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Lenovo and HP's new AI assistants, Qira and HP IQ, run queries locally on your PC, work across devices, and provide a common user interface. Both PC makers hope these tools are widely adopted, but while it's an interesting proposition, I'm more than a bit skeptical that they can keep these products current enough for most organizations to choose them over other alternatives.
Lenovo describes Qira as a "personal ambient intelligence" that replaces the AI Now feature on current Lenovo PCs and the Moto AI feature on its Motorola smartphones. It can enable a conversation or workflow to continue across devices, so you could start a project on your phone and continue it on your PC. And it has some interesting features, such as creating a cross-device summary of important emails, texts, chats, and to-dos called "Catch Me Up"; its own writing assistant; and a meeting companion that provides real-time transcription and translation. Importantly, it will also work with other applications and chatbots, including those from Microsoft, Notion, and Perplexity.
HP's goals are similar. Its HP IQ is designed to provide a "universal experience" with a common UI across all of HP's devices, eventually including printers. The AI can respond to text and voice inputs and analyze personal files to provide summaries and insight. It will have its own meeting agent to record notes and summarize meetings.
Plus, HP promises a "Notes & Knowledge" feature that will keep a running record of interactions and organize notes so they can be more easily searched and shared (which sounds a bit like a more advanced version of Microsoft's Recall feature). In demos, HP has shown how HP IQ can help you build a board presentation by dragging and dropping the documents you want summarized. It too is designed to work with other tools, including Microsoft Copilot. HP says this tech will debut with the upcoming EliteBook X G2 PCs.
To some extent, we're hearing similar things from Samsung with its Galaxy AI, which already works well with Google Gemini on its phones. Its latest Galaxy Book PCs support AI selection and image remastering tools, as well as features like Live Translate and Transcript Assist via Windows’ Phone Link. I have no doubt that Apple, which plans to connect Apple Intelligence and Siri with Gemini, will add more local capabilities as well. So there will be plenty of competition.
The Idea of an 'AI Superapp' Sounds Great, But There Are Issues
If you have a PC or a phone with a decent Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which most of this year's PCs and high-end phones have, then it makes sense to do things like translation, transcription, and maybe basic writing on the local device. For one thing, it will be less expensive; you've already paid for the device's NPU, so you don't have to use "tokens" on a cloud service. It should also be a bit more responsive; there are latency issues related to going to the cloud. In addition, running AI on-device is theoretically more private.
And I do like the idea of an "AI superapp" where you use a common user interface, but under the hood, it calls whatever application, agent, or model it needs. This seems to be what both HP and Lenovo would like to offer. But this vision isn't limited to hardware makers: Microsoft is pushing a similar concept with Copilot, and if you use ChatGPT or Claude, you already have an interface that works across devices.
But here's where PC makers run into a problem. How many people do you know who get all their devices from one company? HP doesn't make phones, and I doubt that printers are the first thing people think about when it comes to AI assistants. Lenovo makes both PCs and phones, but its Motorola line lags Apple and Samsung by a wide margin in the US. Samsung has a strong position in phones, but is a relatively small PC maker. Only Apple really has the ecosystem that works for this vision.
Another Problem: You're Going to Want Cloud Access
I also worry that the most advanced AI models will almost certainly run on servers and in the cloud for the next few years. While there are activities you can do on the local device, models on PCs and phones, by definition, won't have the most advanced capabilities. And the rapid pace at which cloud-based models have improved in recent months contrasts with the relatively slow evolution I've seen using Lenovo's AI Now and HP's AI Companion. Qira and HP IQ will have to update and improve their tools much faster to stay competitive. For instance, the early demos I saw didn't even mention "agents."
And then there's the problem that much of what you want an AI assistant to do involves data that isn't on your PC or phone. You might want to look something up, buy a product, or make a reservation, all of which involve using various web services. If you’re a business user, you're likely to need information from databases or corporate stores of information, likely in Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or SharePoint. In these cases, you're already going to the cloud, so any latency or privacy advantage would disappear.
Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if you just kept the files on your local device. Even when it's practical, that raises a different security concern. For the last decade or so, almost all the CIOs I know have pushed their users to store data in the cloud, for better security and to address lost devices. I doubt most CIOs are ready to change that, even to get AI.
In the end, the success of tools like Qira and HP IQ will depend on Lenovo and HP being able to offer better, more connected experiences that the AI software vendors can, while balancing security and performance considerations. I’m skeptical that the PC vendors will have the focus and the speed necessary to really compete.