HP Imagine Event Shows Off Unique AI Innovations

AI advancements over the last two years have been nothing short of amazing. Initially driven by Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI, this wave has spread far and wide, leaving few firms out of this AI feeding frenzy.

As with all initial technology advancements, most vendors are screaming, “You must deploy AI now!” However, they have little experience or understanding of AI yet, which is fueling a staggering failure rate approaching 90%.

One exception is HP, which has been aggressively deploying and using AI internally. At HP’s Imagine event last month, we saw a better AI future focused not on deploying AI for its own sake but on developing detailed plans encompassing HP’s internal resources and an impressive number of partners to ensure that AI deployments will succeed.

Let’s talk about HP’s unique AI strategy, and we’ll close with my Product of the Week: the first AI-driven HP Envy printers that, thanks to AI, promise to accomplish your complex print jobs.

HP Hope Program Addresses 2 Key Issues

One of the programs announced at HP Imagine was the HP Hope program, which effectively kills two birds with one stone, or one PC in this case. This program addresses two problems. One is the excessive number of older PCs that still work but end up in landfills. The other problem is the huge number of people, old and young, in underdeveloped areas who can’t afford new PCs.

The HP Hope Recycling Futures program provides buyers with a disposal option. When customers return an HP PC to HP, it is refurbished and sent out to people who need a PC but lack the funds to buy one. This process is not a single-cycle program; these refurbished PCs can be cyclically refurbished for several generations, much like schoolbooks are resold, so that fewer new machines have to be purchased, and fewer PCs make it into landfills or recycling shops while they still have substantial utility.

Since AI remains cloud-based, these refurbished PCs are fine for cloud AI access and the increased use of AI tools to monitor, manage, repair remotely, and protect via Wolf Security. The result provides solid improvements even though these PCs are older. In some cases, if not most, even refurbished PCs can often perform better in terms of reliability, security, and availability than new PCs that aren’t wrapped with HP’s increasing number of AI services.

3D Collaboration

HP and Google presented their Project Starline effort, which is impressive. I’ve been following video communication with a passion ever since I saw my first videoconferencing system at Disneyland in the 1960s.

One of the longstanding issues with videoconferencing technology, dating back to those early 1960s systems, is that speaking to someone on a screen just doesn’t feel natural. The 2D representation of the person diminishes the realism of the interaction. This lack of immersion often leads to the need for in-person meetings, especially for critical interactions like job interviews, performance reviews, collaborations, and relationship building — whether personal or professional.

Project Starline allows for a 3D image of the person with whom you are speaking to expand out of the screen and join you visually in front of the monitor rather than within it. If you’ve seen those high-tech billboards where the image seems to jump away from the display, the experience is similar to that. You can even high-five the remote speaker — but this isn’t a tangible projection, so you can’t feel their hand, and it vanishes if you try to touch it.

This technology is a new level of AI use. I call it “Remote Presence” because it makes the remote person feel you are in the room with them. It’s pretty amazing, and I expect this technology to eventually embrace future digital assistants, making them look more realistic without building a robotic body.

HP Wolf Security’s Enhanced AI

HP is also monitoring the use of AI in malware attacks and reports that while AI-driven attacks are still on the horizon, significant testing is underway, indicating bad actors are still learning how to use these tools.

One of the more interesting yet troubling changes is embedding malware into SVG images on websites and online using XML. These attacks tend to install a significant number of scripts that infect devices by utilizing four or more distinct Trojan carriers. This shotgun-like approach significantly increases the likelihood of a successful infection, giving a hostile actor complete control of a PC.

HP’s Wolf Security is being spun up to deal with these new aggressive threats. Still, with AI now being used to create them, the only defense able to mitigate or eliminate the problem will be one that uses an equally capable AI coupled with regular reminders to the employee to avoid clicking on surprise image files.

Wrapping Up

This year, HP Imagine was awash with AI efforts, but the most powerful was HP’s effort to create, with partners, an approach to motivating employees to use these new tools. Often, users’ inability to even try new tools leaves the majority of them underutilized. HP is focusing its AI efforts on helping its business customers’ employees come up to speed rapidly with these AI tools so that firms gain the return on investment this class of tool promises.

This approach positively differentiates HP from companies like Dell, which mostly just throw products at the problem and do not work to ensure successful implementation. HP’s approach represents its relative maturity in that it is measured and focused on benefits, not just selling hardware and software to an inexperienced and somewhat naïve customer base still learning what AI can and cannot yet do.

What continues to bleed through in events like this is HP’s unique focus on its customers, the environment, and doing what is right. I hope HP, unlike others, never loses that.

HP Print AI

At its Imagine event, HP showcased two new All-in-One Envy Printers, the 6100e and the 6500e. These will eventually be wrapped with HP Print AI, the industry’s first intelligent (AI) print manager.

(L/R) HP Envy 6100e and HP Envy 6500e All-in-One Printers

We’ve all had issues when printing a document and not having it lay up properly. Spreadsheets are the worst, often printing one line or column on a page and then kicking out hundreds of useless print copies that make little or no sense, like this:

Due in beta this year, HP Print AI will auto-format print jobs, so the printed document is useful. This means spreadsheets that look like spreadsheets and documents that otherwise wouldn’t fit the paper you are printing on will fit that paper. The AI analyzes your print job based on past training to determine the optimal format. Then, it auto-configures for that result so each print job is as perfect as the AI can make it, like this:

Ironically, I ran into a problem when printing my “know before you go” report from HP for the event. My HP printer cropped both sides, blocking out the names and numbers I’d need should I run into problems (and I did run into problems).

While I have a picture of the new and very nice HP Envy 6100e and 6500e printers at the top of this section, the print service is my Product of the Week because, like most of you, I’m tired of fighting my printer. The idea of it working well automatically is something I’ve been looking forward to for decades.

Editor’s Note: The images featured in this article are credited to HP.