Dell Technologies outlined how enterprise AI adoption across Asia Pacific is moving from experimentation to implementation, with 48% of organizations with more than 500 employees in the region already deploying AI PCs and 95% expecting workstations to play a critical or important role in AI initiatives over the next two years.
Together, these trends point to a more distributed AI environment – one that brings intelligence closer to users while supporting increasingly complex and compute-intensive workloads.
Two IDC InfoBriefs, commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel reinforce this shift – Future-Ready Workforce: The Strategic Case for AI PC Adoption and Powering Future-Ready Computing with Workstations: Built for AI. Built for You. The research highlights growing enterprise momentum behind both intelligent endpoints and higher-performance systems as organizations shape the next phase of AI adoption.
Why It Matters:
For Dell, this shift reflects a broader industry trend toward aligning the right compute resources with specific workload requirements, as organizations balance intelligent endpoints for everyday productivity with high-performance systems designed for advanced AI and professional use cases. Enterprise AI deployments are increasingly spanning client devices, edge environments and the data center, reflecting a more distributed approach across the IT environment.
AI PCs: Bringing intelligence closer to everyday work
AI PCs are becoming a core component of the modern workplace, enabling AI workloads to run directly on the device to deliver faster, more responsive user experiences while reducing reliance on continuous cloud connectivity. This approach also supports enhanced data privacy and security, provides IT teams with greater control over deployment and management across device fleets, and enables more consistent scaling of AI capabilities across the workforce.
The IDC research commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel underscores this momentum. As AI becomes embedded in day-to-day work, device strategy is shifting accordingly. 89% of Asia Pacific organizations now consider AI capabilities a very important factor in future PC purchasing decisions.
This priority is pronounced in key markets across the region – from Australia and South Korea, where organizations are outpacing the regional average in prioritizing AI in purchase decisions, to India, where advanced AI performance is emerging as the leading evaluation criterion. In China, this urgency is further reinforced by a growing recognition of the risks to employee engagement and decision quality if AI PC adoption is delayed.
In India enterprises are moving beyond pilot projects to integrate AI into core business processes with a relatively high AI PC deployment rate of 51%, propelled by a tech-savvy workforce, a strong focus on operational efficiency, a thriving ISV ecosystem and increasing emphasis on security and data sovereignty.
Organizations with over 50% AI PCs in their fleet report saving 2.17 hours per employee per day, a 30% productivity increase compared to using AI on traditional PCs. AI PCs are enabling a new class of enterprise use cases – from real-time collaboration and report generation to natural language search and content creation – delivering tangible productivity gains.
In practical terms, this can translate into faster proposal turnaround for sales teams, quicker analysis cycles for finance and operations, streamlined drafting for HR, faster document review for engineering teams, and more responsive support for customer-facing employees. As organizations prepare for more autonomous and agentic AI in hybrid work environments, AI PCs are increasingly becoming the governed way to scale intelligent experiences across the workforce – safely, consistently, and with clearer business impact.
Four out of five Asia Pacific organizations expect AI PCs to drive adoption of agentic AI, with the same proportion agreeing they enhance control and security for these applications. The broader momentum is clear: 84% of organizations expect AI PCs to increase employee productivity, while 78% cite security benefits and 77% highlight cost advantages of running AI locally.
76% of Indian organizations prioritize AI performance powered by advanced NPUs as the top criterion for AI PCs 15% higher than the Asia Pacific average with security and the ISV ecosystem close behind at 61%
This shift is leading to a tangible investment. Across Asia Pacific, 65% of organizations are willing to pay a premium of 10% or more for AI PCs, reflecting their role as core infrastructure for enterprise AI.
Workstations: Powering advanced AI and specialized workloads
While AI PCs distribute intelligence across the workforce, workstations continue to serve as the performance backbone for more demanding workloads – particularly as organizations shift more AI development on-premise. Developers, engineers, designers, and data teams rely on workstation-class systems for AI model development, simulation, rendering, data preparation, and other compute-intensive activities that require reliability, low latency, and sustained performance.
