Dell Technologies focused on bringing more AI to AI PCs

“There's a wealth of diversity in the AI PC market today. From the silicon form factor, we've never seen this kind of growth. Our perspective is that AI is a hybrid story. It's not just about the PC. It's not just about the cloud, but it's going to be a collaborative opportunity across that,” comments Marc Hammons, Senior Director, Client Solutions Group Chief Technology Office at Dell Technologies.

The AI PCs refresh cycle continues to gain momentum in the Asia Pacific region. Apart from Microsoft officially ending service for Windows 10 recently, organizations are also looking to refresh most of their devices that were acquired during the pandemic period.

According to statistics from IDC, the Asia Pacific (including Japan and China) PC market recorded double-digit growth for the third quarter of 2025, with Japan seeing one of the fastest growths of PCs in the region.

Looking at the market share, Dell Technologies has a 13.3% market share of PC shipments worldwide, amounting to a total of 10.1 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2025. The figures represent a 2.6% growth from the same period last year.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Marc Hammons, Senior Director, Client Solutions Group Chief Technology Office at Dell Technologies believes that there is still a big opportunity for the PC market in the future, especially when it comes to AI PC.

“If you look at statistics, about 60% of PCs sold worldwide are forecasted to be AI PCs by 2027. By 2030, that should be 100%. There's a wealth of diversity in the AI PC market today. From the silicon form factor, we've never seen this kind of growth. Our perspective is that AI is a hybrid story. It's not just about the PC. It's not just about the cloud, but it's going to be a collaborative opportunity across that,” Hammons said.

Hammons also believes that the industry is heading towards an agentic future whereby there are going to be AI agents that are doing tasks on behalf of user autonomously but with guidance both on the device and in the cloud.

“There are some applications that are starting to make their way in. If we kind of split it into consumer and commercial, in consumer there's a lot of really interesting things that are coming out from a creator standpoint, like on-device creation of media, on-device creation of content, whether that be a document or audio or video. I think the AI PC is kind of leading there in the consumer market, and that's kind of interesting. It's appealing to people,” Hammons said on the use of AI PCs in the consumer market.

Meanwhile, in the commercial space, he pointed out that it's a different growth pattern. Hammons said that AI PCs in the commercial space are really about applications in the enterprise and bringing down data and realizing its value on the endpoint for AI PCs.

“We certainly at Dell have the ability to help our customers with training very specific models around their data set. We'll come in; we can help them fine-tune a model. For example, the Dell Pro AI Studio allows us to deploy those models down onto the device and we're doing that within Dell. We've got our own applications today that have been cloud-based over the last couple of years. We're working with our own IT department to actually take those models, fine-tune them, quantize them, and deliver them down onto the AI PC,” Hammons added.

In fact, he believes that remains the real opportunity for enterprises. Because AI PCs unlock data, where it might be consuming tokens in the cloud, public or private, today to do these.

“There's still some expense that's happening there. And now they're able to bring those same tokens and token generation down onto the device and take advantage of that, reduce those costs while maintaining privacy, security, data sovereignty - all the things that I think an enterprise wants,” he explained.

The role of partners

Dell Technologies relies on its partner ecosystem to deliver its AI PCs not just globally but in the region as well. While Dell has got both hardware and software partners, Hammons highlighted that when working with hardware partners, Dell is focused on optimizing devices, fine-tuning the performance of models and fine-tuning the performance of the AI pipelines that are there.

“We work really collaboratively and well with all the major IHVs to achieve that. In the ISV domain, certainly in security, there's a great opportunity. We're seeing a lot of security software start to migrate down to the NPU, whereas it was running on CPU before. They're seeing tremendous performance gains in terms of leveraging the NPU. They're also seeing that typically an NPU will translate into extended battery life. People not just experience performance boosts in terms of the optimization, but that translates into being able to run longer throughout the day,” he explained.

On the creator space, Hammons pointed out that Dell is seeing a lot of applications start to take advantage of NPUs and even GPUs as well.

“It's not an either-or proposition. A lot of times you want to go for higher performance with lower power, which is great when you're an NPU. We have a lot of our IHV partners who are really trying to tap into the GPU as well, be that a discrete GPU or an integrated GPU. We're seeing a lot of these libraries start to target integrated GPU for AI purposes as well. There's just a ton of opportunity around optimization with those partners that just translates into better experiences for end-users. Looking at the capabilities of the PC, there's just so much you can do with it, but the hardware is of course key to it,” said Hammons.

Non-AI PCs

Interestingly, despite the capabilities of the AI PC, Hammons feels that a lot of businesses are still on the fence on whether or not they are going to invest in the device.

“With Windows Refresh, most of those IT decision makers have a serious decision to make. But the agentic AI future that's ahead of us, that is happening so quickly. I think it is just an imperative that IT decision makers really start to consider AI PCs as a fundamental part of their fleet, because the ISV adoption is just going to be a continuing growth curve. The agentic appearance and application on the device, it's not quite on that same as just raw NPU usage curve, but it's right behind it. There are going to be lots of ISVs that are looking to deploy agents down onto those endpoints. And if they're not making that AI PC decision today, they're probably going to have to incur an additional refresh cycle to take advantage of it.,” Hammons explained.

Hammons also believes that AI PCs will have a rather long shelf life compared to non AI PCs.

“The interesting thing is that this is moving at such a rapid pace. It would not surprise me if the refresh cycle here for a little while starts to contract a bit just to take advantage of silicon advancements in the platforms themselves. That said, the space like model architecture is really also improving at a rapid pace. Smaller models are becoming more prevalent. More custom models are becoming the norm. As the software side of this starts to increase, it actually gives longer life to the hardware because maybe there's a more efficient model that can drop down onto that device and still take advantage of which gives the hardware a little bit more legs,” Hammons added.

For Hammons, he really believes that the AI PC is a fundamental tool for work and for play. And he really thinks that counter to what's happening in the cloud today, AI PCs are relatively inexpensive, easy to grasp and are fully accessible.

“I think that AI PCs will play a much larger role moving forward. And my hope, is that I can really start to bring AI down onto these devices as they become more powerful, and it will make you much more productive and get some of those things out of the way, and become the central interface through which we interact in an AI-driven world,” he concluded.