Making the Future of Work, Work: How HP is Harnessing AI to Transform Employee Experiences

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here in Silicon Valley. Daniel and I had some great experiences at HP’s Imagine Event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. We thought the best way to cap off that experience was to bring in HP CEO and President Enrique Lores to do a summary and talk at the highest levels about what’s going on in the marketplace, how HP is trying to take advantage of this AI wave. Enrique, it’s great to see you back on The Six Five.

Enrique Lores: Thank you Pat, and thank you Dan, and it’s great to be here and it’s great to hear that you had a great week. Really thank you for spending time with us this week.

Patrick Moorhead: Thank you for the invite, sincerely.

Daniel Newman: It’s such an exciting inflection, Enrique. The world, how fast the last couple of years in AI and of course there’s been a lot of attention in data centers and energy, but let’s face it, this is going to revolutionize how we work. It’s going to, we went from being at home to being back out to now this really cool hybrid experience, but look, congratulations just on a very successful event. It was great to come back to headquarters, spend some time, hands on the devices talking to you, your executive leadership team. They were really great to make so much time. Love, maybe to just start out with a bit of a recap, key moments, biggest takeaways for the audience because it wasn’t just us in the room. There were thousands and thousands of people watching from afar all checking out what HP is doing.

Enrique Lores: I think the key message we delivered this week is that we are going to be defining what is the future of work, both from a technology perspective and from the perspective how people want to live and work perspective. Things are changing very fast and we think there is a problem that we can address, which is the need for companies to continue to improve productivity and growth, the need for employees to improve their fulfillment, improve how they feel about what they do. And the intersection of both is where we think with our portfolio, our technologies, integrating AI, we can really make a difference and achieve both, growth and fulfillment. And this is how and where we are going to be positioning the company and this is what we are using to define the new portfolio solutions and services that we’re going to bring to market in the coming years.

Patrick Moorhead: One thing I really appreciated, us analysts have various levels of reading between the lines, but you are very clear that you’re doubling down on work. And the clarity I appreciated, and I think a lot of other people did, and of course you have consumer innovations out there, but that was meaningful to me and AI is already making an impact on the way that people work. We look at the various cloud services and now in the age of the AI PC it gets even better. What makes AI PCs unique and how are they changing the way people work and even how will they work? I’m on an AI PC right now and using certain camera features already and I stare at my copilot button and press it every once in a while to see what would happen. But I saw at Imagine just some of the ISVs and examples, I really appreciated the montage, a day in the life of a content expert.

Enrique Lores: And I think you captured it well. It’s really not about one single application within the value of AI PCs, it’s in how they will transform, how every knowledge worker works. And this is what we try to display during the event. And if we pick for example, the life of a product manager and what a product manager needs to do to be successful from doing research, analyzing the research, doing customer interviews, doing design of their videos to show their products, communicate them, all these activities are going to be done in a much, much more productive way with an AI PC, which will both increase productivity of this individual but also increase their fulfillment because rather than having to dedicate their time to more mechanical tasks, they will be able to really concentrate on what everybody enjoys, which is thinking, creating.

And that’s a big thing of the big difference of that this technology is going to bring, and this is why we highlighted, as you said, Pat, that this transformation we is going to start in the commercial side because people will see how they can really work more efficiently and in a more enjoyable way and over time it will come to consumer, but differently from how other innovation has happened in the last 15, 20 years that came from the consumer side. Now we see really commercial where the transformation will start.

Daniel Newman: There’s a really symbiotic relationship now that consumers have with their technology and pretty much every business person is a consumer and we’ve seen how a lot of consumer technology has shaped enterprise and now enterprise is being the first to go because the early applications are so powerful for productivity. I think you and I, all three of us would agree that this cycle, it’s not even so much about you hear the terms like super cycle. What I keep thinking is elongated. There’s going to be feature after feature after feature and suddenly it’s going to be like, “This was the thing that makes me have to change over to these new platforms.” And that’s pretty exciting because that’s what the inflection we haven’t had in a long time. I want to stay on commercial with you Enrique for a little bit. You guys did a very interesting work relationship index study that you presented at the Imagine event.

There was a lot of data in it. And a lot of the data and a lot of what I heard was that there’s some substantial meaningful disconnect between the worker and the employer these days. While some of it is more cultural, a lot of it is technological. There was a data point you gave that was something like about 27% of workers feel that they’re equipped with the technology and tools they need to be successful. That’s not very good. You just talked about AI PC, but what are some of the other innovations that are coming from HP that are going to help employees work differently and fill that gap?

