While companies such as Microsoft or Google are adding AI capabilities to more and more of their products and services, it seems that not all customers do share the excitement that these companies try to convey.
Do customers want these AI features or care about them? It is certainly too early to conclude how this will all play out. Do companies spend billions on AI research, infrastructure and products that they will never recoup because the audience is not big enough?
Dell admitted something interesting in an interview with PC Games recently during CES 2026. The company revealed that it moved away from putting AI PCs front and center in marketing stating that the message that it tried to deliver with its products instead was “not AI first”.
Dell realized that consumers were, by large, not really interested in AI PCs. They were interested in PCs, but whether these were equipped with NPUs and capable of running AI operations locally or not, was apparently not something that the majority of Dell customers prioritized.
We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it—but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” Terwilliger says bluntly. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.
While all recent Dell devices come with NPUs and AI PC capabilities, the company is not focusing its marketing efforts on that.
It seems likely that other PC manufacturers are experiencing the same. While none has come forward that openly yet, there seems to be a clear divider between the interests of companies that push AI and the people that buy PC products with AI capabilities.
Most AI features that Microsoft introduced in Windows 11 do not appear overly useful to the majority of Windows users. Many mimic features that every AI chat on the Internet supports. This could change the moment Microsoft introduces something truly useful, like an AI that reacts to support requests by fixing the issues automatically. Whether something like this is coming this year remains to be seen.
For now, expect to be continued to be bombarded with AI announcements and integrations in products and services. Whether this are truly useful, annoying or even obnoxious is up for every user to decide.
