HP Inc will sack between 4,000 and 6,000 workers under a plan that calls for the PCs-and-printers prodigy to use AI to improve its operations.

President and CEO Enrique Lores announced the plan on Tuesday alongside the company’s Q4 results, during which he said HP Inc’s “future-ready” cost savings plan, which commenced in 2022 and recently concluded, beat its savings target of $1.4 billion. But HP Inc still has fat to trim, so has launched what Lores described as “a company-wide program led by an executive reporting directly to me.”

“We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support, and many of our operational processes,” he said. The company’s results announcement [PDF] states the aims of the new cost-cutting program are “to drive customer satisfaction, product innovation, and productivity through artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.”

Or in other words, replacing about ten percent of the company’s people with AI, to save $1 billion.

Lores hinted at how HP might find those savings by pointing to its own adoption of AI PCs running “curated applications” that he said see internal teams “deliver better results with their productivity up 16 percent.”

Strong sales of all PCs saw HP’s personal systems revenue reach $10.8 billion in Q4, eight percent year-over-year growth. Printing revenue dipped four percent to $4.3 billion. Full-year revenue across the company hit $55.3 billion, up 4.2 percent year-over-year, but net earnings and earnings per share dipped.

HP is worried that rising memory prices will make its next financial year challenging.

“Memory costs are currently 15 to 18 percent of the cost of a typical PC,” Lores said. “While an increase was expected, its rate has accelerated in the last few weeks.”

HP thinks it can withstand increased memory costs in the first half of its financial year, but warned margins for personal system will likely be impacted in H2.

The company will try to address that with measures including “qualifying lower-cost suppliers and redesigning the portfolio for reduced memory configurations.”

Price rises are also on the agenda, but HP thinks it has an edge because its long-term relationships with suppliers mean it is confident it will have enough memory to meet demand. ®