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Virtually every aspect of technology has been affected, and potentially improved, by artificial intelligence (AI). PCs are no exception. While the meaning of “AI PC” is still evolving, it generally refers to a computer specifically designed to excel at AI-powered tasks. These beefed-up computers typically feature: 

• High-end CPUs and GPUs to handle the demanding computational requirements of AI applications such as AI assistants that automate tasks, schedule meetings, answer emails, and provide personalized recommendations and data analysis and visualization.
• Dedicated AI accelerators like Neural Processing Units (NPUs). These specialized chips are optimized for AI tasks such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. 
• Pre-installed AI-powered software such as AI assistants (like Microsoft Copilot), creative tools, and AI-enhanced productivity applications. 

Will AI PCs play a big role in 2025 and beyond?

As AI becomes more integrated into daily use, the demand for powerful computers capable of handling AI workloads will grow and provide new levels of productivity by automating tasks, generating creative content, and providing intelligent assistance.  AI PCs are also designed to improve the user experience with AI-powered features like voice assistants, intelligent search, and personalized recommendations to enhance the overall user experience.

Key players in the AI PC market

• Intel is building CPUs with built-in AI acceleration capabilities.  
• AMD is heavily investing in AI-powered processors with its Ryzen AI processors designed for AI-driven experiences. 
• Nvidia, arguably the leader in GPU technology,  continues to drive AI performance with its powerful processors. 
• And Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, which allow for on-device AI processing. are increasingly integrated into Windows PCs.

Related AI PC coverage Just what the heck does an ‘AI PC’ do?

November 25, 2024: AI-optimized PCs have been announced by virtually every system maker and chip producer, but the functions AI PCs offer will vary depending on the hardware. And users face a learning curve trying to figure out the new features.

2025: The year of the AI PC

October 24, 2024: Forrester has tagged 2025 “the Year of the AI PC” — and if the number of recent product announcements is any indication, that’s likely to be the case. Gartner Research projects PC shipments will grow by 1.6% in 2024 and by 7.7% in 2025. The biggest growth driver will be due, not the arrival of not AI PCs, but to the need by many companies and users to refresh their computers and move toward Windows 11.

How soon will AI PCs replace traditional PCs in the enterprise?

Sept. 25, 2024: There’s much anticipation among enterprises and consumers alike for AI PCs, However, as with any new technology, it’s unclear when AI PCs will finally have their moment. Gartner forecasts that 43 million AI PCs will be shipped in 2024. IDC predicts even more — 57 million units — will be shipped in 2024. And by 2028, AI PCs will represent 92% of all PC shipments worldwide.

What does Qualcomm’s interest in buying Intel’s chip design business mean for the future of PCs?

Sept. 11, 2024: Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Apple have been in a fierce battle for domination of the chip market for AI PCs, which are touted as the future of computing. Further ramping up competition in this fiery landscape, Qualcomm has reportedly explored buying portions of Intel’s design business, most notably client PC design, as Intel looks to spin off units ahead of an upcoming board meeting, anonymous sources told Reuters.

Copilot+ AI PCs are finally here. You don’t want one — yet

July 9, 2024: The AI hype keeps on coming. The latest news is the arrival of an entirely new line of Windows computers, Copilot+ PCs, which are specifically designed with AI in mind. Microsoft claims they’ll dramatically speed up AI, offer new features unavailable to other PCs, and deliver improved battery life. The new machines point the way to the future of Windows and of AI.

Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI PCs: Still a privacy disaster waiting to happen

June 12, 2024: Many security pros say Microsoft is opening a Pandora’s Box with its AI-powered Copilot+ Windows PCs. Microsoft argues those new PCs, available as of June 18, will make it easy for users to find files and remember things you’ve done on your computer using the new Recall feature, which takes screenshots, stores them in a database, and uses AI to help you find and use whatever you want. Despite warnings by security pros, Microsoft claims rock-solid security is baked directly into the new feature.

Review: The M4 iPad Pro — an amazing AI PC

May 17, 2024: The M4 iPad Pro is designed to provide the best possible performance thanks to the M4 chip inside. Apple suggests it needed to use this processor because it wanted to make the iPad Pro thin and to drive the amazing display. The move to M4 also means you get a huge leap in processor performance (1.5x faster than the last model) and graphics (4x faster rendering). Deploying this chip means the iPad Pro with M4 could become the world’s ultimate AI-driven tablet.

Enterprises want AI PCs, just not yet

April 23, 2024: While the employee benefits of using an AI PC are intriguing, they may not be enough to convince IT buyers to go all in just yet. Despite the enthusiasm generated  by advanced AI-driven functionalities, enterprises are expected to adopt a more measured approach over the next year, according to Forrester.

