- Dell hosted a Q&A as part of its pre-briefing for CES 2026
- An exec said of the firm’s laptops that “from a consumer perspective … they’re not buying based on AI”
- This admission comes just as another Windows 11 AI fail is going viral, which is unfortunate timing for Microsoft
Dell is telling it straight as far as the contemporary world of PCs goes, with the computer maker bluntly explaining that consumers aren’t buying laptops based on AI abilities.
PC Gamer reports (as flagged by The Verge) that Dell’s execs were refreshingly frank on the topic of AI and the PC in a Q&A session that was part of the company’s pre-briefing for CES 2026 this week.
First up, Dell’s COO, Jeff Clarke, observed that there was an “expectation of AI driving end user demand” but also an “un-met promise of AI”, hinting at some of the disappointment – or confusion – around AI PCs for the average consumer.
Then Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, went further and noted of the company’s fresh product launches (which included the new XPS 14 and 16 laptops): “One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first. So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC.”
Terwilliger continued: “We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device – in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it – but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”
Analysis: it might be ‘make or break’ for AI in Windows 11 this year
In short, Dell is taking its foot off the pedal when it comes to pushing AI in its marketing, simply because it doesn’t believe that consumers are that interested – and that it might even be a point of confusion for some.
While you could argue that the latter viewpoint is somewhat patronizing, I think it’s a fair enough observation overall. I believe some consumers really don’t care about AI, and do not see the benefit of the various abilities for Copilot+ PCs – those exclusive Windows 11 AI features – or how they might use them.
And in truth, there isn’t that much to get excited about with these AI features to date, anyway – not beyond image-editing tricks (and let’s face it, many folks don’t do anything much with their photos) and additional search powers (some of which people may be very suspicious of on the privacy front, particularly the key AI piece of the puzzle here, which is Recall).
Many people probably don’t use AI beyond queries posed to ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or whatever their favorite flavor of AI portal happens to be, using them as a kind of beefed-up Google search (other engines are available, etcetera).
Furthermore, with all the heat that Microsoft is taking over trying to crowbar more AI into Windows 11 – despite consistent cries from detractors who’d rather the software giant fixes what’s wrong with its desktop OS, rather than putting in new features that ‘no one asked for’ at a rate of knots – the reputation of AI features is being tarnished considerably in terms of questioning Microsoft’s motives here.
Is all this for show, riding the AI hype train and pushing as hard as possible with such features in Windows 11 in a bid to further impress shareholders and drive market capitalization?
Onlookers to the kinds of online bunfights that have been going on between anti-AI rebels and Microsoft’s execs are no doubt absorbing messaging which, let’s say, isn’t leaving these AI features in the best light.
Especially not when you get videos like the one below on X, recently posted by Ryan Fleury (hat tip to Futurism for spotting this), which highlights an embarrassing fail by the AI agent in Windows 11’s Settings app.
That clip has currently amassed well over four million views (at the time of writing), and as you can see, it shows the AI freezing up and failing to offer any reply to a basic query. Not just any basic query, mind, but the very one that Windows 11 suggested the user should try in order to show off the capabilities of the agent – so, you’d expect that it’d work well given that fact.
Okay, so this is a one-off example, but we’ve seen others. I can’t help but recall (pun fully intended) the video from Microsoft’s marketing department where the Copilot AI assistant makes rather a mess of trying to help a user change the text size in Windows 11. (That clip was eventually pulled, and I’m not sure how it was published in the first place). These are eye-opening cases of AD – artificial dumbness – a term I coined two minutes ago (one that, unsurprisingly, already exists, so Google – or should I say Gemini which provides the ‘AI overview’ – tells me).
With sentiment souring around AI in Windows 11 to a greater extent of late, is it any wonder that Dell wants to distance itself from the concept of AI PCs? At least for now, especially as we’re moving into a tough sales environment for laptops and desktops (with the spiking costs of RAM, storage, and also GPUs in some cases).
And yes, Dell may remind us that despite its comments here, it’s still pushing with AI in a way, as “everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it” – but it’s not like there’s a choice in that regard, is there? Away from budget laptops, all cutting-edge PC chips that are going to power modern laptops now have beefy NPUs, whether they are AMD, Intel or Qualcomm.
In fairness, the agentic AI functionality that Microsoft is now implementing with Windows 11 may be the piece of the puzzle that finally moves the needle with AI and grabs the attention of consumers more widely – but that remains to be seen. As do the potential security pitfalls or other nastiness that AI agents might bring in tow.
And with one of the major problems with AI being a lack of trust in these features, whether from a security or privacy perspective – or just ‘hallucinations’ (AI getting stuff plain wrong) – AI agents could possibly be the ‘breaking’, rather than the ‘making’, of Copilot and all its associated trappings in Windows 11.
2026 will be a very telling year for AI, I think, but for now, Dell gets credit for being frank about the current state of play with the AI features in Windows 11 PCs. Although arguably, this is the only sensible route to take with marketing PCs right now, given the circumstances as discussed above.
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