Intel’s Unique Advantage in Leading AI PC Category With SW

Patrick Moorhead:
Welcome back to day three of the Six Five Summit 2024. We are talking modern work and all things AI. The entire theme of the summit, hopefully you’ve picked up, is all about AI and that’s either enterprises or consumers enjoying all that AI goodness or the continued build out of the AI infrastructure, whether that’s in the data center, the data center edge, or even in devices. And if there’s one conversation that has just been, let’s say, off the rails discussion, and that is the IPC fundamentally getting the goodness of all the AI, generative AI capabilities, and let’s not forget about the machine learning capabilities, but having them resident on the device where it can be more performant, it can be more private, and some say even more secure.

I couldn’t imagine a better person to have this discussion about enabling the ecosystem here, Carla with Intel. Carla, great to see you.

Carla Rodriguez:
Great to be here, Pat. Thanks for having me.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. So I’m excited about AI PCs, lots of promises out there, a lot of excitement, and over the past six months I’ve seen varying degrees of people explaining what I think is the most important thing about it is what can I do on this? What can I do on these AI PCs? And your day job is very much dialed in on how do I light up these experience. So how are you at Intel going to do this?

Carla Rodriguez:
Yeah. Absolutely. Lots to unpack there. I’ll try to be-

Patrick Moorhead:
That was a 20 question first question.

Carla Rodriguez:
I love it. I love it. So first and foremost, the excitement is absolutely there. We’re excited. Our customers are excited. Our ISV partners are even more excited. So this is what Intel is best at. We’ve done this in the past. We continue to lead an ecosystem where we bring not only our hardware vendors together, our software vendors together, and we also bring that marketing machine and our sales machine to help all of these come forward and really drive and accelerate innovation. This is what Intel does best, and we’re doing it again with AI PC.

Now, how do we do this? The big question we get is, please tell us what we can do on an AI PC that we cannot do on a non AI PC. And a lot of it is materialized through the software. If you are a creator, if you’re a small business owner, if you are a gamer, there are specific things and a whole host of range of things that we’re seeing come through the market that will hopefully make you way more productive, more secure, save you battery life, and in some cases truly do things that you cannot do today. We have several examples. It all starts with engineering.

It all starts with product truth. Part of how we do that is those deep co-engineering relationships that we have fostered over decades with what we call our top 100 plus ISVs. This is decades of work with content creators like Adobe, Wondershare, security players like CrowdStrike, ESET, Buffers most recently. So I’m naming a host of different, like a snippet of different players that we’ve worked with across all of those things where we really try to run the right workload on the right XPU.

Some things meant to continue to run on CPU, some things that are critical to continue to run on GPU and some now leveraging an NPU. And that is a lot of the back and forth that we have specifically with that software ecosystem, so we help optimize their features. And this is where we’re seeing command text, command prompts to lighten a background or anti-phishing scanning on our systems that have consistently been run on the cloud and can now be run locally. This is where we’re seeing all of that pop up and that, fortunately it’s my day job with my team and I to see what else is out there.

That’s not only with our top 100, but also with our scale programs, for those kind of smaller and more medium-sized applications.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. I’m glad you brought up a holistic view of it. You talked about developers, ISVs, and also marketing. Sometimes we pretend that you show up with the goods and it’s just going to happen. That has happened very little, and marketing and communications and getting out there is key. And I think we saw this full force at Computex out there last week. Literally, Computex heart of the PC ecosystem, ODMs were there, OEMs were there, ISVs, chip makers all over the place. Can you maybe review for this or people that weren’t able to go to Computex or didn’t read about what happened Computex, what happened there?

Carla Rodriguez:
Yeah. No. Super excited to have just come back from Taipei. I was actually there at the end of March as well. So much excitement happening there. We actually started a lot of this with our software developers directly. We met with them at the end of March. We launched an AI PC developer program specifically targeting software developers to really incent more of that innovation for AI PC. Obviously work very closely with the software and hardware ecosystem, but we’re targeting the developers as well. Handed out actual dev kits to get the hardware in the hands of developers paired up with all of the tools that we drive.

Had a great opportunity to meet with press and analysts and really excited about what the second half of ’24 has for us.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, in this new age of generative AI, and by the way, some of the same rules apply, correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, we’re looking at optimizing hundreds of models, machine learning models, transformer models that go from text to create an image, text to create a video, going from a type of photo to a different type of image. Can you just to kind of bring that to light, just the sheer number of models and the complexity of those, because I think they all have to work across CPU, GPU and NPU, correct?

Carla Rodriguez:
That’s right, Pat. So last count, we were at, I think, 500 or so AI optimized models running best on Intel, and that is correct. That is across image generation, object detection, text, commands, generative, etc. And those were running across frameworks led by OpenVINO, ONNX, DirectML. When we say broad and open ecosystem, that’s exactly where that gets materialized. And these are all models that then create that flywheel. This optimization really helps, again, run the right workload on the right XPU, and it allows developers to test.

