Asia Pacific firms broaden AI PC & workstation use

Enterprise AI adoption in Asia Pacific is broadening to include wider use of AI PCs and workstations, according to new IDC research commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel. The studies found strong uptake of both device categories among larger organisations in the region.

Among Asia Pacific organisations with more than 500 employees, 48% have already deployed AI PCs. Another finding showed 95% expect workstations to play a critical or important role in AI initiatives over the next two years.

The results suggest a more distributed approach to AI deployment, with businesses using different types of hardware for different tasks. Dell said AI PCs are being used for everyday productivity and local AI processing, while workstations are handling more demanding development, design and modelling work.

The AI PC research was based on a survey of 720 IT and business decision-makers at organisations in Asia Pacific with more than 500 employees. A separate workstation study surveyed 960 decision-makers in the region on adoption, usage and the role of those systems in AI strategies.

AI PC uptake

Across Asia Pacific, 89% of organisations now see AI features as a very important factor in future PC purchasing decisions. The research also found that 65% are willing to pay a premium of 10% or more for AI PCs.

Australia stood out in the results, with 65% of organisations already having deployed AI PCs, 23 percentage points above the regional average. Other reported adoption rates were 51% in India, 39% in Japan, 37% in South Korea and 37% in China.

In Southeast Asia, adoption reached 54% in Singapore, 45% in Malaysia, 60% in Thailand and 58% in the Philippines. Dell said the subregion is running 6 percentage points above the regional average for AI PC adoption.

The research also linked AI PC deployment to reported productivity gains. Organisations with more than half their PC fleet made up of AI PCs reported saving 2.17 hours per employee per day, which the study described as a 30% productivity increase compared with using AI on traditional PCs.

Businesses are using these systems for tasks such as report generation, natural language search, content creation and real-time collaboration, according to Dell. Other uses cited include sales proposals, finance analysis, HR drafting, engineering document review and customer support.

According to the findings, four out of five organisations in Asia Pacific expect AI PCs to drive the adoption of agentic AI. The same proportion said these devices improve control and security for such applications, while 84% expect productivity gains, 78% cite security benefits and 77% point to lower costs from running AI workloads locally.

Workstation role

Dell also highlighted a continuing role for workstations in more complex computing tasks. These machines are being used by developers, engineers, designers and data teams for AI model development, simulation, rendering and data preparation.

The workstation research found that 50% of organisations would choose a workstation as their preferred device for AI development. It also found that 97% agree workstations are high-performance devices that support work on AI and machine learning models.

In Australia and New Zealand, 93% of organisations surveyed reported higher productivity among workstation users. Another 56% expect the share of workstations in their fleets to grow over the next five years.

Dell outlined industry examples for these systems, including engineering and architecture in manufacturing, content rendering in media, software development in technology and risk modelling in financial services. It also cited a Sydney architecture and engineering firm using Building Information Modelling workflows, where a workstation can reduce lag and waiting times when teams run complex models and switch across several applications.

AI has become the top technical computing use case for workstations in the survey. Reported uses included data preparation at 62%, model training at 60%, fine-tuning at 59%, deployment at 44% and inference at 29%.

Vendor views

Jacinta Quah, Vice President, Client Solutions Group, Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China, at Dell Technologies, said the mix of devices reflects where AI workloads are now being placed inside organisations.

"AI is changing where work happens and where intelligence needs to live," Quah said. "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 specialised, compute-intensive workloads. Together, they enable organisations to scale AI more effectively, strengthen security and privacy, and drive meaningful business outcomes."

Intel linked the shift to changing technical demands from AI projects across the region.

"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, at 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."

IDC said the spread of smaller AI models to end-user devices is likely to continue alongside demand for more powerful systems.

"The speed at which AI models are being compressed to run on-device has been remarkably fast," said Bryan Ma, Vice President, Client Devices, at 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."