5 benefits of transitioning to an AI-ready laptop

Every company worth anything is busy trying to figure out how to integrate AI into its workflows. AI or artificial intelligence has, almost overnight, reached a point where common folk like you or I are seeing tangible benefits to using AI engines in our daily lives. AI is helping us navigate our lives, deliver information quickly and more succinctly, and generally helping us accomplish a lot more than we were able to without them.

AI is everywhere, and we expect to be able to access it everywhere. This includes our laptops and other smart devices. Focusing primarily on laptops today, what are the benefits of having AI powered laptops, and should you upgrade to one? Read on to find out the five benefits of transitioning to an AI laptop. 

1. Better battery life

The fact of the matter is that AI requires a lot of computational power to run. Sure, your laptop has plenty of powerful hardware built into it that can handle virtually any task you throw at it, but this is where AI-ready laptops differ. AI-ready laptops are called as such as they generally have an NPU built into them. An NPU or Neural Processing Engine is a processor – similar to your CPU and GPU – that has been designed to process AI models.

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Processing AI with an NPU is much more efficient than via a traditional CPU and GPU, which will result in less power being drawn by your laptop, and thus better battery life.

2. Better performance

While ChatGPT and the like have a solid hold on our collective imaginations in the AI department, there are other kind of AI models that we use daily and don’t even realise it. Those calls we have on Zoom or Teams where the background is blurred and noise suppressed? Those use AI. The same applies for background removal, low-light enhancement, and more. Performing these tasks on an AI-ready laptop will, again, be faster and more efficient. In addition, some AI models are also designed to learn your work style and better optimise resource use to ensure you’re getting the best performance for your needs.

3. Better productivity

Speaking of video calling, AI models also help enhance workflows in other, more demanding applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom. AI is also now integrated into live services like Office365 – Word, PowerPoint, Excel – as well as into Windows itself in the form of CoPilot.

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All these services help enhance your productivity, and they can do so faster and more efficiently on an AI-ready laptop. Do note that many AI services still run on the cloud, where it’s your internet connectivity that is the bottleneck. We’re only referring to local AI models here.

4. Better audio

Believe it or not, but AI has been working silently in the background enhancing the audio quality on many laptops. Using mics to listen to and tune the output on the fly. Apple’s HomePod and various high-end speaker manufacturers have used this tech for a while, but now, thanks to AI, we’re finding it in laptops.

5. Better security

One often overlooked feature of AI-ready laptops is that they tend to have better device security built in. They’re better at presence detection, for example, which confirms whether you’re in front of the camera. Newer security tools, especially at the enterprise level, are starting to incorporate AI-powered security tools that can take advantage of the NPU.

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All of this sounds great, but is it worth upgrading to an AI-ready laptop? At the moment, no. If you’re happy with your laptop’s performance and features, upgrading to an AI-ready laptop will not give you enough of a performance boost to matter. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, though, getting an AI-ready one is a good idea as it’ll be more future proof than a traditional laptop. But here again, there’s no compelling reason currently to stretch your budget just for an AI-ready laptop.