Our AI vision balances innovation and security: HP's Vineet Gehani

Hindustan Times

24-04-2025

A consistent theme defining India's PC market has largely been clustered, hard-fought competition. Very little give, and even a percentage point shift can change rankings significantly. Within that, there has been a dominant outlier. HP's lead at the top of the market share charts, dates as far back as 2019. There has been an annual growth trajectory too since — 26.5% of India's PC market share then, 301.% for the entirety of 2024, whilst remaining the undisputed leader. Lenovo marks a distant second, with 17.2%, and the rest follow. One of the reasons for HP's dominant position in India's PC stakes, has been quick reaction to market demands. The current transition with AI PCs is the latest example, with the tech company painstakingly putting together a portfolio that appeals to enterprises and consumers. The HP EliteBook X G1, the Omen Max 16 and the OmniBook, all recently refreshed additions, cover the business user, gamer and content creator demographics.
In a conversation with HT, Vineet Gehani, who is Senior Director - Personal Systems at HP India, estimates that AI PCs will make for one of every two PCs that are sold in India in the next couple of years. They are unlikely to leave it at just the hardware. 'We make it customised, and we make it intuitive for our customers,' he tells us. Examples of that are already being seen, with OpenAI's models underlining the HP AI Companion app that the new PCs come preloaded with. It can do a lot — search the web or documents, analyse files, summarise PDFs create a to-do list, curate strategies based on prompts and plan a day ahead around your meetings. It also connects seamlessly to certain PC settings, for quicker control. There is greater purpose for AI compared with previous AI-focused PCs, and users would hope this is just the start.
Also Read: HP EliteBook X G1a review: AI in PCs finally gets definitive meaning and purpose
Gehani details HP's approach to AI PCs and how important it is to work closely with partners including AMD, Intel, Qualcomm and Microsoft, the need for customised AI solution beyond what's already integrated in apps and operating systems, and the company's decision to add quick-commerce platforms to their already elaborate retail presence in the country. Edited excerpts.
Q. HP machines are now available on quick-commerce platforms. Is that yet another revolution waiting to happen, and what are HP's plans to build on an early mover advantage?
Vineet Gehani: It's more than experimentation, for sure. We take pride in having the widest channel network to carry products to the marketing. Obviously then, having an omni-channel strategy that makes it consistent and relevant for the best customer experiences, works best. We have a HP World network which is more than 750 outlets, and we work very closely with all large retailers, regular retailers, telecom chains, also now and of course, the e-commerce players. Quick-commerce is complimentary because it is serving a specific need for customers who want products absolutely with 10 or 15 minutes, and cannot actually wait for even a day. We see this as very relevant to our portfolio, and particularly peripherals, and accessories products.
If you need you need a mouse or a keyboard as a replacement, chances are you need it right away. Same is true for a headset which may have working for some reason. It is also fairly important for printer supplies. If you're running run out of ink and you need to print, you need a solution at that point in time. I believe this is where the early adoption or pilots are, and now this is becoming a very intimate channel for these products. We have now made some of our consumer laptops available on these platforms, and I think there is rapidly growing interest that we can see. And I'm sure with all of these new devices and with customers wanting to adopt even faster, it's a great channel for us.
Q. What is your assessment of the AI PC era that we've seen till now, and how do you see this playing out?
VG: We must talk about AI before we talk about the AI PC. Artificial intelligence has been a phenomenon and an opportunity. People have been getting used to what these artificial intelligence tools around them can do. When we talk of consumers, creators, and the overall portfolio that we serve to market, it is a real challenge. The AI PC journey actually started with what we call AI enhanced PCs, which simply were devices with an additional neural processing unit, or NPU, in them. That's what we've been serving the market to this point so far. When we actually define that, it its in the range of 10 TOPS (that's trillion operations per second; a metric to define an NPUs capabilities), if I am to get technical on that front.
But now we are really excited about how the AI PCs will become the next big thing for the consumers and how they'll use them to enhance their work and their personal lives, and how will it become easier, intuitive, more collaborative, more productive, and the outcomes from that. And why do we say that? It is simply because AI PCs now become richer in terms of their technical specifications. They are adding on lot more customised features.
Look at the next generation AI PCs that HP is carrying to market — all compute at 40 TOPS or more, and that range goes up to 55 TOPS. This is a new enhanced portfolio on the commercial side of products in the form of new EliteBook products, and on the gaming side with the new OmniBook range. And of course, there are variants in that. It is not just the new silicon, but they are also getting more intuitive and customised in terms of what they offer to customers in HP patented features. The HP AI Companion on these devices is an example.
It is basically the on-device capability — till now most of the AI computing has happened on the cloud. Now it sits on the device. So that's the edge computing network we' excited to carry to market. Whether it is summarising text, inferencing data from files that sit on the device and don't have to go up and down the cloud, and doing speech to text translations and live captions, these are some examples of functionality we are bringing on devices. That is, to not forget existing features which get more advanced, including HP Sure View and HP Wolf Pro security.
Q. Core to the next phase would be enough genuine use cases for AI at home and at workplaces. Is it important for HP also to think of solutions, beyond What is already there in Windows 11?
VG: We work on very closely is to first take sure every technology which is available in the ecosystem to bring together the bouquet that is on offer. That means working closely with silicon partners including Intel, AMD and now Qualcomm, and also with Microsoft for all their Copilot and Copilot+ features. But we cannot stop there. We make it customised, and we make it intuitive for our customers. We are always evolving to offer those richer and more intuitive experiences to our enterprise customers, to our consumers, gamers, and creators.
AI PCs right now have a signal digit contribution of the overall industry and to our portfolio. We expect this to grow rapidly, and we are looking at almost one out of two PCs sold in the next two to three years, to be AI PCs. We must make sure that customers are getting the best experiences and obviously also make it as easily adoptable as possible. The price points that we actually offered on AI PCs so far, have been upwards of ₹1,00,000. Now these AI PCs with enhanced features will become more affordable, say around ₹70,000 and of course, going up the ladder to about ₹1,50,000.
Q. I believe HP AI companion users open AI models right now. With many deep reasoning and thinking models now available from various AI companies, do you see that as an opportunity to add more and develop?
VG: Our engineering as well as research and development teams are always looking at how things are evolving in the overall AI ecosystem, so that we can actually start adding them to devices to make them even more capable. I mean DeepSeek was a revolution and there have been many other developments. It is obvious that a lot is happening. We are very conscious and concerned about what's secure and what is really value enhancing for our customers. A lot of that filtering also obviously frozen before we decided as what's the best technology to carry.
Q. What have you heard back from demographics content creators, startups, or enterprise customers, in terms of how are beginning to deploy AI?
VG: The interest is rapidly growing, and that's why we believe in the next two or three years, we see about 50% of the market will shift. There's a specific reason. Users want their devices to normally do the mundane tasks or do all of what they have been doing in the past, but they want to be able to do that faster. They want to spend more time on enhancing their quality of work, their business and function areas. I'll take this example — instead of writing long emails or spending time sifting through and analysing large amounts of data, users want the devices to actually start doing that.
Our concern is to understand the specifics of what would a data scientist want, a product manager's needs, a salesperson in an organisation require. Emerging from that are a lot of the features that are going into newer computing devices, and this will dynamically as well as iteratively improve. We've had the speech to text for a long period of time, but this is now not only speech to text of a person. If you're in a conversation or on a call, we could be talking to a Japanese more comfortable in their language and get live captions of the conversation, without the person having to change their originality and generality of the conversation. That is what users are asking for, to make the interaction rich and more meaningful. These are some ways in which AI PCs will improve the experience for everyone.