Microsoft is holding back the ‘AI PC’ revolution

March 13, 2024: The PC industry has a big problem. And it’s not hardware makers’ fault — it’s Microsoft’s responsibility. The hardware is here: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and PC makers have delivered on their end. Now, everyone is waiting for Microsoft to catch up and make Windows truly shine on these AI PCs. Can the company deliver something compelling in time?

Dell ramps up ‘AI PC’ plans with Latitude and Precision refresh

Feb. 27, 2024: Dell unveiled a range of new laptops and PCs featuring neural processing units (NPUs) designed to run AI workloads on-device for improved video call quality and better laptop battery life.  Dell is one of several hardware vendors looking to benefit from growing interest in AI PCs.

Before you buy a Windows 11 AI PC, read this

Jan. 17, 2024: AI PCs were everywhere at CES 2024, and companies like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm are all touting how great their hardware is at running AI tasks.  But since these “AI PCs are already on shelves and you can buy them before CES 2024, we need to cut through the hype and focus on what you’re getting for your money. They might one day deliver a lot of cool features — just not yet.”

The reintroduction of neutrality rules for network providers is looking increasingly unlikely, at least for the next five years, after a US appeals court blocked efforts by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reinstate them.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit court upheld its earlier stay on the FCC’s May 2024 Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order, effectively pausing the policy’s return.

The net neutrality rules require that providers of telecommunications services treat all traffic equally, but give providers of information services more freedom to filter or prioritize what they transmit. The FCC’s view on whether internet service providers (ISPs) provide telecommunications or information services has flip-flopped over the years.

Originally, the FCC classified ISPs as information services, exempt from the most stringent rules, but under the Obama administration it shifted position to treat them as telecommunications services. During President Trump’s first term of office his appointee as FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, reversed that shift — only for President Biden’s appointee, Jessica Rosenworcel, to attempt to bring ISPs once again under the net neutrality provisions.

That move foundered on January 2 with the appeals court’s ruling.

“We hold that Broadband Internet Service Providers offer only an ‘information service’ […], and therefore, the FCC lacks the statutory authority to impose its desired net-neutrality policies through the ‘telecommunications service’ provision of the Communications Act,” the court order read. “Nor does the Act permit the FCC to classify mobile broadband — a subset of broadband Internet services — as a ‘commercial mobile service’ […] and then similarly impose net-neutrality restrictions on those services,” the order stated. “We therefore grant the petitions for review and set aside the FCC’s Safeguarding Order.”

The appeals court based its argument, in part, on the ending of the so-called Chevron deference principle. This principle, which once required courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous laws, was ended by a US Supreme Court ruling in June 2024, and has widespread regulatory consequences for IT departments.

With Rosenworcel’s term of office drawing to a close, it seems unlikely that the FCC will continue to pursue the reinstatement of net neutrality rules for ISPs. Trump’s pick as her replacement, Brendan Carr, favors market-led innovation over federal oversight.

Implications for enterprises

With net neutrality off the table for now, enterprises face an unregulated internet landscape that could favor large ISPs. ISPs can legally prioritize or throttle specific traffic, forcing businesses to pay premiums for reliable, high-speed access to cloud services, SaaS applications, or online collaboration tools. Without rules preventing practices like throttling or prioritizing traffic, companies reliant on stable, fast internet connections may face increased operational costs.

The absence of net neutrality is particularly concerning for smaller businesses. These businesses may struggle to compete if ISPs offer premium services to larger firms at higher prices. The lack of affordable, equitable access also risks disrupting digital transformation plans across industries.

For enterprises, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling is a clarion call to adapt to an increasingly market-driven internet landscape. It underscores the growing importance of proactively securing reliable and cost-effective internet services, as policy uncertainty looms over digital commerce and operations.

A longer timeline for reinstatement

The court’s ruling suggests net neutrality rules return will remain stalled for at least the duration of the Trump administration. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, his administration is expected to maintain the deregulatory trajectory set under the Biden administration. Trump has aligned with Carr’s market-driven vision, opposing federal oversight of ISP practices.

Analysts predict that with Trump’s re-election priorities, policies like the suspended FCC ruling will take a backseat to broader economic goals. The absence of net neutrality for another five years is all but assured.

Broader implications: a geopolitical lens

The absence of net neutrality also carries global implications. The US decision sets a precedent for other nations grappling with the balance between regulatory oversight and market freedom. In regions where state-controlled internet infrastructure dominates, the delay in net neutrality restoration in the US may limit policy inspiration for protecting smaller stakeholders in the internet economy.

This context places additional pressure on US enterprises that compete globally. Their ability to innovate, streamline operations, and scale may be hampered without equitable internet access.

