On this first episode of our Six Five On The Road series from HP Imagine 2024, Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead sit down with HP’s Alex Cho, President of Personal Systems, for a conversation on HP‘s transformative approach to the future of work through AI. Alex shares insightful perspectives on HP’s ambitious endeavors to redefine work dynamics, emphasizing growth, creativity, and breakthrough innovation. This episode delves into the heart of how HP is pioneering the compute landscape with next-generation AI PCs, cutting-edge audio and video AI solutions, and an innovative AI development platform.
Their conversation covers:
- The alignment of these AI innovations with HP’s vision for the future of work.
- Feedback from early adopters of HP’s new AI PCs and their impact.
- Measures HP adopts to ensure user privacy and security amid new AI functionalities.
- HP’s strategies to streamline AI development workflows for corporations.
- The role of AI in enhancing new video conferencing solutions by HP and their market position.
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Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. We may talk about publicly traded companies and their share prices, but please do not take this as investment advice. We are not investment advisors..
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road at a very unique spot. We are in the HP Garage here in Palo Alto, literally Silicon Valley was invented here. That’s what the plaque says. Daniel, what a great place. Here we are.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, if it says it, it must be true. But it is actually a really cool place. We were in the garage where it all happened. You hear those stories about in the garage when things happened. Nowadays, it’s more usually like a basement or someone’s home office or a Starbucks. But back in the day, this is where the magic happened, Pat, and we were here and the cameras, you can probably see some of this stuff around us, but these are real devices. This is a museum.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it really is. The event, HP Imagine 2024, which is actually happening in Palo Alto at HP’s headquarters here, is not about the past. It’s all about the future. There have been some huge AI announcements that have gone out and super exciting. I can’t even think of a better person to kick this off than HP’s, Alex Cho, head of personal systems. Alex, great to have you back on The Six Five.
Alex Cho: Yeah, it’s great to be back with you and also host you here at where Silicon Valley started. So, great to be here.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s super inspiring and Imagine has been great, getting a chance to hear all the updates from you. We’ve had you on our show a number of times, Alex, and we always really enjoy it. Remember it all starting, at least for me, with you when you told us about how the PC is essential.
Alex Cho: Yes.
Daniel Newman: Now your story is evolving to this next wave of the future of work. So there’s different sort of speculations about what’s going on, the next devices, AI, the impact. Everybody’s going to be connected all the time with these generative tools. At least listening to you, you’ve had a bit of a different spin on it and I’ve really enjoyed that. But all the innovation announced this week, tell us a little bit about how you see this aligning with how you envision the future of work.
Alex Cho: So we are so excited about this event because it’s more than a product. It’s more than a set of products, but it’s about work, and we think that we have a unique opportunity to transform how people will work. We think that we have a very unique opportunity to use AI across a portfolio of products that HP has to change the day in the life of the worker. That’s a huge opportunity. We are positioned better than we’ve ever been across a portfolio of what we have, and our announcement just reflects we are super powering all of that with AI. So, we’re very excited about this.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I’m super excited. It is funny, you talked about the PC becoming essential, almost like you had a crystal ball. Boom, I think during the pandemic time, the PC absolutely was essential. Now you’ve brought out, I would say, one and a half waves of AI PC’s… Two. The ones, the second generation has only been out there for a while. But what kind of feedback are you getting from users so far? Maybe even talk about what you’ve learned as well?
Alex Cho: Yeah, remember, these are not just the next PCs, these are the next generation of PCs. That’s just the beginning. What we’re hearing from people, particularly as they’re doing new things, it’s all about doing new things, AI experiences on them. They’re recognizing, wow, this is not just a new PC. This is allowing me to be faster. This is allowing me to be more productive. This is allowing me to create. The best quote that I heard from people responding to this, it’s as if they have their own staff of researchers helping them summarize all the documents. It’s like they have their own staff of creative artists on their device helping them to create professionally. It’s having a whole set of resources available for them. That’s powerful. That allows you then to do so much more beyond what you can do before.
Patrick Moorhead: Kind of like superpowers almost, right?
Alex Cho: That’s right. That’s the word.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: It does feel good when you’re able to very quickly get access, very quickly design, very quickly develop, and you’re seeing it. It’s helping all the different types of workers, these knowledge workers, these creative workers, technical workers and coders. You’re seeing differences being made. Of course you guys are really helping to lead the charge. One thing I do hear a lot, Alex, and I think you’ve probably heard a bit about this too, is there’s some concerns though about how we feed information in the earliest eras of these ChatGPTs. You heard about companies spilling the beans inside. Of course part of the exciting story of this new future of work and on-device frameworks and NPUs is doing more on the device, doing it more securely. How are you ensuring your customers that they can get all these great benefits but keep their important data private and secure?
Alex Cho: We think that’s one of the most important topics of AI and that is how do we ensure privacy and security? It’s also the reason why there’s a very unique value of the AI PC because it allows you to use AI, yes, but use it while keeping your data local and private and secure to you. That really is what we believe is the opportunity around the AI PC movement. That is to capitalize on AI, improve your productivity, do it faster when it’s done locally, more cost-effectively and private and secure. That’s why what we have announced with our latest products is the ability to have a research assistance on your device, your local files. Then you’re able to research, summarize, query, keeping that data on your device, keeping it private and secure. One of the main elements of how we think this will become increasingly important for all of our customers.
