI technology remains a topic of significant interest, yet many people are still unsure about its practical benefits in daily life. Their conversation provides insight into this exciting area, discussing the potential advantages, challenges, and the latest HP products designed to empower consumers through AI.
Highlights include:
- The benefits AI technology can bring to the daily lives of consumers
- Potential advantages of incorporating AI into consumer products
- Consumer concerns and challenges with AI technology
- An overview of the latest HP AI-driven products and solutions
- How HP ensures their AI-powered offerings are user-friendly and focused on consumer needs
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road, here in the very famous HP Garage where Silicon Valley started. It’s also an amazing HP event. Huge announcements, great conversations. Dan, look at us. We’re where basically Silicon Valley started.
Daniel Newman: We are. We kind of are. You were there. HP Imagine here, in the humble-
Patrick Moorhead: Well, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there in the ’20s.
Daniel Newman: It was the ’30s.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: ’38, ’39. HP Imagine though, we are in the humble beginnings of HP. It’s pretty cool to be in here. I don’t think people from the camera can totally appreciate, but this was literally the center of the Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, where it started. Pat, it’s really, really cool. But what’s also cool is being here at an inflection.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: We are at an inflection, the market is changing, new technologies are coming out. We know that work is about to change. And just the way we interact every day with our devices is changing really, really fast.
Patrick Moorhead: It really is. We talk about innovation happening in a garage and it happened here. When tech first started, it was really all about the business. Then we saw consumers started to use it. Then the market flipped, where consumer was outpacing innovation of the commercial market. Now today, we’ve got this symbiotic relationship between consumer experiences as commercial, because 100% of business users are consumers, but not 100% consumers are business users.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely.
Patrick Moorhead: It’s hard for me to say which is driving each other. Anyways, a lot of innovation around consumers here. It’s my pleasure to welcome Sam to the show. First time on The Six Five. It was so great catching up with you. Hey, you were there, I was there, and we somehow never met each other with our histories. But it’s great to have you.
Sam Chang: Thanks for the opportunity, and excited to be here.
Patrick Moorhead: For sure.
Daniel Newman: I think you were referring to consumerization, which did really start to peak. There was some handset devices that came out, some that made email really accessible with the buttons. And then, there was the one with no buttons that came out that a lot of people are still using today. But we saw that first time, the old adage of when a CEO came to work with something they were using personally, and slid it under the desk of the CIO and said, “Make this work for me at work.” I think ever since then, we’ve really seen the consumer as the driving force in so many ways to the technology that we use in our personal lives and at work. And now, it’s all blurring together. Let me get your take, Sam, leading the consumer business here. How is AI, as you see it, changing and improving the life of every day consumers?
Sam Chang: Well, I think we’re still in the first, even maybe not even first half of first inning of AI. It is a huge inflection, I think, for both technology industry, and consumers. Already, we’re already seeing people using ChatGPT or CoPilot Plus to doing a lot of things they would have done, spent a lot more time.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Sam Chang: Whether it’s summarizing things, well, now you can do that easily locally. It also gives you a lot of superpowers on a computer, where you can actually do a lot of painting. Where maybe you’re not a great artist, but with power of AI, you can actually become a lot better, and give you that superpower that you didn’t always have.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Maybe we do a drill-down on that, I’ll call it the advantages of bringing AI into consumer. Does it all come down to either having more fun than you thought? Obviously, you want to be efficient and productive. But what are some of the areas that consumers can benefit from AI? It’s funny. We first saw the, “Hey, let’s do a trip. I’m going to Spain, I have $1000. Tell me where I should go.” I don’t see a lot of people doing that. There is a lot of benefit, particularly with students, with summarization. “Hey, help me summarize this document,” or, “Help me research it.” But where are the areas that people are really getting some lift here?
Sam Chang: Yeah. I actually have a couple of kids in school still. It was amazing when ChatGPT came out. Within a week, I feel like, every high school kid was already on AI. A lot quicker than even most enterprises were. When it comes to what students do every day. In some sense, you’re almost running your own business. They need to summarize things. They need to communicate. They also spend a lot of time doing video conferencing with their teachers, but also their friends. And they do a lot of gaming and entertainment as well. AI can actually improve and enhance what they do, all the way from helping you be more productive, almost running a business of your own as a student. Also, help you do a lot more entertainment as well. Again, whether it’s video editing or music editing you do as a hobby. Also, help you to do more gaming in terms of additional benefit you get, in terms of battery life and performance.
Patrick Moorhead: You listed pretty much everything that I do. I guess, kids versus, Dan, will would you call me a Boomer? I’m Gen X though.
Daniel Newman: A young Boomer.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, okay.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. I think in the end though, there’s just so much about accessibility, and information, and knowledge. The ability for the AI to start to actually be a little bit more predictive, a bit more assumptive. We talk about the trip. Maybe it’s not planning your $1000 trip exactly. But anywhere you want to go, anywhere you want to … “I want coffee and I’m in a city I don’t even know. Where’s the best place to go?” It used to be just search, but generative tools now can help summarize, it can help explain to you the difference between maybe three options. Are you more into really rich, flavorful coffees? Do you just want generic morning tea? You know what I’m saying? These technologies are starting to simplify it, make it more accessible and very digestible, and being a bit more predictive.
On the other side of it though, especially with probably aging populations, people that are a little bit more timid about the adoption of new technology, there are some challenges, though. Sam, as you’re thinking about are people nervous about privacy? Are consumers worried about security? I know enterprises are. What are you seeing in terms of how consumers feel about those risks?
