Inside HP’s AI bet to rebuild itself for the ‘work intelligence’ age

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) returns to Las Vegas from Jan. 6 to 9, the tech industry is gearing up for its annual spectacle of prototypes, silicon benchmarks and AI -branded gadgets. But one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology over the coming year will unfold far from the keynote stages and demo floors. HP, the 85-year-old Silicon Valley company long defined by PCs, printers, and enterprise hardware, is repositioning itself as a work-intelligence platform—where devices learn continuously, services anticipate needs, and AI dissolves the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and the cloud. Under Jim Nottingham, senior vice president and division president of Advanced Compute Solutions, HP is treating AI not as a feature or a marketing layer but as a structural force reshaping how the company builds products, manages its supply chain, and generates revenue. As enterprise spending shifts toward intelligent, autonomous systems, that strategy is becoming central to HP’s future and to whether it can compete with contemporaries, including Dell and Lenovo on devices, while holding its ground against Microsoft and the cloud hyperscalers that control workplace software, data and AI workflows. Nottingham said HP’s transformation began with an uncomfortable realization that “work was not working as well as it should.” Customers had raised these issues for years, but the true scale of the problem became clear only after HP measured it through its 2025 Work Relationship Index . The findings were striking as just 20% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work, meaning most feel overwhelmed by fragmented tools, constant interruptions and systems that make work harder rather than more productive . “We heard versions of this from customers across industries and geographies,” Nottingham says. “When you have visibility across millions of devices and organizations of every size, patterns like this become impossible to miss.” Those insights forced HP to confront a deeper truth about AI. “You can’t just add AI to a device and call it transformation.” Instead, HP rethought how devices, software, services and management systems work together across an entire workday. The shift cut across personal systems, print and services at the same time, pushing the company toward a single, platform-led vision of the future of work rather than three separate roadmaps. “At CES, we’ll demonstrate that platform-led view across the portfolio,” Nottingham says. “AI became the organizing principle because it’s the first technology capable of tying those pieces together and enabling work environments that are more adaptive, secure, and intelligent.” From hardware economics to intelligence at scale HP’s reinvention comes at a moment of pressure. Hardware margins are shrinking as devices commoditize, while hyperscalers increasingly control enterprise workflows and set the bar for intelligent work systems. HP’s counter is scale. Few companies span endpoints, managed fleets, printing infrastructure, and workforce software at a global reach. HP is betting that AI layered across that footprint can drive higher-margin services and recurring revenue without forcing customers to replace existing systems. Recent financial results help explain the company’s confidence....

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