Gartner predicts AI laptops will dominate business market by 2026

The analyst firm Gartner has revealed that it believes AI laptops will be the only laptop choice available to large businesses by 2026, which is up from just 5% in 2023. As this shift occurs, x86 computers will see their dominance wane in favor of ARM-based systems, Gartner said.

Ranjit Atwal, a senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said:

"The debate has moved from speculating which PCs might include AI functionality, to the expectation that most PCs will eventually integrate AI NPU capabilities. As a result, NPU will become a standard feature for PC vendors.

As the PC market moves from non-AI PCs to AI PCs, x86 dominance will reduce over time, especially in the consumer AI laptop market, as Arm-based AI laptops will grab more share from Windows x86 AI and non-AI laptops. However, in 2025, Windows x86-based AI laptops will lead the business segment."

The question for businesses will be which AI PC they should buy rather than whether to buy AI PCs, Atwal said. He said that businesses are unlikely to pay premiums for AI features but will buy them for future-proofing or if they offer a more secure and private computing environment.

Away from the business focus, Gartner predicts that AI PCs will reach 114 million shipments next year—a 165.5% increase compared to 2024. Gartner classifies AI PCs as those with an embedded neural processing unit.

This year, the analyst firm believes that AI PCs will reach 43 million units, a 99.8% increase of 2023. Interestingly, laptops are dwarfing desktop shipments. In 2024, it said we'll see 40.5 million AI laptops shipped, while AI desktops will number just 2.5 million. Things will pick up for desktops in 2025 a bit when shipments will increase to 11.8 million while AI laptops zoom ahead to 102.4 million shipments.

While most people are probably familiar with ChatGPT at this point, AI is also being used in other creative ways. For example, Microsoft has developed a feature called Recall for Copilot+ PCs, which takes a picture of your screen every few seconds and then lets you search using natural language to get back to what you were doing before.

Source: Gartner