Copilot+ PCs are so far failing to penetrate the enterprise as IT decision makers remain understandably unimpressed with the exclusive Windows AI features they offer and other efforts, such as the need to refresh fleets with Windows 11-capable gear, take priority.
Microsoft introduced the term Copilot+ PCs last year to describe high-end laptops with a built‑in Neural Processing Unit (NPU) – an on‑chip AI accelerator – capable of delivering 40+ TOPS (trillions of operations per second). By way of comparison, Intel’s last-generation high-end Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops boasted 11 TOPs of performance; these laptops were designated with the marketing term “AI PC.” The first Copilot+ PCs were powered exclusively by Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips when they launched in spring 2024. In the fall, Intel and AMD joined the party as laptops based on their Core Ultra 200V and Ryzen AI 300 series respectively hit the market.
To help promote Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft built into them a bunch of special AI-enabled features that might be able to benefit from local processing, and the company and its hardware partners also talked up the battery life improvements offered by the initial Arm-only models.
But despite the marketing push from Microsoft and its hardware partners, the laptops haven’t really penetrated businesses in a meaningful way.
“The reception of Copilot+ PCs by businesses has been mixed,” Canalys Research Manager Kieren Jessop told The Register. “Deployments have mostly been pilot programs to specific personas rather than mass roll outs.”
Jessop shared the results of two global polls of channel partners (B2B companies) his company conducted. In a March 2025 survey, a full 73 percent were familiar with Copilot+ PCs, but in an April query, only 33 percent said that the AI capability of any kind (not just Copilot+) was important or a key factor.
Canalys survey of IT on Copilot+ PCs. Image courtesy of Canalys – Click to enlarge
According to Context Senior Analyst Marie-Christine Pygott, Copilot+ PCs make up a small but growing percentage of all PCs with a built-in NPU (which are designated by the marketing term “AI PC”). In Q2 2025, European distributors shipped 1.2 million AI-capable PCs to resellers. Of those, only nine percent were Copilot+ PCs, while the rest were laptops that can’t hit Redmond’s 40 TOPS requirement. That nine percent is tiny, but an improvement over four percent in Q1 and two percent in Q4 of 2024.
As we’ve noted before, overall sales of AI-capable PCs have been underwhelming. According to Context, only two out of every five PCs sold in early Q2 were AI-capable. So Copilot+ PCs so far make up only a tiny piece of a small pie.
“What we are seeing for Copilot+ PCs is that unit sales and share are going up steadily but are overall lower than what the industry hoped for when they were first launched,” Pygott told us. “There are a few reasons for this, including high pricing (although this has been coming down), lack of use cases, and low perception of what a Copilot+ PC is and what it can do, and in the commercial segment, a reluctance to go for Arm-based devices in the case of Snapdragon X due to some software incompatibilities that were experienced after these devices had first been launched.”
What growth there has been in Copilot+ PCs is coming more from the hardware refresh cycle rather than the exclusive AI features they enable, Pygott said. Newer laptops, by virtue of the latest-gen Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm processors they use, are meeting the Copilot+ PC standard of 40+ TOPS – whether customers care about it or not.
Microsoft did not return a request for comment on the viability of Copilot+ PCs in the enterprise.
Exclusive Copilot+ features: built for consumers
So what exactly do you get with a Copilot+ PC anyway?
- Recall (in preview): This very controversial, opt-in feature takes screenshots of all of your activity so that you can later ask natural-language questions, such as “what website did I see the red shoes on?” and have it pull up a picture of that activity. Though the security of this feature has improved since it was first announced and then delayed for rollout in spring 2024, with the files now being stored in virtualization-based security (VBS) enclaves, there are still major privacy concerns about this software.
Recall is not supposed to store screenshots of sensitive personal information, but it isn’t perfect, as it screenshotted the home page of my bank and a notepad file I filled with usernames and passwords. The Brave browser recently blocked Recall screenshotting by default.
Though it is considered to be “in preview,” Microsoft pushes you to enable it during the OOBE (Out of the Box Experience) on Copilot+ PCs.
Recall captures a screen full of usernames and passwords – Click to enlarge
- Click to Do: You enable this feature by hitting Windows + Q (or from the Snipping tool). It gives you a pointer that allows you to highlight text or images on the screen and perform some limited tasks on them, such as copying to the clipboard, web searching about them, or removing the backgrounds from images (but if you just save the image on a non-Copilot+ PC, you can still remove the background in Microsoft Designer).
