From AI Hype to Everyday Utility: Vineet Gehani Explains HP’s Vision for the Next PC Era

In 2026, the conversation around AI PCs feels noticeably different from the one the industry was having a year ago. The discourse, which previously revolved around chatbot integrations, TOPS numbers, or NPUs, has now shifted to how companies are increasingly framing AI as a broader computing shift. At the same time, questions around privacy, on-device intelligence, and affordability continue to persist: How practical are these experiences for mainstream users?

For HP, that shift is being positioned under the ‘OneHP' strategy. The company advertises it as an ecosystem where PCs, peripherals, collaboration tools, and AI software work together as a more connected whole rather than as isolated hardware products.

Ahead of HP's product launch held at the Customer Welcome Centre (CWC) in Gurugram on May 11, Gadgets 360 spoke with Vineet Gehani, Senior Director, Personal Systems, HP India, to gain insights into the company's ‘OneHP' vision, the rise of AI PCs, the newly introduced OmniBook lineup, and why HP believes India could become a key market for AI-led personal computing.

AI Connecting the HP Ecosystem

In the last few years, more and more PC brands have been attempting to build ecosystem experiences around their hardware portfolios. While Apple has heavily leaned on continuity features across devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Microsoft has positioned AI and Copilot as central to the Windows experience. On the other hand, HP appears to be taking a broader approach to this. AI is not being purely framed as an assistant, but as an underlying layer working across PCs, printers, peripherals, and collaboration tools. Gehani described HP's larger philosophy as building systems that become “more intuitive and proactive” based on user behaviour and hybrid work patterns.

“The products need to get more collaborative, more secure because you're working in different connected environments,” he said. “They also need to become intuitive in understanding what are the backgrounds, what the environments are, what the noise and lighting factors are.”

At the centre of this strategy is the brand's HP IQ platform, a 20 billion parameter model-based tool that was first previewed at Imagine 2026 earlier this year. Instead of functioning as a standalone AI tool, it is claimed to work across the ecosystem of PCs, Poly collaboration products, printers, and accessories. With this, the company appears to be aligning itself closely with the broader shift toward edge AI computing. The core philosophy behind this is to process a greater volume of workloads locally on the device rather than routing requests through cloud infrastructure.

“It's about what the consumer wants and delivering it on the device. Where we are evolving is that as much as the compute that can actually happen on the device without the data being sent outside the device and to the cloud and back, which is basically what we call AI at the edge computing, are the features which basically with every, like the [new] EliteBook on the commercial side and the [new] OmniBook series on the consumer side, are actually offering more of that,” Gehani said.

New Device Categories Targeting First-Time PC Buyers

The latest ecosystem push is also shaping the kind of hardware HP is introducing in India. While premium AI laptops remain central to the company's roadmap, HP is also beginning to experiment with newer categories. One such product is the newly launched OmniPad 12, which, as per Gehani, is geared towards “first-time buyers who are still not adapted to the PC environment, but are very familiar with using the intuitive and the UX of the mobility form factors that are available in the market.”

HP's new OmniPad 12 is advertised as a hybrid device

The tablet is positioned as a bridge between those two experiences. It comes bundled with a detachable keyboard and can switch between tablet and PC usage modes, courtesy of which, HP believes it could resonate particularly with students and first-time buyers who are transitioning from smartphones toward larger-screen productivity devices.

“So, we say it's the productivity of a PC with the flexibility of a tablet-like device,” Gehani said. “This is a hybrid device which actually works both in tablet and PC mode.”

Delivering Practical Use Cases With AI PCs

The conversation around AI PCs also revolves around a question the industry is still trying to answer — what exactly will convince mainstream users to upgrade? During the interaction, Gehani acknowledged that the ecosystem is still evolving, comparing it to the early evolution of the internet, when connected computing itself was still finding mainstream utility.

“This is a little bit like what happened about 20-25 years back when internet evolved,” he said. “Right now we live in a completely connected environment.”

HP launched 20+ products at the CWC on May 11

Enterprise adoption is emerging as one of the clearest early indicators of AI PC demand, as per HP. Gehani pointed towards sectors such as BFSI and enterprise environments where organisations are increasingly looking to process workloads locally instead of sending sensitive data to cloud infrastructure. “A lot of the computing which was required to be done in the cloud is now becoming available to be done on the device,” he said.

The company claims HP's PCs now account for 29.1 percent (IDC) of the overall PC market (per IDC). This, as per HP, is a sign that their adoption may already be moving beyond the early experimentation phase.

Managing AI Workloads With Optimised Battery and Thermal Performance

Despite the rising numbers, however, laptop makers still have a big challenge to face before AI PCs can be ​democratised and truly adopted by the masses. The most notable one revolves around running complex AI workloads on-device, where there needs to be a balance between thermals, portability, and battery life, especially on thin-and-light systems. This is especially relevant for PCs like the newly launched HP OmniBook and HP EliteBook lineup, where portability is central to appeal.

The brand first previewed HP IQ, based on a 20 billion parameter model, at Imagine 2026

This is where, according to the company, the HP IQ device ecosystem plays a key role. It is not only claimed to enable AI experiences, but also dynamically optimise resource allocation depending on the task being performed. In simple terms, the system can automatically adjust its performance behaviour based on active workflows when needed, rather than operating at maximum power all the time.

“[HP IQ] is optimising the performance of the device by the specific tasks and the workflows that it is performing at that point in time, so that the battery is not fully utilised at all times at one linear level.” He added that AI is also being used in the background for power and efficiency optimisation. “There is AI working at the back end, also in terms of enhancing the productivity and the battery usage needs. It is optimised to essentially work on the EliteBook premium range, so that the enterprise users get the most out of that,” Gehani explained.

The Affordability Factor in India

While HP is clearly betting heavily on AI PCs, affordability remains a big adoption barrier in India. Despite global momentum in the AI PC market, the premium pricing of these products in the country has historically limited them to enterprise buyers and enthusiasts. This has become an even bigger hurdle in recent months, with the soaring memory prices ultimately affecting the MOP of devices across categories. Gehani explained, “Well, of course, we all know that the component costs have been increasing in the last six months or so, and we are basically making sure that we are navigating right for the end users and the consumers to still be able to buy within their respective budgets.”

While the OmniBook lineup caters to enterprise users, the OmniPad 12 is geared towards first-time buyers

The brand is attempting to address this challenge in two ways:

One is through its wide portfolio of AI PCs across different price bands. “We offer a much wider range of the AI PCs that now start from, let's say, Rs. 65,000, which earlier started from Rs. 1 lakh+ and then obviously go up all the way to the premium end.”

The second way of improving the appeal is through providing easier and more flexible purchasing options. “[We offer] even better affordability offers on EMI, on the collaborations that we have with the banks and the NBFCs. And now we see that over 80 percent of our customers actually now leverage when they buy from the various formats that we serve the market through by using and leveraging these affordability offers. So, it's about expanding technology to make this available at different price points and then also making it easier for the consumers to adopt.”

“It is about the portfolio and the diversity that we are actually offering to the customers and trying to cater to different price points and to the different needs of every customer,” Gehani said. “We do not want to offer one technology for everybody's mass usage.”

For now, however, the AI PC industry still seems to be in a transition phase, between experimentation and mass adoption. The challenge for companies is not just building powerful AI hardware, but also convincing mainstream users that such systems can add something meaningful to their workflows. Ultimately, it may depend less on the raw computing power and more on how invisible and useful the tech becomes over time.