Whisper it, but genuinely useful local AI has already arrived on laptops

I have Lucy Bell, a training and content specialist at HP, to thank for my conversion. We were talking during a promotional lunch HP had organised at Canary Wharf, in honour of its new range of HP OmniBook Ultra Next Gen AI laptops. And this naturally led me to the question of what do you use AI for?

Now, over the past year, I have asked this question of many people who work for companies that are pushing AI laptops. Companies like Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo, and most people struggle to put their finger on anything concrete. Lucy’s answer was the opposite.

“So I create a lot of content for work, and my content stems from data sheets on products,” she said. “Sometimes I can be sent about 15 to 20 data sheets and be told that I need a product brief on each of them within an hour or so. It can be very manic.”

But Lucy happens to have an HP OmniBook X as her work laptop, which (like the new OmniBook Ultra series) features a processor with a built-in neural processing unit. And thanks to that NPU, it includes an app called HP AI Companion.

“I simply put in all the data sheets and asked it [HP AI Companion] to analyse them and give me four key selling point for each product on the list. And then asked it to go, ‘Okay, give me some engaging social media ideas so I can turn this into content to share out with my team’. Or, ‘how can I word this in a more entertaining way and make it more lifestyle driven’.”

The answer seemed almost too good, too slick. So I asked the natural question: “Did you actually do that?”

To which she replied, instantly, “Yes, I actually did. It’s really, really good!”

AI laptops: a matter of privacy

You could argue that this isn’t new. Whether it’s Amazon, Google, Salesforce or Microsoft, commercial AI tools already exist that can analyse documents and spit out results. Most of those AI tools, however, are based on faraway data centres, so you have to release your information into the wild.

As we’ve seen with numerous stories over the past two years, that runs the risk of the AI learning confidential information that it inadvertently leaks to other people when they run a similar query. And although some forward-thinking organisations have invested in local versions, that remains an involved process.

A local AI bypasses such confidentiality concerns by keeping everything on your system. “Because it’s all local and stored on the device, work will never be mad at me,” Lucy said about pumping confidential data sheets into the AI Companion.

“It’s just saved on device, which I love. That in itself, is a non-negotiable because the content that I’m piling through, for products that aren’t out yet, I can’t be sharing that with an online AI platform.”

Let AI take the load so you can have lunch

This all ties in with why HP was holding the event in the first place. According to its research, two in five employees never take an hour-long lunch break, so in a clever piece of marketing it hired out Hawksmoor in Canary Wharf and invited local workers to a free lunch.

You earned that lunch by submitting a task that you would otherwise do to one of its new PCs.

Now, obviously, this is a gimmick. But kudos to HP for thinking of it, and for giving all of the attendees – including tech journalists such as me, although I was surrounded on all sides by besuited businesspeople – a “task receipt” at the end.

Printed on similarly shaped paper to regular restaurant receipts, this gave the answer to each attendee’s task. I don’t know if I was given someone else’s receipt, or the task I suggested to HP was too complicated, but my task was apparently to write a report on employment retention strategies in the tech industry.

And the report was pretty good. Obviously, like all AI-generated reports, it’s generic in places and not how I would write it, but it covered everything from remote work policies to understanding turnover to career development opportunities. Not bad for an AI running on a local PC.