HP’s ongoing AI transformation has significantly increased the company’s productivity, but the computer and laptop maker believes there is even more room to expand the use of AI tools across its workforce.
The company was in New York City this week to discuss plans for HP IQ, its next AI orchestrator built into devices scheduled for release later this year. After the presentation, Prakash Arunkundrum, chief strategy and transformation officer at HP, spoke with InformationWeek to discuss what AI means within HP as it looks to develop AI-powered devices for other companies.
“Within HP, we’ve seen about a 20% increase in productivity wherever we’ve implemented these tools,” he said, noting the organization’s breadth and complexity. Although HP now operates internationally and grew out of the old Hewlett-Packard that started more than 87 years ago, Arunkundrum calls HP an “OG” startup from Silicon Valley that is agile enough to scale AI across the enterprise. ( Original company split in 2015 HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise).
HP’s internal transformation includes leveraging agent workflows as well as bots on employee workstations to support customers with cloud and locally connected resources, Arunkandram said. Even for a technology company, getting HP’s 50,000-plus employees to put the latest AI models into action takes planning and effort.
“About half of them already have some kind of agent tool in place, and of course the goal is to reach everyone, 100%,” he said.
Beyond improving internal productivity through AI, Arunkandram said. AI is also shaping customer satisfaction It may enable new business models. This includes having customer information ready at the beginning of a support call. “When you use the voice or chat interface, [when] Call now. I’m not going to ask you 20 questions before you know why your computer isn’t working. ” he said.
As HP developed its AI architecture for creating agent models, it collaborated with players in the silicon scene, including Sierra AI, to enable it to actually build automation, Arunkandram said.
He said HP’s engineering team is keen to expand its use of AI in developing new resources for customers. “They actually want more, so there’s no question of adoption.” [with them]. There is a demand issue. ” This also includes an interest in using the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We registered exploratory partnership We use OpenAI to deploy some of our frontier models,” he said.
While other employees are using AI resources to support their workflows, employees with general knowledge may be more cautious about how AI can improve their work. Arunkandram explained that the more provisional group is a minority.
Arunkandram noted that the escalation of AI across markets and industries has a lot to understand, and moving quickly is not enough. “I would say that over the course of 18 months, there has been a huge shift in how we understand these things. So speed is kind of the holy grail for how we think about experimentation, being able to try new things and pivot if it doesn’t work,” he said.
Building on the concept of being agile, device manufacturers like HP need to find ways to secure their space in the AI space, which many users access remotely. “You can’t interact with AI without the physical layer. We are the physical layer,” he said.