The IDC research on workstations reflects this reality. 95% of organizations across Asia Pacific expect workstations to play a critical or important role in AI initiatives over the next two years, while 50% would choose a workstation as their preferred device for AI development and 97% of organizations agree workstations are high-performance devices that fuel innovation for the organization by empowering teams to explore cutting-edge technology like AI and Machine Learning models
In India, 95% of organizations surveyed reported higher productivity among workstation users, 76% expect the share of workstations in their fleet to grow over the next five years, and organizations reported strong workstation use for AI deployment (77%) and data preparation (76%). This makes India one of the clearest markets to frame workstations not only as productivity tools, but as increasingly important platforms for advanced AI workflows.
Use cases vary by sector – from engineering and architecture workflows in manufacturing, to content rendering in media, software development in technology, and risk modeling in financial services. For example, an Indian bank wants to build a GenAI assistant for service agents or an ML model for fraud detection.
A workstation can help the bank’s data scientists and AI team experiment locally with proprietary data, shorten iteration cycles and keep sensitive banking information. AI has become the top technical computing use case for workstations, supporting the full lifecycle from data preparation (62%) and model training (60%) to fine-tuning (59%), deployment (44%) and inference (29%).
This also shifts the conversation from upfront device price to total cost of ownership – including lifecycle longevity, scalability, performance consistency, and risk reduction. As AI initiatives move closer to production, workstations are increasingly seen as long-term platforms that can scale with evolving workloads, rather than short-term tools for experimentation.
Toward an AI compute continuum that supports the next phase of enterprise AI
Together, AI PCs and workstations form an AI compute continuum, supporting everything from everyday productivity to advanced AI development and professional workloads across the enterprise.
For organizations across Asia Pacific, the next phase of AI will not be defined by a single environment or device category, but by the ability to place the right workload on the right compute. AI PCs are extending AI into everyday workflows, while workstations are helping organizations industrialize more advanced, compute-intensive, and specialized AI use cases. Combined, they give leaders a more practical foundation for scaling AI with greater speed, control, and long-term value.
Perspectives:
“AI is changing where work happens and where intelligence needs to live,” said Jacinta Quah, Vice President, Client Solutions Group, Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China, Dell Technologies. “AI is changing where work happens and where intelligence needs to live,” said Jacinta Quah, Vice President, Client Solutions Group, Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China (APJC), Dell Technologies. “AI PCs and workstations are not simply device categories in a refresh cycle – they are foundational platforms built for a future-ready enterprise AI era. AI PCs bring intelligence to everyday workflows, at the fingertips of employees where data is generated. Meanwhile, workstations provide the performance and control needed for more specialized, compute-intensive workloads. Together, they enable organizations to scale AI more effectively, strengthen security and privacy, and drive meaningful business outcomes.”
“AI is placing new demands on compute, requiring both local intelligence and high-performance processing to work seamlessly together,” said Jack Huang, Regional Sales Director, PC Client Commercial and Channel, Asia Pacific and Japan, Intel. “As AI workloads become more diverse, organizations need silicon innovations and platforms that can support both efficient on-device experiences and more demanding workstation use cases. Together with Dell, we are helping to enable the next phase of enterprise AI with technologies built for responsiveness, efficiency and scale.”
“The speed at which AI models are being compressed to run on-device has been remarkably fast,” said Bryan Ma, Vice President, Client Devices, IDC. “In the next year or two, very robust models will run on PCs that far exceed today’s capabilities. At the same time, organizations continue to depend on high-performance workstations for advanced AI development and specialized workloads, reinforcing a more distributed AI environment across the enterprise.”
Research Methodology:
The findings are based on two IDC InfoBriefs:
IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Dell Technologies and Intel, Future-ready Workforce: The Strategic Case for AI PC Adoption, Doc. #AP242547IB, January 2026
IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Dell Technologies and Intel, Powering Future-Ready Computing with Workstations: Built for AI. Built for You, Doc. #AP242550IB, February 2026
Future-ready Workforce: The Strategic Case for AI PC Adoption is based on a survey of 720 IT and business decision-makers across Asia Pacific organizations with more than 500 employees. Powering Future-Ready Computing with Workstations: Built for AI. Built for You surveyed 960 IT and business decision-makers in the region to assess workstation adoption, usage, and their role in enterprise AI strategies.
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