Dell: AI is relatively unimportant to PC customers as a purchasing argument and tends to confuse them | News

People often equate artificial intelligence and the ubiquitous chat and image generation tools in discussions. AI, that is ChatGPT – and if there are any more hallucinated answers there, that is considered evidence of problems across the entire range of topics. This is of course very short and only reflects a fraction of what AI or machine learning means. The areas of application are very different in nature and range from the aforementioned chatbots to fraud detection in credit card payments, translation and speech recognition systems on computers and smartphones, battery optimization on the iPhone, intelligent task assistants, automatic image analysis in medicine and quality control in factories to recommendation systems for streaming services, sales platforms, navigation and route planning in road traffic or the predictive maintenance of industrial plants. So what an “AI PC” is supposed to be, as you hear it everywhere in marketing, remains a very vague and unclear term.

Dell stops “AI first” marketing
Interestingly, Dell says that a certain rethink has taken place. So we had to learn that customers actually don’t know much about such terms – or don’t make purchasing decisions because a computer with “particularly much AI” is advertised. Overall, mere AI promises lead to more confusion than to more understanding of what can actually be achieved with it. Just a year ago, they were at the forefront of propagating the “AI first” approach and putting the “AI PC” at the center. However, this is now handled differently, says Dell’s “Head of Product” Kevin Terwilliger.

“Customers want features and benefits, not buzzwords”
It is noticeable that during the presentations at CES, every innovation is no longer sold as “contains AI”. According to the manager, this does not mean giving up on the topic, because of course every new product contains AI-based functions and has an NPU installed. However, the focus is again on the benefit for customers, because they want to know why they should choose certain products. Dell therefore quickly gave up the “AI first” marketing and no longer wants to surf the wave that the “AI” sticker is enough to suggest to users that everything is now miraculously getting better.