Enrique Lores: I think again, you’ve got the key message because this means that more than 70% of knowledge workers don’t think they have the equipment that they need. And this is really the opportunity that we see. And when we think about how to integrate AI not only in our PCs but also in our printers, in our video conferencing rooms, in our headsets, we really see a big opportunity to improve that experience. This week we announced, for example, new technologies to make printing easier and make printers smart so they will know what you want to print even if you’re sending the printer the wrong information. And all of us have printed spreadsheets many times and we know how difficult it is to set the boundaries and to clearly say what you want to print. Very soon printers will know if you’re sending a spreadsheet, we’ll ask you, “Are you sure you want to print this or did you rather print this which is really what you wanted?” And you will be able to change that before ink gets on paper so it’ll be much more efficient.

We also showed how AI is going to be transforming video conferences and we are building an AI director in all our systems that will basically manage the meeting as a movie. And depending on who you are, we’ll identify who are the key speakers. We’ll make sure that each person has its own image, not like a boring, poorly image that we have today, which really we know has an incredible impact on experience. It is really across a full portfolio where we see these opportunities to improve the experience to again make employees more productive, which is what companies want and also what employees want to be.

Patrick Moorhead: Enrique, I’ll admit, I was blown away at what you’re doing with HP AI Print and it’s funny that there’s a lot of measurements of our audiences and we do traditional analyst white papers, but we also get it out quickly on social media. And I got more action on HP AI Print than any other thing that you announced there. And it’s pretty clear to me. Anybody who is over the age of, I don’t know, 20 has had challenges with printers, whether it’s spreadsheets, whether it’s an HTML page, you wanted to print one page and you got 10 and none of them were what you wanted. That was super impressive. And what you have in the pipeline, what you’re doing with Director, I’ve actually experienced the first versions of that myself in a poly room. And what you have coming up with Starline is one of these absolutely demonstrative potential game changers.

And I appreciated the demonstrations you are giving up that. The AI is impacting us today. I think we all agree here that it’s getting even bigger in the future and whether that’s at your own personal device, in a meeting room, on the go, pretty much everywhere where you get work done. We talked a little bit about going all in on commercial, but HP is very much a high market share provider and with, I would say, the empathy that you put into your marketing and your designs, you’re very much consumer play too. What does the future look like for consumers in daily life?

Enrique Lores: First of all, the consumer business continues to be an incredibly important business for us. I think for both consumer and commercial now that the hardware is starting to be available, it’s all about applications and software to be developed to take advantage of that. And this is why it is this week we made so much emphasis on ISVs, on software companies, how they are taking advantage of that because seeing is believing and in this case, experiencing is believing. And this is what we demonstrated this week that productivity is going to dramatically improve. And this applies both for commercial experiences and over time for consumer experiences.

Daniel Newman: Enrique, I can’t help but want to point out the cool production tools that you show the AI production and producer for video. Pat, you and I have to appreciate and acknowledge that and you’re like, “A lot can be done.” Talk about something that can help both professionals, personal consumers, people that work from home, individuals that run small businesses, so powerful. You can create something that looks movie or very close to professional quality with one or less people. That’s great, especially because I don’t always have people around to make that stuff work. Enrique, that’s cool. And Pat, by the way, on the print thing, I agree, I tend to print those 11 pages with just column Z on it. It is frustrating. I don’t know how many times I’ve done that where I’ve gone to the printer and it’s like I had a three-page thing and I come down and there’s 29 printed pages and I’m looking at it and it’s like just one column on page after page.

I’m glad AI is going to pull some of the human error out of that. And just by the way, it’s so logical. It’s so logical that it would not do that. And AI, this is a great, simple, everyday problem for it to solve. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here. As we let you get on with your day, I would just love to get a future forward perspective from you within the constraints of what you can share. As we head into the future with HP and all this excitement, what are the developments that you are most enthused about? What are you most looking forward to?

Enrique Lores: I think we are just at the beginning of the changes that we’re going to see. Probably one of the most fundamental things is going to be how humans will interact with computers. And for many years the interaction has been limited to our fingers. This is totally changing. We started to demonstrate some of the work that we are doing with voice control. Same thing will happen with gestures. And this is going to open a new wave of innovation, not only in terms of applications but over time also in terms of form factors and new ways to integrate with computers that I think in the next five, 10 years is going to radically change what we think about the world. We really see this as a super exciting period of time. For those of us that have been in this business for a long time, clearly the amount of change is unprecedented and we see all these changes as opportunities and we are really working hard to take a very strong leading position in all these things.

Daniel Newman: Congratulations, Enrique. Thanks so much for joining Patrick and I here on The Six Five On the Road. Great HP Imagine, can’t wait to see what’s coming next. Let’s have you back soon.

Enrique Lores: Thank you. Great to see you guys.

Daniel Newman: And thank you, all of you out there that are part of our community that have watched this episode. And of course check out all the coverage that we had from this year’s HP Imagine. Subscribe and be part of The Six Five community. We appreciate you tuning in, but we have to say goodbye for now. See you soon.