Microsoft is adding a new Click to Do action to Insider builds, which describes images when you click on them. This feature could help with accessibility.
The most impressive thing about Click to Do is that it can pull text from any image. In my testing, it even grabbed the text “USA” from President Trump’s hat in a news photo, even though his head was at an angle, and it grabbed the words “The End” from a picture on the El Reg home page.
Click to Do highlights text in a graphic on El Reg home page – Click to enlarge
- Cocreator in Microsoft Paint: Allows you to draw a picture and then tell Windows to redraw it for you with a prompt. In my experience, this was only slightly different from a text-to-image generator. I drew a cat in a car and prompted it to create a cat in a car, and it gave me a different-looking cat and car. If I moved the “creativity” slider to a lower number, it showed slight variations in my drawing.
Cocreator in Microsoft Paint – Click to enlarge
- Windows Studio Effects: Allows you to blur the background on webcam shots or put a fake background behind you. Studio Effects are available on non-Copilot+ PCs, but the Copilot+ PCs have a few more options and do the processing locally. Most of the important online chat services, including Google Meet and Zoom, already have background blur and replacement built in, so you don’t need Windows to do this for you.
- Live Captions: Real-time captioning of any video you watch, including real-time translation if the source material is in a language that’s foreign to you. Live captions are available on non-Copilot+ PCs too so the big benefit appears to be that Copilot+ PCs use the NPU rather than the cloud for processing. However, most videos you’d watch are online anyway and most online services include their own closed captioning services.
- Restyle Image / Image Creator: These features live in the Windows Photo app and allow you to have the AI either modify an existing image to match a different style or draw a new one based on a prompt. This is probably not a compelling business (or consumer need) because many online services, including Microsoft’s own Bing Image Creator, offer some of this functionality in the cloud.
- Super Resolution: Upscales images in Microsoft Photos. This could be useful for home users, but how many businesses need to do this and don’t have professional imaging software like Photoshop to use instead?
- Automatic Super Resolution: Enhances the frame rates and resolution in some games on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs. Businesses don’t care about gaming and serious gamers buy computers with discrete GPUs and x86 processors.
- Semantic indexing for Windows Search: Allows you to use natural language to look through your local files. Microsoft gives the example of searching for “pasta” and getting images with pictures of spaghetti and lasagna in them. Many cloud storage services, including Google Photos, do similar kinds of image searching when your images are stored with them.
While some of these features might be useful to consumers, they don’t make a particularly compelling case to businesses. If a business needs serious image editing, it’s probably going to employ a designer who uses professional tools such as Adobe Photoshop, which has its own set of AI features.
“The features for enterprise right now are limited. They’re not necessarily buying them to have those capabilities right now,” Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst for TECHnalysis Research, told El Reg. “By investing in Copilot+ PCs now, they are making an investment in systems with capabilities.”
Jessop agreed, saying that “the needle isn’t moved by the exclusive features as they [enterprise customers] can get them from cloud-based services. On-device processing does offer benefits to privacy, but a feature like Recall is still viewed with much skepticism regardless.”
O’Donnell explained that, when businesses buy Copilot+ PCs, they are banking on the 40+ TOPS NPUs in those systems becoming useful as new business applications come out. They are looking years ahead to a time when local AI processing is more important.
TECHnalysis is currently conducting a survey of enterprise customers to find out how important having an NPU is to them, and these results differ from what Canalys found. According to early results O’Donnell shared with us, 88 percent of respondents believe it is at least somewhat important to have an NPU right now and that number grows to 93 percent when asked about having an NPU two years from now.
For their part, Dell and Intel recently rolled out similarly bullish survey results showing that businesses favor Copilot+ PCs. In their “Windows 11 & AI PC Readiness Report” [PDF], the companies state that 62 percent of a thousand UK IT decision makers polled would be more likely to choose a Copilot+ PC than a “regular AI PC” (presumably a PC with an NPU below 40 TOPS). 64 percent of respondents said that having new PCs that are powerful enough to run AI applications is either extremely critical or critical for business.
But, despite companies saying that on-device AI is important to them, getting good performance and battery life are much more important in the real world.
“It’s important to understand that when Copilot+ PCs first started coming out, the playbook focused on AI, performance, battery life,” Jessop said. “But after tepid or confused reception to what exactly the value in on-device AI is, the playbook seems to have moved to focusing on performance and battery life first, AI (and talks of future-proofing) second.”®