Austin, Texas, USA, February 4, 2026
The pace of AI PC innovation appears to be significantly shortening enterprise purchase cycles.
“Nearly half of enterprises are signalling that they would be willing to significantly shorten their PC purchasing cycles if TCO (total cost of ownership) is offset by productivity gains attributable to AI,” said Olivier Blanchard, Intelligent Edge and AI Devices Practice Lead at Futurum. “This is an extraordinary snapshot into how enterprise ITDMs and buyers are thinking about the ROI of AI PCs, not just in terms of justifying purchasing (or upgrading to) AI PCs but in terms of both accelerating their adoption and shortening their organizations’ upgrade cycles.”
The research reveals several key trends shaping the AI PC landscape:
- AI PCs are moving quickly from niche innovation to central IT strategy, with a majority of enterprise buyers viewing them as important or essential to their organization’s future computing needs.
- Enterprises are buying AI PCs at 3x the rate of AI smartphones—despite smartphones outselling PCs 4:1 globally—because PC refresh cycles are being driven by workforce automation projects, not consumer demand.
- AI PCs could outship AI smartphones in 2026 — hitting an estimated 72M units vs. 68M — despite PCs being a much smaller overall market. The driver: enterprise refresh cycles are accelerating as Windows 11 Copilot and local LLMs demand on-device AI, forcing IT buyers to prioritize hardware upgrades years ahead of schedule.
Figure 1: Q4 2024 AI PC Q/Q Growth Rates by End User
“While expectations for AI PC ROI are high, few organizations have strong measurement frameworks in place,” noted Blanchard. “The overarching assumption is that the market remains in an early phase of exploration and justification. What is interesting about this new insight, however, is that IT decision makers are looking beyond traditional ROI models to better understand the broader impact of AI-enhanced productivity, particularly at critical endpoints. This could have significant ramifications for the PC industry, an opportunity that enterprise PC vendors should pay particular close attention to.”
One data point worth noting is that the vast majority of revenue from AI PC shipments in Q4 still came from AI PCs with fewer than 40 TOPS on the NPU. This signals two things: first, that while the value to users and organizations of AI-accelerated applications on PCs is clear, the need to invest in high-performance PC systems isn’t. This is because the vast majority of AI applications accessed via a PC remain cloud-based and do not run locally. The second is that, despite the performance-per-watt advantages of integrating an NPU into a PC to handle AI workloads, a PC’s ability to deliver AI-accelerated productivity, especially when mostly cloud-based, isn’t necessarily tied to the NPU. (Our data confirms that the NPU, while useful and extremely efficient for some tasks, doesn’t see a lot of activity during regular daily use.) Combined, these two observations signal to PC OEMs that while shipping AI PCs with advanced local AI performance capabilities will grow increasingly critical to organizations as AI workloads begin to expand to the edge, enterprise IT decision-makers care more about how PCs help their teams increase overall productivity than about what percentage of AI workloads are being performed locally versus in the cloud.
Read more in the reports “2H 2025 AI Devices Decision Maker Survey Report” and “2H2025 AI PCs Market Data” on the Futurum Intelligence Platform.
About Futurum Intelligence for Market Leaders
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Other Insights from Futurum:
Futurum Study: 62% of AI PC Adoption Supports Efforts to Futureproof Organizations for AI
Why 18A Can’t Come Too Soon for Intel’s AI PC Processor Business – Report Summary
Unpacking the Benefits of AI PCs – Six Five On The Road
Author Information
Olivier Blanchard is Research Director, Intelligent Devices. He covers edge semiconductors and intelligent AI-capable devices for Futurum. In addition to having co-authored several books about digital transformation and AI with Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman, Blanchard brings considerable experience demystifying new and emerging technologies, advising clients on how best to future-proof their organizations, and helping maximize the positive impacts of technology disruption while mitigating their potentially negative effects. Follow his extended analysis on X and LinkedIn.
