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Dell Technologies outlined how enterprise AI adoption across Asia Pacific is moving from experimentation to implementation, with 48% of organisations 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.
For Dell, this shift reflects a broader industry trend toward aligning the right compute resources with specific workload requirements, as organisations 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 organisations 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 organisations are outpacing the regional average in prioritising 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 Australia, 65% of organisations have already deployed AI PCs – 23% higher than the regional average – highlighting strong early adoption momentum. Despite varying rates of adoption, similar trends can be observed in India (51%), Japan (39%), South Korea (37%), and China (37%), and across Southeast Asia, including Singapore (54%), Malaysia (45%), Thailand (60%), and the Philippines (58%). Southeast Asia’s AI PC adoption is outpacing the regional average by 6%, driven by the ability to adopt new technologies without legacy constraints, strong infrastructure in markets like Singapore, favorable market conditions and supportive government initiatives.
Organisations 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 organisations 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.
As AI workloads become more diverse, organisations need silicon innovations and platforms that can support both efficient on-device experiences and more demanding workstation use cases.
Jack Huang
Four out of five Asia Pacific organisations 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 organisations expect AI PCs to increase employee productivity, while 78% cite security benefits and 77% highlight cost advantages of running AI locally. In Southeast Asia, 57% of organisations prioritise security when considering AI PCs.
This shift is leading to a tangible investment. Across Asia Pacific, 65% of organisations 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 specialised workloads
While AI PCs distribute intelligence across the workforce, workstations continue to serve as the performance backbone for more demanding workloads – particularly as organisations 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 organisations 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 organisations agree workstations are high-performance devices that fuel innovation for the organisation by empowering teams to explore cutting-edge technology like AI and Machine Learning models.
In the next year or two, very robust models will run on PCs that far exceed today’s capabilities.
Bryan Ma
Across Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, 92% of organisations surveyed reported higher productivity among workstation users, while 52% expect the share of workstations in their fleet to grow over the next five years. Organisations in this part of the region also reported workstation use for data preparation (66%), model fine-tuning (62%), and foundational model training (55%), underscoring the role of high-performance systems in advanced AI and professional workloads.
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. 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%). For example, an insurer in Southeast Asia chose to work with workstation platforms for their enterprise safeguards, ensuring sensitive customer data is stored, processed and secured safely through features such as built-in Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Error-Correcting Code (ECC) memory, chassis intrusion detection and self-encrypting drives.
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 thenext 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.
AI PCs bring intelligence to everyday workflows, at the fingertips of employees where data is generated.
Jacinta Quah
For organisations 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 organisations industrialise more advanced, compute-intensive, and specialised 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 & Modern Workplace,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, organisations 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 BryanMa, 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, organisations continue to depend on high-performance workstations for advanced AI development and specialised workloads, reinforcing a more distributed AI environment across the enterprise.”
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 organisations 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.