Patrick Moorhead: I’ve used that feature, I like it, I want more of it. It’s so useful and I can’t wait to see. So there’s a lot of different types of, dare I use the word personas, but there’s absolutely a set of users. They’re developers, they’re AI developers. As we’ve seen, there’s a lot of different modalities, different ways that developers can do this. My son’s actually a backend AI developer, telling me all the challenges that he has. You’ve put together a set of capabilities specifically for developers. You made some announcements last year, you made some this year and you made some announcements here at HP Imagine. Tell us where you are in that in the AI developer pipeline?
Alex Cho: We think what we see is almost every company around the world is racing to put together AI models behind their firewall to improve their own processes, and who’s involved? All of the data scientists, all the AI developers in a company. For that, what we’ve learned is this whole process is new and complex and this is a process where people are finding data, copying data, trying to work with others into that space. We announced last year and we’ve been progressively announcing increasing features around what we call AI Creation Center, a solution that enables AI developers to build AI models, customize them, and deploy them in a safe way. It allows them to do it quickly. All their tools are curated already into a stack.
What we announced earlier this year is integrating a trust framework because everyone is following the trends around bias and hallucination. So we have a way to guard against that. Then today at this event, we’re announcing reinventing really the workstation that powers it by allowing that workstation to host its GPU resources because all this AI model development is leveraging more and more and more around GPUs. What’s interesting is it’s still underutilized at the enterprise level. So you take a growing trend, you create a solution stack, makes it easier for them to work, allows them to put trust into that whole output process and now improves the utilization of GPUs in the enterprise. We’re very excited about this.
Daniel Newman: We all know capacity is constrained, so every bit of resource that you’re able to eke out and of course in the enterprise with some of these different projects that are being done, there’s lots of proof of concepts, lots of startups within big companies right now where it’s how does AI transform the business. Now, Alex, you guys made a pretty big investment in Poly a few years back and it’s been a very exciting transition as well. When you talk about new work, styles of work, you took the best of the personal systems and then you started adding some of the best of the room based technologies. Then of course you’ve layered all kinds of services on top of that. How is AI helping evolve that? We all know it’s no longer all work from remote, it’s no longer all work from home. It’s really become that hybrid that I think everyone saw. But can you share a little bit more about that?
Alex Cho: Yeah, hopefully you’re starting to see the master plan. The master plan was to transform work and work involves PCs, also involves displays and monitors. But increasingly, as everyone knows, work is about connecting with others through video conferencing. That’s where our Poly solutions really add to that total portfolio. We don’t just think of it as Poly equipment, we think of it as AI enhanced Poly experiences. What do I mean? Most people have experienced joining a meeting room maybe from home. You’re dialing in and you see everyone in the room and everyone looks kind of small. One great example of how AI works is it allows you to track each individual and get a much better view of their reactions so that you really feel like you’re part of the room. AI enhances that experience.
We also announced the ability to manage audio and sounds better by reducing the echoing from walls so that when you’re listening in you hear what people are sounding like and not maybe the reverberations around the room. Just two examples of how AI is transforming that meeting experience. What we announced today is that we’re going to use a much broader portfolio of video bars to equip large rooms, medium rooms, small rooms as a place that we can deliver new AI experiences as a part of work. It’s an essential part of everyone’s everyday life.
Patrick Moorhead: It needs to be strong, whether it’s remote, whether it’s in the office, on the road, pretty much everywhere, that I think we all can agree every location matters. One of the things I’ve appreciated using your latest AI PCs is integration of Poly where this may sound like something as basic, but even putting a unique corporate background in regardless of the video service that I use and as opposed to having to use the five or six different video services that I connect with clients with. I do appreciate that. So I want to talk about the competitive field. Every new major inflection point gives everybody in the ecosystem and your competitors and you the ability to take share and give share. I’d like for you to talk about maybe some of the differentiation. How are you competitively positioned out there right now?
Alex Cho: Well, to be very clear, we’re here to grow share and we think that we’ve never been better positioned because first is when you think about the PC and the AI PC in particular, we are leadership around AI performance. That’s a part of our announcement, is to deliver the industry’s highest level of AI performance, which means all these new AI experiences, you’ll get it faster on an HP device. But that’s just layer one. Above that, AI is about data. As we talked about before, privacy and security will be important for every customer and we offer the world’s most secure PC platform for that.
In fact, we’ve announced earlier this year, we’re really the only vendor who’s able to protect against future quantum compute hacks as a foundation and protecting against increased vulnerability in an AI world. We are the leaders. But what’s also important above that is we don’t come to the customer with just a product. We come with a portfolio of work products. It’s the PC, it’s the room, as we talked about, it’s our printers, it’s the services that support an employee, whether you’re working from home or in the office, that portfolio breadth is second to none. That’s why for us, it’s all about transforming work, enabling employees to be more productive, using the entirety of our portfolio, where each of them have leadership, but together, stitched together is second to none.
Patrick Moorhead: Appreciate that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Alex, I really do appreciate you taking some time. The Imagine event, it’s been inspirational and of course being here we’re Silicon Valley started. For people like us, Pat, that spend all of our days talking about innovation and breakthroughs and checks and balances, critiques and credits to the companies that are doing well, it’s great to just experience this piece of history. Of course, Alex, it’s always great to have you here with us on The Six Five. So thanks so much for joining us.
Alex Cho: You’re welcome. Be inspired, come with us.
Patrick Moorhead: Love that.
Daniel Newman: Thank you everyone for tuning in here. Patrick Moorhead and I are here at HP Imagine 2024. We’re in Palo Alto in the HP Garage where it all began. Subscribe, join us for all of our episodes, all of our coverage here, and of course all of the great content on The Six Five. 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.