Sam Chang: It is true. A lot of AI breeds a lot of power. But there’s also a lot of responsibility I think, as an industry, we need to do. There are a lot of advantage also coming from running AI locally. Not only does it give you better latency, but also it’s more secure. You can do a lot of things that are more protective of your privacy. But also, as we think about AI, there are already things we know, like productivity or video editing. But I go back to smartphone. When the smartphone came out, it was famously launched with three killer services. Music, web browser, and visual voice mail. There was no Airbnb. There was no Uber. I’m actually excited that a lot of the innovation of services that we know of but yet to be discovered will be coming out of consumer.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. It’s just exciting. I use it more than I ever thought I would. I’m in. I use it every day. What I’m super, super excited about is all the on-device stuff. It can’t come here quicker. I’m enjoying your RAG tool that you have on HPs now. Can’t wait to get even more files I can dump in there. It’s very useful, and it’s very secure, and very private, and I appreciate that.
We’re here for HP Imagine 2024. Talk through some of what you’re offering related to AI.
Sam Chang: Yeah. You mentioned the RAG tool. We actually have an application called AI Companion, where you can actually analyze your personal document without necessarily saving it to the cloud. You can query questions and get answers very quickly. And create your own personal library, as I call it. We also have other applications, like Polycam Pro, where you can leverage the NPU and do all the things you would have already done since the COVID, three, four years, video conferencing. But by allocating the right workload, you can actually improve not only the quality, but the battery and performance of your computing when you do video conferencing with multi-calls.
Patrick Moorhead: I’ve used that, too. A little fun fact I really like, and this sounds like a small, little feature. I like the fact that I can put my corporate logo as a background inside of Poly Studio. Regardless of what service I use, it’s there. It seems small, but it’s a big deal to me personally. I appreciate that.
Sam Chang: I get the same feedback as well. It’s a very minor thing.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Sam Chang: That watermark. But every time I go on a call people are like, “Oh. How did you do that?”
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.
Sam Chang: It’s one of those, people bring it up.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Newman: When you talked about the three initial killer apps, that really resonated with me. Of course, we know that this AI era will have this build out. Something’s going to get launched that’s going to trigger, and it’s really going to be the forcing function of this cycle that everyone keeps talking about. When I see that new thing like, “Oh, I’m a DJ. I saw this cool way an MPU can be used to enable me to use one laptop to get rid of all kinds of equipment I used to have to use.” That’s the inflection point for some consumers or small business types.
But it is about experience, too. The three really resonated with me because they made the experience easy. Visual voice mail. I didn’t always want to have to call in and figure out how to check in. You can just see your voicemail right away. Web browsing, having an actual usable one. Because there were browsers out for a while, but some of them were just not usable. Talk a little bit about how HP thinks about making these AI-powered solutions consumer friendly.
Sam Chang: Yeah. Actually, I like those two example you mentioned, because I think they’re an analogies when we think about PC as well.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Sam Chang: Browser was available in mobile, I think including Blackberry.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Sam Chang: But it was-
Daniel Newman: It was unusable.
Patrick Moorhead: It was hard.
Sam Chang: It was the combination of the performance as well as the user interaction model that made it really easy. The same thing for, I think, visual voicemail. Making it simple. I think as we think about AI and AIPC, a lot of the usability will get enhanced. Today, we do a lot of keyboard and mouse is how we typically interact, or a touch pad. But one of the things AI can do over time is improve that modality, so we can speak and do a lot more natural language processing. Maybe it’ll understand some of the jargon or terminology that maybe my teenage kids can use, and write that essay or draft read it in a more personal tone. A lot of personalization is also I think that AI will improve a lot. And making it easier to use, whether it’s your student or the older people like-
Daniel Newman: Like Pat.
Sam Chang: Xers.
Patrick Moorhead: I love that. No, I’m super excited about even Recall coming out in the future. Being able to jockey across multiple ecosystems. It can be Microsoft, it can be Apple, it can be HP, it can be the web browser. I get old, my memory slips. I want to have my entire history and being able to do some really quick search. And putting all this AI horsepower on the device itself, at least black and white, I can say that it is going to make a difference. We are going to see some major announcements that are going to come out this year that are going to put an exclamation point on all of this. I think the doubters will say, “Yes, we have something here.”
In the end, the arbiter is the consumer. But I think they’re going to get on the bandwagon, too.
Sam Chang: Yeah. Recall, I think it will hopefully be released soon.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.
Sam Chang: I think it’s going to enable a lot better interaction. Being able to not only going back to what I’d done two days ago, but over time two weeks ago, but doing it in a very secure and private manner.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Sam Chang: And being able to bring the semantic search.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.
Sam Chang: I don’t exactly have to know what I was searching for based on a typical keyword paradigm, but being able to have that intelligence. Even if I describe a movie or some book I read, or the dress I was shopping for my kid, it’ll know what I was looking for, intent, and surface that for me.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. A digital assistant, your concierge, your memory. It does all those different things, and it creates that seamless, semantic experience where we just talk to our device like we talk to each other.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure.
Daniel Newman: I think that’s really exciting and I think that’s where consumers are heading.
Sam, thanks so much for joining us here on The Six Five. We should have you back sometime soon.
Sam Chang: Thanks for the opportunity. Again, happy to be doing this at the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes, absolutely.
Daniel Newman: There, Sam did it. He closed it out perfectly for me. You’ve got The Six Five here. We are at HP Imagine 2024 in beautiful Palo Alto, at the HP Garage. Hit that subscribe button, join us for all of our other coverage of the event here, and of course all of our great Six Five content. We’re signing off for this episode. We’ll see you all soon.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
