Crayon APAC VP on why the Windows 11 refresh is different this time around

Mark Walton, APAC business management VP, Crayon explains why customers want to refresh their devices.

Organizations are eager to upgrade to Windows 11 due to the AI and Copilot capabilities rather than the operating system itself, this is according to Mark Walton, APAC business management VP, Crayon.

Walton worked Microsoft for nearly 25 years and has seen his fair share of Windows refreshes.

"I was around when we had windows 95,” he explained. “Every upgrade that we did, it was a battle, customers were like, ‘no, not doing it’.”

What Walton finds surprising is for this refresh, his customers aren’t talking about Windows 11, they’re talking about Copilot.

“Windows 11 just happens to be that operating system that enables them to run Copilot, because you get the Copilot as part of the browser. Then, if you're in an organization, they could provide Copilot, which is part of your Microsoft 365 productivity suites,” he explained.

“I'm not really hearing people going, ‘We're refreshing the device for Windows 11’. I hear people going, ‘we're refreshing the device because we want to start taking advantage of all of this AI capability’.”

When Walton is talking with his partners, they speak more about Copilot than Windows 11.

“Everyone's talking about Copilot, agentic AI, and AI agents, that's the conversation that everybody is having,” he explained.

Through these conversations, Walton is able to discuss PC + Copilot and AI PCs with his partners.

“Then the reality is they need to make sure they’ve got a device that can run that. And Windows 11 just so happened as an operating system has been built with AI in mind, and that's why we now have these, these PCs plus Copilots coming out.”

As agentic AI continues to be a major part of partner conversations, He noted that he informs them that agents can be run on these devices.

“When you look at when ChatGPT first came out, all of those computations were happening in the cloud,” he said.

“It took a little while, but now you're having AI agents, which are built for a very specific task, and reasoning over very specific data, and a lot of that will just happen on the device.”