March 26, 2026
By Bob O'Donnell
With the stunning rise of autonomous agents like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Work as well as the staggering variety of opinions on what impact they will have on the future of work, it’s probably not terribly surprising to see renewed interest in the computers we all use at work. Toss in the fact that Intel just released the commercial vPro versions of its new Core Ultra Series 3 (code named Panther Lake) processors and, well, you have the perfect storm to generate news on business PCs.
Or, in HP’s case, a nicely timed opportunity to debut a wide range of commercial PCs, notebooks, software and services and talk about the role they play in the Future of Work. And that’s exactly what the company did at their annual HP Imagine event, showing newly updated ProBook and EliteBook notebooks, ZBook mobile workstations, Z-series desktop workstations and more. They also shared survey information on the critical importance that having access to fully functioning PCs and printers have on our workplace productivity.
From a product perspective, a majority of the new commercial PCs that HP announced were based on Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 processors. However, the company first talked about its latest EliteBook 6 G2q notebook based on Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon X2 series chips and described it as the “world’s most configurable Arm-based PC.” This lightweight laptop is offered with either the 12-Core X2 Elite or the 6 or 10 Core X2 Plus SOC and is available with numerous memory and storage options. In addition, there are options for HP Go, the company’s branded MVNO cellular data service, and a Qualcomm 5G modem. HP also showed off Intel and AMD-based versions of the same design, which is 15% thinner than previous generations. Other new PCs the company introduced included the EliteBook 8 G2 and the ProBook 4 G2, each with different physical designs, screen sizes, chip options and other configuration choices.
On the workstation side, HP debuted updated versions of its ZBook line, including the ZBook 8 G2, with options for both Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3-based ZBook X. As in the past, all of these units can be configured with various Nvidia discrete GPUs and, thanks to the greatly improved Xe3 graphics cores built into Intel’s latest SOC, you can also get a system with 12 Xe3 cores. On the desktop side, the newly redesigned Z8 Fury G6i offers the latest Intel CPUs, up to four Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 graphics cards and an interesting new future-proofing option. Specifically, HP showed off an optional expanded side cover (which also works with the Z4) that provides up to 15% more volume inside the case to fit future GPUs (which are expected to be too large to fit inside standard designs) as well as extra fans. Speaking of GPUs, the company also demonstrated a new version of its unique ZBoost GPU sharing software, which allows idle GPUs on nearby network-attached workstations to be called into service for certain tasks. The latest version now supports rendering workloads from applications such as Catia, TwinMotion and Siemens NX, as well as the AI-accelerated workloads from the first version of ZBoost.
Undoubtedly the most intriguing announcement that HP made was the debut of its HP IQ software application, which will be in early beta later this spring. Designed to be a type of local AI assistant, IQ offers an intelligent pull-down user interface (UI) from the top center of the screen where you can enter queries and then sends those requests to an on-device model that can perform them for you, leveraging the data on your PC. In addition to the typical writing assistance, document summarization, and meeting recording and transcription capabilities that have become standard fare, IQ features several other interesting location-based features. Called HP NearSense and built around Google’s new D2DI (Device-to-Device Infrastructure) standard, these capabilities offered simplified connectivity and are being integrated into IQ.
The first of two NearSense features provides an easy way to find other local users and easily share files without having to connect, log in, or perform any of the other types of tasks normally involved with PC-based file sharing. Second, leveraging the connection with HP’s Poly conferencing room equipment, IQ-equipped PCs that are taken into meeting rooms featuring some of the latest generation Poly Studio video bars will be automatically presented with the ability to connect to the assigned meeting. Admittedly, neither are earth-shattering on their own, but they are both solid examples of the kind of connected intelligence that modern PCs ought to have, so it’s great to see HP leveraging this new standard.
As a big believer in the potential of on-device AI, I love the concept of what HP is doing with IQ—and it’s great to see an application that will actually leverage the NPU of newer AI PCs as IQ does. However, I think it’s going to be challenging for enterprises and businesses to widely deploy this because of the many concerns that IT organizations have regarding any kind of autonomous agent. To be clear, IQ doesn’t have the kind of “access anything/do anything” capability of tools like OpenClaw, but it’s going to take a while for many larger organizations to adopt it. Plus, not surprisingly, it’s initially an HP-only application, which always creates challenges in multi-vendor PC environments (which many businesses have). An even bigger concern is that it requires the organization to be running HP’s WXP (Work Experience Platform), because that’s where organizations set up the guardrails and settings for the application. While I do believe WXP—which offers a variety of device management and telemetry tools for IT managers—has some powerful capabilities, it’s in an extremely crowded field, and many organizations already have other tools in place.
Despite my concerns, I give HP huge credit for making such a comprehensive effort with IQ, and I believe its initial UI offers an excellent way to integrate agentic AI applications onto a PC in an elegant, seamless manner. It’s definitely going to be interesting to watch, especially as more powerful models are able to start running locally on PCs.
The other important PC-related announcement that HP made at Imagine is on the security side. For years, HP has driven advanced security capabilities—though, unfortunately, they don’t get much credit for it. They continued that tradition at this year’s Imagine with the debut of TPM Guard, which is integrated into all the company’s latest PCs and workstations. The problem is that even BitLocker encrypted data can now be hacked into via a low-cost hardware “snooping tool”. TPM Guard prevents those types of attacks by encrypting the physical communication between a PC’s CPU and its TPM (Trusted Platform Module)—a hardware security component found on all commercial PCs. It’s not something every user or every organization needs to worry about, but it is a critical hole that security-conscious environments have wanted to see filled. This, in connection with the new DTECT malware prevention technology that Intel has integrated into the commercial (vPro) versions of their Core Ultra Series 3 hardware, makes the latest PCs significantly better protected than previous generations. DTECT does real-time detection of malware leveraging AI models as well as the NPU and GPU built into the latest Intel commercial chips.
For a long time, interest around commercial PCs was frankly pretty limited. However, with the ability to run more powerful AI tools, perform on-device AI, and start thinking about autonomous agents, PCs have become very interesting once again. As HP demonstrated at Imagine, it is very much in the thick of these developments, and this year’s commercial PCs and workstations open up some very interesting opportunities.
Here’s a link to the original column: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hp-pushes-work-experience-forward-bob-o-donnell-rvenc/
Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech.
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