In 2025, AI is starting to feel like a buzzword to the general public — but for a business, it’s a day-to-day reality and the path toward accelerated growth. According to an IDC white paper that was sponsored by AMD, AI PCs are driving a major PC upgrade cycle. They’re pushing businesses toward switching to PCs that integrate neural processing units (NPUs) to run AI tasks locally.
The white paper is based on a survey which targeted IT decision makers (ITDMs). Taking place in November 2024, the survey comprised 670 respondents from large companies (500 employees and up) located all around the world. Many were from large corporations — 195 respondents were managers (or higher) in organizations with over 5,000 employees. There’s also a broad range of industries here, including design and manufacturing, finance, and telecommunications.
A whopping 73% of surveyed businesses say that the release of AI PCs in the last couple of years has had a major impact on their plans, accelerating the need to refresh their PC hardware. With that said, many of these companies still run on Windows 10 (58%), which will contribute to the urgent need to upgrade. Windows 10 is reaching the end of its life cycle, which means greater security risks for companies. However, 60% of companies that are still running Windows 10 plan to upgrade to Windows 11 AI PCs that support Copilot+.
Of course, the businesses in question are already using AI in their day-to-day operations; 95% of the surveyed companies already use or test AI in the cloud. AI is widely applied in manufacturing (predictive maintenance), retail (AI-driven recommendations), finance (fraud detection), and healthcare (AI-enhanced diagnostics). As seen on the above chart, employees use AI for a lot of different tasks, including summarizing documents, content creation, and automation.
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The benefits of AI for businesses are plenty, and the decision-makers are well aware of that fact. They cite personalized user experiences (77%), enhanced data privacy (75%), and better security (74%) as the top advantages in a business setting.
Companies also expect that AI will make the lives of their employees easier, with 82% of respondents saying that they expect AI to have a positive impact on their workforce. AI will eliminate repetitive tasks (as said by 83% survey participants), help employees shift focus to the important things (79%), and increase productivity (76%).
Managers remain aware of the challenges in AI adoption, however. Data privacy concerns (36%), security risks (26%), high costs (31%), and regulatory compliance issues (25%) are among the top obstacles that companies need to face. Those risks are mitigated by the use of AI PCs, which process data locally instead of turning to cloud-based solutions.
AMD plays a big role in the development of new AI PCs. The company says that it’s working with OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo to build AI directly into their systems; it’s also doing a lot of work on the software side to ensure that the most recognized AI applications are optimized for AMD-based PCs.
This survey makes it clear that AI PCs are here to stay, and businesses are embracing that fact. With Windows 10 reaching end of life in October, we might see the adoption of AI PCs rise exponentially over the next year.