The AI Compute Continuum: from intelligent endpoints to advanced AI workloads

SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 22 April 2026 - Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) today outlined how enterprise AI adoption across Asia Pacific (APAC) is moving from experimentation to implementation, with 48% of organisations with more than 500 employees in the region already deploying AI PCs and 95% expecting workstations to play a critical or important role in AI initiatives over the next two years. Together, these trends point to a more distributed AI environment – one that brings intelligence closer to users while supporting increasingly complex and compute-intensive workloads. Two IDC InfoBriefs, commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel reinforce this shift – Future-Ready Workforce: The Strategic Case for AI PC Adoption and Powering Future-Ready Computing with Workstations: Built for AI. Built for You. The research highlights growing enterprise momentum behind both intelligent endpoints and higher-performance systems as organisations shape the next phase of AI adoption. For Dell, this shift reflects a broader industry trend toward aligning the right compute resources with specific workload requirements, as organisations balance intelligent endpoints for everyday productivity with high-performance systems designed for advanced AI and professional use cases. Enterprise AI deployments are increasingly spanning client devices, edge environments and the data centre, reflecting a more distributed approach across the IT environment. AI PCs: Bringing intelligence closer to everyday work AI PCs are becoming a core component of the modern workplace, enabling AI workloads to run directly on the device to deliver faster, more responsive user experiences while reducing reliance on continuous cloud connectivity. This approach also supports enhanced data privacy and security, provides IT teams with greater control over deployment and management across device fleets, and enables more consistent scaling of AI capabilities across the workforce. The IDC research commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel underscores this momentum. As AI becomes embedded in day-to-day work, device strategy is shifting accordingly. 89% of APAC organisations now consider AI capabilities a very important factor in future PC purchasing decisions. In Singapore, 54% of organisations have already deployed AI PCs – 12% higher than the regional average – highlighting strong early adoption momentum. Southeast Asia's AI PC adoption is outpacing the regional average by 6%, driven by the ability to adopt new technologies without legacy constraints, strong infrastructure in markets like Singapore, favourable market conditions and supportive government initiatives. APAC Organisations with over 50% AI PCs in their fleet report saving 2.17 hours per employee per day, a 30% productivity increase compared to using AI on traditional PCs. AI PCs are enabling a new class of enterprise use cases – from real-time collaboration and report generation to natural language search and content creation – delivering tangible productivity gains. In practical terms, this can translate into faster proposal turnaround for sales teams, quicker analysis cycles for finance and operations, streamlined drafting for HR, faster document review for engineering teams, and more responsive support for customer-facing employees. As organisations prepare for more autonomous and agentic AI in hybrid work environments, AI PCs are increasingly becoming the governed way to scale intelligent experiences across the workforce – safely, consistently, and with clearer business impact. Four out of five APAC organisations expect AI PCs to drive adoption of agentic AI, with the same proportion agreeing they enhance control and security for these applications. The broader momentum is clear: within APAC, 84% of organisations expect AI PCs to increase employee productivity, while 78% cite security benefits and 77% highlight cost advantages of running AI locally. This shift is leading to a tangible investment. Across APAC, 65% of organisations are willing to pay a premium of 10% or more for AI PCs, reflecting their role as core infrastructure for enterprise AI. Workstations: Powering advanced AI and specialised workloads While AI PCs distribute intelligence across the workforce, workstations continue to serve as the performance backbone for more demanding workloads – particularly as organisations shift more AI development on-premise. Developers, engineers, designers, and data teams rely on workstation-class systems for AI model development, simulation, rendering, data preparation, and other compute-intensive activities that require reliability, low latency, and sustained performance. The IDC research on workstations reflects this reality. 95% of organisations across APAC expect workstations to play a critical or important role in AI initiatives over the next...