From an end user computing perspective, 2024 is the year tech executives tried to convince the world that artificial intelligence (AI) can help employees to work more efficiently.

This has resulted in a raft of “copilots” designed to improve office productivity and automate tasks. The fact that large language models (LLMs) can generate content, take notes during meetings and summarise complex documents shows where this technology is being applied to improve workflows and speed up mundane tasks.

To support these new end user applications, there has been a push across the IT sector to develop AI at the edge, on PCs and mobile devices.Microsoft introduced a new category of PCs, called Copilot+, which requires a neural processing unit (NPU), for running some AI workloads locally. Initially, these PCs were ARM-based, but Intel and AMD are also ramping up their AI-based PC efforts – and there is no doubt this will continue in 2025.  

Yet, in spite of the productivity boost they promise, some industry experts believe there is no clear use case for businesses to upgrade to these new devices.

Purchases of new PCs have been in decline for years since Covid-19. There really is only an uplift, when IT departments are forced to upgrade, to ensure PC hardware remains on a supported operating system.

Given that Windows 10 will end support on 14 October 2025, there may well be some IT departments that will naturally upgrade older PCs, to ones that are AI-enabled, as they migrate over to Windows 11.

AI is also being used as part of desktop IT support. Natural language queries offer a straightforward way for end users to access the library of knowledge in IT support frequently asked questions archives to enable them to find answers to some of the problems they may be facing with their PC hardware.

The device itself can also run agent software, which collects a wealth of information on its health. This information can, where appropriate and to comply with privacy laws, give desktop IT support data to feed machine learning algorithms that power predictive maintenance tasks to keep the PC running optimally.

IT budgets remain tight and Computer Weekly has featured a number of companies that have decided to purchase second-hand PC equipment rather than buy new. While this may be a bit of a niche for many organisations, it makes PC purchase more affordable and end users can often get much better hardware for a reasonable price.

In those organisations that only require PCs for very specific tasks, such as in a callcentre, Microsoft has revitalised interest in cloud-based PCs, by introducing a new device type.

Its $349 Windows Link device is effectively a locked-down, thin client device that boots directly into the Microsoft Cloud. Such devices may well become part of the IT estate going forward as businesses look to reduce desktop computing IT maintenance costs and lower the risk of cyber attacks that target end users.

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 end user computing articles.