They’re also getting to know what is running best where, and it’s not something that automatically gets learned. It’s something that they’ve got to go test. And so putting all of this in the hands of developers to see that innovation out there is incredible. We’re seeing things where you can command an image to be lighter. You don’t even need to reach your keyboard and your mouse. Think of the applications there. We shared earlier this year, OmniBridge gesture with American sign language to text English text unlocking all sorts of opportunities for a lot of the population that can now engage in the workplace differently.

And that’s just the beginning.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. So can you give us an idea? What’s the nature of these? Are these relationships that you just started? Are these small companies, big companies? I mean, what does this look like? I mean, listen, I’ve been doing this longer than I want to admit. I started doing product marketing for PCs in 1990, and I’ve been in and around that. What do those relationships look like?

Carla Rodriguez:
So they go back many, many years. So we work with not only the top 100, we also work with what we call the smaller and the scale partners. With the top 100s, those relationships, some of those relationships go back decades. We have our application engineers that actually know some of their applications in some cases better than some of our own technologies. That’s how deeply embedded we are. At the end of the day, the nature of these relationships is based on product value, platform technologies that we bring to the market so that the software can leverage every bit of it in a way that makes their application better.

That is typically a more deeply technical relationship, engineering relationship from a scale standpoint for a lot of the smaller and medium-sized ISVs and developers. We’ve got frameworks and tools and all of those 500 plus models that we just talked about so they can leverage in a more do it yourself method. And then we wrap a lot of our marketing programs alongside that because it’s very valuable to a lot of our ISV ecosystem testimonials, collaterals, trainings, all the way to the edge with some of the retail sellers and our large enterprise sellers.

That is very important because at the end of the day, they’re looking for that scale to land their applications on which guess who brings that scale? Intel. Intel’s the one that’s driving AI PCs at scale, and we’ve been very public about this. We will be driving 100 million units of AI PCs throughout 2025. So they’re betting on Intel because they know Intel can drive that.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. And we were talking about the marketing, we were talking about the technical competency, but in the end, it’s all about business and the economic opportunity that Intel can provide to ISVs either in upgrades for, let’s say, an upgraded AI feature, maintaining market share, or potentially getting a jump on the competition who’s not doing optimizations. Let’s say it’s an image editor versus another image editor, and it’s kind of a feeding frenzy at this point, and I really do believe that this is going to be the biggest economic opportunity from a growth standpoint.

It’s going to be very similar like we saw with the internet, going from non multimedia to multimedia, going from desktops to notebooks.

Carla Rodriguez:
We are right now in active enabling with a couple of partners, and there’s very compelling things coming from videos as well. We’ve seen a lot of this in the past, but what we haven’t seen is the ability to record a video just like we all do day to day and in some cases we may say the wrong word. And we typically would stop rerecord or go splice that particular word in there. Now we’re able to find the word, replace it, and then use AI to actually clone your voice and smooth that out in the video like that. Love it.

Patrick Moorhead:
I’ll tell you what, that’s super exciting. This is really valuable stuff that I just know inherently is going to excite people. And I believe, I said this on your stage at CES that we’re going to kick off this super cycle. It’s going to take a while, 2004, 2005, but it’s there. And the hard work that you are doing an Intel with your ISVs, with your partners and your engineers are really the difference maker because people don’t buy hardware for the sake of hardware. They buy because of the new experiences and either the joy and fun they can get out on the consumer side.

There’s the hardcore productivity opportunities there as well. So you are a busy person, and I’m sure your team is working overtime to get this build out. And it was apparent to me at Computex, that’s exactly what you did, but you’re not done.

Carla Rodriguez:
Absolutely. And well, it takes a village. It takes a village to bring together the hardware ecosystem, the software ecosystem, the marketing machine, as I call it, to ultimately drive better experience to our customers, our consumers, our creators, our small business owners. Let’s not forget our enterprise customers. It takes a village and we’re excited. And you’re right, ISVs, many of our software partners are running their own business and they’re competing on value, and this is unlocking additional value. What I like the most is are the examples that we’re seeing that we’re helping enable, where AI is really being put to good use.

Experiences that are enabling certain populations with disabilities to now participate in a productive working environment and allowing us the public to be there, and so we’re seeing a lot of that. There’s a lot of AI that’s being put for nefarious reasons, unfortunately. That creates fear. But we’re also right there to put AI to identify that, detect those, make it safer for consumers and for the public. So we’re excited. We’re super excited.

Patrick Moorhead:
Carla, thanks again for coming on here day three of the Six Five Summit 2024 modern work. It’s all about AI and I think it’s going to be about AI enabling AI for a while. So thank you very much for coming on.

Carla Rodriguez:
Thanks for having us, Pat.

Patrick Moorhead:
Thanks for tuning in. Hit that subscribe button. We appreciate your time. Take care.