5 Things To Know About HP Inc. As CEO Enrique Lores Departs

The company is in the midst of a major AI PC shift and seeking to enable partners around consultative solution sales related to AI, HP executives tell CRN.

As HP Inc. searches for a permanent CEO following the departure of Enrique Lores, the company is in the midst of a major AI PC shift that is bringing massive opportunities for partners, according to executives.

Speaking with CRN Monday, prior to the announcement of Lores’ departure, HP executives said the PC and printer giant is investing to enable partners around consultative solution sales related to AI.

Going forward, “we see increased adoption of AI devices on the edge,” said Kobi Elbaz, senior vice president and general manager for global revenue operations at HP.

Lores, a three-decade veteran of HP who had served as the company’s president and CEO since 2019, is stepping down from the company to lead PayPal as its next chief executive, HP disclosed Tuesday.

With his departure, HP board member Bruce Broussard has become the vendor’s interim CEO, effective immediately, HP said. HP’s board plans to conduct a search for a permanent CEO successor.

What follows are five things to know about HP with the departure of Lores as CEO.

AI Device Transition Is Accelerating

Speaking with CRN Monday, Elbaz said there’s no question that the company sees a “big acceleration” underway when it comes to the shift to AI PCs.

In January, HP said it was making big strides to advance GenAI performance on its premium EliteBook X commercial notebooks with the launch of second-generation AI PC devices in the series.

In a major move, the PC giant unveiled its EliteBook X G2 Series with an expanded set of processor options for clamshell models—with choices between chips from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm—while sticking with an Intel-only approach for convertible 2-in-1 devices in the new portfolio.

HP is also doubling down on enabling other devices in its portfolio with AI, such as its Poly audio and videoconferencing devices.

For instance, the company is working to ensure that when teams are using HP devices in a Poly conference room, “you get much better experiences” through AI, Elbaz said. “So we will look about how we create more experiences across the devices.”

Memory Shortages Could Favor AI PCs

While the industry is facing challenges from memory shortages and increased prices on certain devices, experts such as Circana’s Mike Crosby have told CRN that many AI PCs should still have memory available even if the broader PC market is under pressure.

Elbaz said that because of this dynamic, “I think we’re going to see that the mix of AI PC going to increase in the overall [market].”

AI PC is “a massive market,” he said. “We see more and more use cases coming into play, and also more powerful devices in terms of the numbers of TOPS [trillion operations per second] they can run.”

Ultimately, “I do believe this will continue to fuel the PC industry revenue growth,” Elbaz said. “We see increased demand.”

Partners Shifting To Consulting On AI

To capitalize on the AI device transition, HP is working to enable partners to increasingly focus on AI-related solution selling, executives told CRN.

“There still are a lot of sales reps who are selling speeds and feeds,” said Mary Beth Walker, vice president and global head of partner experience and enablement at HP.

By contrast, HP believes the far bigger opportunity with the “Future of Work” is to bring together both hardware and software into an overall solution that meets customer needs, Walker said.

“We’re really educating the reps to be able to really have different conversations with different people” around the AI transition, she said. “A lot of times, the CIO isn’t the person that’s involved in all these conversations about productivity.”

All in all, “being able to take advantage of that—of not having to go to the cloud [for AI]—is just going to grow and grow,” Walker said.

Partners Getting ‘Stickier’ Within Customers

To help with selling AI solutions, “the biggest opportunity for our partners is to identify the persona-based use cases in customers,” Elbaz said. “If [partners] understand the pain point, [they can understand] how they can bring more solutions and services around the devices.”

The result of understanding different customer use cases for AI is that the partner also becomes far “stickier” with the customer, he said.

Within the HP partner community, “many of them are already there on that journey,” Elbaz said. “But a lot of others, I think, will join that [approach] and will build that capability.”

‘Future Of Work’ Strategy Continues

At present, far too small of a portion of workers have a “healthy” relationship with their workplace, Elbaz said.

“We think technology can change that a lot,” he said. “Because if you are more productive, you get more fulfillment, and you increase your healthy relationship with your employer.”

HP is one of the few companies, if not the only company, that is able to “touch everything an employee needs—from the PC, the printer, the audio, video,” Elbaz said.

With HP’s “Future of Work” strategy alongside the advancement of AI, “we believe we can uplift a lot of the productivity of people,” he said.