AI PCs Will Dominate By 2027, Says Asus Executive
Demand for AI PCs – which ship with a neural processing unit (NPU) to assist with AI tasks – has been relatively modest so far. The market share of AI PCs is 'still single digit', Eric Chen, Asus's senior corporate vice president told me in a briefing to coincide with last week's Computex trade show. 'It's not that big,' he admitted.
However, he said that growth over the next couple of years will mean that by 2027 'over 50%' of total PC shipments will be AI PCs.
Asus's predictions are roughly in line with that of major analysts such as Gartner, IDC and Canalys, all of which have predicted steep growth in AI-capable PCs over the next few years.
The big challenge for PC makers is giving businesses and consumers a solid reason to pay a premium for an AI PC.
Popular AI services such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Anthropic's Claude are cloud based and don't directly benefit from the presence of an NPU. Meanwhile, Microsoft has struggled to deliver compelling AI features in Windows, with the highly controversial and much delayed Recall feature only arriving on Copilot+ machines at the end of last month. Microsoft was forced to pull an early test version of the all-seeing Recall after serious security flaws were discovered by testers, which have now been fixed.
Chen said 'the big bottleneck" right now is that users don't fully understand how AI can help them. He gave an example of how Asus is deploying AI within its own business to check the paperwork that comes with business transactions. Previously that task was done by hand, but now the company is using AI to process the paperwork.
'They used to spend 200 hours to do the checks,' said Chen. 'Now, three hours. That's a big, big difference.'
It's those kinds of tasks involving sensitive customer data that companies might not want uploaded to cloud services that will really take advantage of the local processing power offered by AI PCs, Chen claimed. 'A lot of companies and people, they don't want their data to upload to the cloud,' he said.
Although Asus has been developing a suite of its own applications, such as Muse Tree, which offers AI image generation without relying on expensive, resource-hungry cloud services, Chen concedes that professionals will still turn to the cloud when they need the optimal quality.
He said that 'local is already good enough" for many lightweight tasks, however, and that cloud AI services will eventually start tapping the power available to AI PCs. 'The cloud and the local, they will work together. That is one of the trends that will happen,' Chen added.
AI PCs may well hold more appeal to businesses than consumers right now, and that's perhaps one of the reasons that Asus has decided to ramp up its commercial offering, pitting the company into even stronger competition with rivals such as Dell and Lenovo.
'In the past 35 years, we are more focused on the consumer PC business,' said Chen. 'In the coming years, Asus will develop our commercial business as well.'
IDC's figures for 2024 worldwide PC shipments put Asus in fifth position, with a market share of around 7%. But Chen said the company had 'very aggressive' plans to attack the commercial market in a bid to close the gap to market leader Lenovo, which shipped more than three times as many PCs as Asus did in 2024, according to IDC's figures.
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