Artificial intelligence is transforming workforce productivity across industries by streamlining processes, enhancing decision-making and enabling new methods of value creation. Making this possible are specialized AI processors like the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, which have already made their way into billions of devices.

Last May, Microsoft introduced Copilot+ PCs, an entirely new class of PC powered first by Snapdragon X Elite processors.

Copilot+ PC’s emergence showed that AI — especially on-device AI — is more than just a buzzword. It’s a game-changer that maximizes enterprise efficiency and enhances workplace productivity. According to MIT, generative AI tools have demonstrated up to a 40% improvement in productivity for highly skilled workers.¹   

In this post, we’ll explore why on-device AI matters and how a diverse range of personas are benefitting from the proliferation of AI-enhanced apps for the PC.

How on-device AI supercharges productivity

On-device AI leverages the hardware and software capabilities of a device to process data and execute AI models locally — without relying on a cloud connection or remote servers. While this approach is steadily gaining traction, it’s hardly new. Early examples of on-device AI include T9 predictive text, digital signal processing (DSP) for audio and face detection in digital cameras. But over the last few years, we’ve made some massive leaps in on-device AI capabilities.

It's easy to see how those early features have advanced to enable voice assistants, collaboration tools and security features. One technology enabling this advancement is the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) which is a specialized processor designed to perform AI tasks efficiently.

By offloading AI computations to the NPU, your device can handle complex tasks with greater speed and energy efficiency, allowing for longer battery life and better overall performance. Another standout advantage of the NPU is its ability to enable real-time processing and decision-making. Unlike cloud-based AI, which requires an active internet connection which can introduce latency, the NPU operates independently of connectivity.

Executing AI tasks on-device reduces lag, enhances security and makes your device and its apps more reliable. Many features are designed to boost productivity.

Proven productivity use cases for on-device AI

On-device AI is improving collaboration and enhancing user productivity across a number of applications. Several have already proven to be valuable across industries:

• Real-time translation breaks down language barriers and fosters inclusiveness by allowing employees to communicate in their native language. 
• Voice-to-text transcription ensures that meetings and interviews are accurately documented, saving time and reducing the margin of error.  
• Document summarization helps quickly digest large amounts of information, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency. 
• Semantic search focuses on understanding the intent and contextual meaning of a query — rather than just matching keywords — delivering more precise and useful information. 
• Predictive analytics can be faster, more accurate and even more secure when they happen on device. 
• Image editing and enhancement allows you to instantly see improvements in exposure, contrast or color. 
• Video editing tasks like object enabling precise and automated masking.  
• Advanced security makes authentication seamless so users can login and get right to the apps and resources they need to do their job.  

No matter the use case, because our Hexagon NPU uses a fraction of the power of a discrete GPU, Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite processors offer superior battery life to traditional PCs.

Target personas for Copilot+ PCs and NPU-accelerated features

Whether it’s faster response times, smarter applications or better user experiences, Copilot+ PCs are becoming an indispensable productivity tool for enterprises and SMBs alike. Here are a few of the user archetypes already benefiting from AI-enhanced features.

IT management and cyber security professionals

Chartered with ensuring the smooth operation of an organization's digital infrastructure, IT professionals must identify and address potential issues before they escalate. Many popular applications take advantage of the NPU-accelerated workloads.

DTEX InTERCEPT integrates the best of DLP, UEBA and UAM, addressing the limitations of these tools individually. DTEX paints a vision of the future of endpoint risk management by demoing a scenario in which confidential information has been copied to the clipboard. Before the payload could be pasted into a public web service, the platform uses the NPU to identify the risk and redirect the user to an approved service.

Intune uses machine learning to make real-time decisions about user access based on factors like location, device health and risk assessments. It works alongside Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to offer AI-driven security features like detecting anomalous behavior, automatically remediated threats and using local processing to enhance protection.

Software engineers and application developers

Developing new software requires both time and creativity. AI allows professionals to automate repetitive tasks allowing them to spend more time collaborating on innovative product features.

Visual Studio Code has a robust extension ecosystem which augments the popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with novel features including AI-assisted code generation. Developers can use this to write functions, refactor code, generate comments and describe features in a fraction of the time.

Enterprise applications developed in-house could become a competitive edge for some organizations. We recently collaborated with Deloitte to build an app that combines three AI modalities to generate source code for an application based on a meeting recording and a picture of a whiteboard.

Executives and knowledge workers

Busy professionals often need to juggle multiple tasks and information streams. AI helps minimize context switching by summarizing information, making personalized recommendations and prioritizing tasks

Live Captions help everyone — particularly people who are deaf or hard of hearing — better understand audio by providing automatic transcription. To make more content accessible to more people, live captions now have the ability to provide translations and will turn any audio that passes through your PC into a single English-language caption experience.

Personal.AI enhances productivity with text summarization and generation. Its chat assistants are trained to perform specific tasks to improve efficiency. It also features on-device Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) to protect confidential information, allowing data to remain secure while delivering AI capabilities. It’s particularly helpful for busy professionals who need to manage multiple tasks and information streams.

Camo enables the camera you already own to produce incredible video, whether you’re in a meeting, streaming or recording. On-device AI separates models from their backgrounds, allowing them to add adjustable depth, privacy blurs, and physical or virtual chroma keys. It also follows hand movements and gestures putting Augmented Reality (AR) at their fingertips.

Guidde helps teams create video documentation up to 11 times faster. It uses generative AI to enable anyone to create, edit and share how-to guides for any software or process — without requiring any prior design or video skills. A translation model allows you to push out content across languages in real-time saving significant cost and time for organizations.

Creative professionals and artists

Popular apps are leveraging a Copilot+ PC’s on-device AI to enhance creative processes by assisting with image and video editing or generating text.

Adobe provides hardware-accelerated features throughout their product suite. For example, in Adobe Premier, AI automatically knows if your clips are Dialogue, Music, SFX or Ambience and adds a new interactive badge.

Blender supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline — modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking — even video editing and game creation. It has an NPU-powered feature that you can download for free, which will reduce the time it takes to turn a 3D object file into a 2D image when using text-to-image AI.

CaptureOne is an imaging software that commercial studio photographers use in the fashion and e-commerce industries. With AI-enhanced color grading and cropping, it helps professionals quickly edit many images while maintaining complete control over the creative expression and artistry behind every shot.

DaVinci Resolve has optimized performance of the DaVinci Neural AI Engine, with NPU acceleration giving customers up to 4.7 times faster performance of AI tools such as magic mask and two times faster performance for smart reframe on computers using this new processor.

Future outlook

Companies are already rolling out Copilot+ PCs to a wide range of employees as the number of use cases skyrockets. In fact, IDC predicts that 57 million AI PC units will be shipped this year alone, and by 2028, AI PCs will represent 92% of all PC shipments worldwide.² Gartner is even more bullish and expects AI PCs to account for the entire market by 2028.³

Whether for personal use or in a business context, the benefits of AI-enabled devices are set to unleash human potential. AI PCs revolutionize user experiences by offering unparalleled levels of enhanced productivity. This transformation will not only benefit individual users but also have broader implications for enterprises and small-to-medium businesses and their employees.