The new Dell XPS at CES 2026.
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Dell executives have been disappointed by the response to AI PCs.
- Dell's head of product said AI features are likely confusing consumers.
- Microsoft's CEO has become the company's "most influential product manager" to try to fix things.
Microsoft wants you to replace your old Windows 10 laptop with a new Copilot PC, one that's ready for the AI-powered "agentic OS" that Windows 11 will become. But one of the world's biggest PC makers says consumers aren't buying the Copilot hype.
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At a press briefing ahead of CES 2026, two of Dell's top executives threw a bucket of ice-cold water on the idea that consumers are clamoring for AI. Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke, in his opening remarks, referred to the "unmet promise of AI." The company had "an expectation of AI driving end-user demand," he noted, but "it hasn't quite been what we thought it was going to be a year ago."
In the Q&A portion, the company's head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, stressed that Dell's messaging about its 2026 PC lineup is not "AI first."
Customers aren't buying it
That's "a bit of a shift from a year ago, where we were all about the AI PC," he acknowledged. "What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, they're not buying based on AI. In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
Those remarks didn't mention Windows or Copilot, but it's pretty clear that the executives are talking about Microsoft's AI products, which haven't exactly delivered obvious benefits for home users or taken much share from ChatGPT. Google's Gemini has gotten high marks, and Anthropic's Claude continues to get praise for its coding skills. And none of those competitors require a fancy new "AI PC" to work their magic.
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This development doesn't bode well for Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, who saw the company miss the platform shift to mobile devices and tablets and desperately wants to avoid chalking up another failure in yet another momentous platform shift.
The problem(s) with Copilot
A recent report from The Information painted a picture of a CEO who's not pleased with Copilot's progress. "Over the past several months, Nadella has morphed into Microsoft's most influential product manager," the report said. "He is conscious of the perception that [the consumer version of Copilot] lags behind competitors like Gemini, the people said. He recently sent notes directly to product groups working on Copilot's consumer app with feedback on bugs and shortcomings he noticed in the chatbot, according to a third person who saw the emails."
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This isn't exactly a new problem for Microsoft, which has a reputation for shipping half-baked products, then iterating slowly as the market experiments with its product. That approach might work for a startup in a new category, but it's a proven recipe for failure for a company of Microsoft's size. Customers get a chance to try your unfinished product and develop a negative impression; those negative word-of-mouth reviews spread even as the flaws in the product are fixed. The result? Microsoft's reputation takes another hit.
On top of all that, the real revenue engine for Microsoft isn't consumers -- it's business customers, where licenses are sold 100,000 at a time, and where IT controls the ecosystem and can mandate what's installed. But even there, it's easy to imagine scenarios where enterprise customers decide they really don't need to pay another $20 per user per month for a benefit that isn't there.
AI PCs are here to stay
Technically, every new PC that the leading OEMs ship this year will be an AI PC, with either a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor or one of the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 or AMD Ryzen AI CPUs. That's good news for customers who are trying to future-proof their purchases -- maybe in a year or two or three, the powerful neural processing units in those machines will have workloads where they can show off their stuff.
But Microsoft's many Copilots aren't ready for that role today, and until they are, the makers of Windows PCs are going to have to sell their new hardware the old-fashioned way.
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