Copilot+ PCs Struggle to Gain Traction in Enterprise Market Despite AI Capabilities

Enterprises slow to pick up on Copilot+ PCs

Businesses don't seem to care about exclusive features like Recall Copilot+ PCs are so far failing to penetrate the enterprise as IT decision makers remain understandably unimpressed with the exclusive Windows AI features they offer and other efforts, such as the need to refresh fleets with Windows 11-capable gear, take priority. Microsoft introduced the term Copilot+ PCs last year to describe high-end laptops with a built‑in Neural Processing Unit (NPU) - an on‑chip AI accelerator - capable of delivering 40+ TOPS (trillions of operations per second). By way of comparison, Intel's last-generation high-end Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops boasted 11 TOPs of performance; these laptops were designated with the marketing term "AI PC." The first Copilot+ PCs were powered exclusively by Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips when they launched in spring 2024. In the fall, Intel and AMD joined the party as laptops based on their Core Ultra 200V and Ryzen AI 300 series respectively hit the market. To help promote Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft built into them a bunch of special AI-enabled features that might be able to benefit from local processing, and the company and its hardware partners also talked up the battery life improvements offered by the initial Arm-only models. But despite the marketing push from Microsoft and its hardware partners, the laptops haven't really penetrated businesses in a meaningful way. "The reception of Copilot+ PCs by businesses has been mixed," Canalys Research Manager Kieren Jessop told The Register. "Deployments have mostly been pilot programs to specific personas rather than mass roll outs." Jessop shared the results of two global polls of channel partners (B2B companies) his company conducted. In a March 2025 survey, a full 73 percent were familiar with Copilot+ PCs, but in an April query, only 33 percent said that the AI capability of any kind (not just Copilot+) was important or a key factor. According to Context Senior Analyst Marie-Christine Pygott, Copilot+ PCs make up a small but growing percentage of all PCs with a built-in NPU (which are designated by the marketing term "AI PC"). In Q2 2025, European distributors shipped 1.2 million AI-capable PCs to resellers. Of those, only nine percent were Copilot+ PCs, while the rest were laptops that can't hit Redmond's 40 TOPS requirement. That nine percent is tiny, but an improvement over four percent in Q1 and two percent in Q4 of 2024. As we've noted before, overall sales of AI-capable PCs have been underwhelming. According to Context, only two out of every five PCs sold in early Q2 were AI-capable. So Copilot+ PCs so far make up only a tiny piece of a small pie. "What we are seeing for Copilot+ PCs is that unit sales and share are going up steadily but are overall lower than what the industry hoped for when they were first launched," Pygott told us. "There are a few reasons for this, including high pricing (although this has been coming down), lack of use cases, and low perception of what a Copilot+ PC is and what it can do, and in the commercial segment, a reluctance to go for Arm-based devices in the case of Snapdragon X due to some software incompatibilities that were experienced after these devices had first been launched." What growth there has been in Copilot+ PCs is coming more from the hardware refresh cycle rather than the exclusive AI features they enable, Pygott said. Newer laptops, by virtue of the latest-gen Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm processors they use, are meeting the Copilot+ PC standard of 40+ TOPS - whether customers care about it or not. Microsoft did not return a request for comment on the viability of Copilot+ PCs in the enterprise. So what exactly do you get with a Copilot+ PC anyway? While some of these features might be useful to consumers, they don't make a particularly compelling case to businesses. If a business needs serious image editing, it's probably going to employ a designer who uses professional tools such as Adobe Photoshop, which has its own set of AI features. "The features for enterprise right now are limited. They're not necessarily buying them to have those capabilities right now," Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst for TECHnalysis Research, told El Reg. "By investing in Copilot+ PCs now, they are making an investment in systems with capabilities." Jessop agreed, saying that "the needle isn't moved by the exclusive features as they [enterprise customers] can get them from cloud-based services. On-device processing does offer benefits to privacy, but a feature like Recall is still viewed with much skepticism regardless." O'Donnell explained that, when businesses buy Copilot+ PCs, they are banking on the 40+ TOPS NPUs in those systems becoming useful as new business applications come out. They are looking years ahead to a time when local AI processing is more important. TECHnalysis is currently conducting a survey of enterprise customers to find out how important having an NPU is to them, and these results differ from what Canalys found. According to early results O'Donnell shared with us, 88 percent of respondents believe it is at least somewhat important to have an NPU right now and that number grows to 93 percent when asked about having an NPU two years from now. For their part, Dell and Intel recently rolled out similarly bullish survey results showing that businesses favor Copilot+ PCs. In their "Windows 11 & AI PC Readiness Report" [PDF], the companies state that 62 percent of a thousand UK IT decision makers polled would be more likely to choose a Copilot+ PC than a "regular AI PC" (presumably a PC with an NPU below 40 TOPS). 64 percent of respondents said that having new PCs that are powerful enough to run AI applications is either extremely critical or critical for business. But, despite companies saying that on-device AI is important to them, getting good performance and battery life are much more important in the real world. "It's important to understand that when Copilot+ PCs first started coming out, the playbook focused on AI, performance, battery life," Jessop said. "But after tepid or confused reception to what exactly the value in on-device AI is, the playbook seems to have moved to focusing on performance and battery life first, AI (and talks of future-proofing) second."®

AI PCs are here - but businesses aren't exactly rushing to buy them just yet

Price, lack of use cases and interoperability are also concerns Although AI PCs are becoming increasingly available to both consumers and businesses, it seems firms are still not rushing to buy them. New data from Canalys found around three-quarters (73%) of B2B partners are aware of Copilot+ PCs between March and April 2025, yet only one in three considered AI capabilities important in purchasing decisions. Despite the huge performance updates, businesses still look to be prioritizing Windows 11 refreshes and battery life over Copilot+ exclusive features, particularly with the Windows 10 end of life on the horizon. Initially launched with Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips and later available with Intel Core Ultra 200V and AMD Risen AI 300 series chips, Copilot+ PCs are seen as high-end devices with 40+ TOPS NPUs for local AI processing. Canalys' data shows nearly one in four (23%) PCs sold globally in the final three months of 2024 was an AI PC, however this is a generalized term that means different things across the industry. For Canalys, it means that the devices include a "chipset or block for dedicated AI workloads such as an NPU." However, Context Senior Analyst Marie-Christine Pygott explained (via The Register) only 9% of the 1.2 million AI-capable PCs shipped by European distributors in Q2 2025 classified as Copilot+ PCs, meeting the 40 TOPS requirement. Pygott blamed the slow uptake on high pricing, a lack of use cases and low perception of what a Copilot+ PC is and what it can do. Some enterprise customers have also been reluctant to moving to Arm-based Snapdragon chips due to software compatibility issues. However, things could be on the verge of changing, with a recent Dell survey revealing that around three in five (62%) IT decision-makers would prefer a Copilot+ PC over a regular PC. Looking ahead, Canalys expects 60% of the PCs shipped in 2027 to be AI-capable, with 2025 potentially seeing them hold a 40% market share.