Intel’s Santhosh Viswanathan highlights the rise of AI PCs transforming the future of personal computing

Intel executive Santhosh Viswanathan reveals how AI-powered personal computers are entering a new era centred on local intelligence and distributed AI, with significant implications for global markets including India.

Intel’s Santhosh Viswanathan says the personal computer is entering a new phase, as the industry moves from an era defined by information retrieval to one shaped by on-device intelligence. Speaking to The Hindu BusinessLine, the Intel executive argued that AI PCs are not merely faster laptops, but machines designed to generate, run and coordinate AI tasks locally, reducing reliance on cloud round-trips and making the model more efficient for both consumers and enterprises. His comments echo Intel’s wider pitch that the AI PC will become a practical hub for smaller models and agents, rather than just a terminal for accessing them.

The company has reason to emphasise that shift. In Intel’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, finance chief Dave Zinsner said AI PC revenue rose 8% sequentially and accounted for more than 60% of the client CPU mix. Intel has also been publicly framing AI PCs as part of a broader move towards distributed, “frugal” AI, with on-device processing intended to improve responsiveness, lower power use and reduce the need for expensive cloud compute, according to a Forbes India interview with Viswanathan and Intel’s own AI PC materials.

Viswanathan’s strongest case for AI PCs is economic as much as technical. He described the architecture as a combination of CPU, GPU and neural processing unit, with each engine handling different tasks so that workloads can be performed more intelligently and with better battery life than on a CPU alone. Intel’s AI PC report likewise says the appeal lies in blending those processors to support productivity, security and local inference, while keeping workloads closer to the data that generates them.

That argument carries particular weight in India, where PC penetration remains far below that of mature markets. Viswanathan said India’s adoption rate is still below 10%, compared with more than 90% in the United States, and he warned that the country cannot afford to remain at such a low level of access if AI is to be widely useful. He said the real gap is not only among enterprises, many of which already have fixed computing in place, but among students, small businesses and other users who have yet to gain regular access to a PC.

Intel is also positioning India as a strategic centre for its own operations. Viswanathan said the company has its second-largest R&D site in the country, outside the United States, with teams in Bengaluru contributing across client, data centre and networking businesses. That footprint matters as the AI infrastructure stack changes. He said Intel is working with government stakeholders on the India AI Mission and expects the next phase of agentic AI to require a different kind of data-centre architecture, with CPUs playing a larger role alongside GPUs as systems move beyond today’s first wave of model training and deployment.

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Source: Fuse Wire Services