When it comes to artificial intelligence development, Apple seems more interested than usual in seeking out good acquisition targets, potentially building on the small acquisitions it makes most months. The company has, in fact, led the industry when it comes to strategic AI acquisitions since 2023.

Why? Because it must.

And the reason is pretty straightforward: the company is putting huge resources into Apple Intelligence development, but it can’t get the staff it needs for the big push.

It takes a village

A quick glance at Apple’s recruitment website today revealed that it currently has 399 open roles in its machine learning and AI teams. That’s almost enough people to form a small village.

Apple’s search for villages of AI professionals isn’t unique; everybody’s doing it. OpenAI lists 149 jobs. Google has 277 machine learning jobs. One year ago, AI accounted for 27% of all open UK tech roles. Given that the hype and expectations in the sector have only grown since then, it’s hard to believe there’s been any decline in demand.

What’s driving this is that as the number of potential AI implementations grows, so does the demand for workers to build them. Large, small, and medium-sized players across enterprise tech share the need. 

They aren’t just being greedy. They understand the huge strategic imperative behind the AI evolution.

Nations, technology companies, a growing number of enterprises, government organizations, and start-ups are all competing to recruit the best staff. They know that, “we are at a tipping point in business and society where AI will revolutionize how we work, live and interact at scale,” Mohamed Kande, global chair for PricewaterhouseCoopers International, explained last year.

More jobs, few people

Yet they recognize that as ever more processes get digitized, the demand for people with experience will become a hindrance to AI industry development because that demand is not being met.

As McKinsey explained last year: “Our survey of 3.5 million job postings in these tech trends found that many of the skills in greatest demand have less than half as many qualified practitioners per posting as the global average.”

And yet the World Economic Forum predicts AI will create 97 million new jobs by the end of the year.

Like everything else, the global race for brains to build AI is, of course, made a whole lot harder by trade embargoes, and ever-increasing international tensions. The ever-evolving regulatory landscape forms another barrier to industry growth. The same skills shortfall exists across other critical tech areas, too: edge, cloud, quantum computing, data process management, analytics, CSR. As these sectors grow exponentially, the skills gap continues to widen. 

So, if you can’t recruit the talent, what do you do? 

If you can’t hire it, buy it

Globally, there were 245 AI-related industry acquisitions in Q1 2024 alone, said McKinsey. Apple, then, is right in the thick of it all with the acquisition of numerous AI startups in 2023 and its famous purchase of Darwin AI and at least three other AI-related firms last year (including Drishti, Mayday Labs, and Datakalab).

The company tends to be tight-lipped when making acquisitions, so it might well have secured even more companies we just don’t know about. We only know of the IP purchase from Mayday Labs as a result of an EU filing.

The thing is, this is all about scale. That means that even if Apple does recruit that village of AI experts, the acceleration in demand for AI is going to continue, and it will probably need to recruit a second village full a few weeks later. Again, it won’t be alone. That need for skill is an imperative forcing tech firms (most likely including OpenAI, and certainly including Apple) to focus their efforts on specific goals when building new generative AI (genAI) services. While effective management within scarcity has always been par for the course — Apple is really good at this — those companies who best approach development within those constraints will be best placed to make it all the way to that looming AI mountain and climb to the top. 

All the same, to outsiders focused on AI-related hype, the reality is that the challenges facing industry evolution mean innovation will soon begin to seem incremental, rather than revolutionary, as the “move fast, break things,” approach is replaced by a more business-like, objective, and slow strategic resource allocation-driven approach. Those who break through the noise to deliver the highest value tools and services will be those that win this AI space race.

As long as they can get the staff.

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Continuing education has always been important for IT professionals, but the need to keep your skill set up to date is now more important than ever. 

While it’s easy to look to enterprise vendors — or independent operations such  CompTIA — as sources for training and certification, the options for IT pros tasked with managing Macs, iPhones, and other Apple devices aren’t as well-known. But there are plethora of resources out there, if you know where to look.

Apple’s own resources

Obviously, the first place to look for training is directly from Apple, which maintains multiple resources for IT professionals — including a couple of certifications. Here’s a rundown of those you should know about.

WWDC

Let’s start with the one everyone knows about, which is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held every June. The event has become an Apple keynote event in its own right, and while most of the content is intended for Apple developers, it always includes at least a few sessions for IT pros; the exact number  varies each year, but the “What’s New in Managing Apple Devices” is a perennial option. Some years there are several others, such as when Apple unveiled declarative device management or sign in with Apple at work, or when the company opened up about how to use Managed Apple accounts in your organization. 

The topics vary, but they’re almost always a must-have option to explore every year. 

• Apple Developer Resources. Apple makes loads of additional information available to its developer community. Again, much of it isn’t strictly IT-focused, but there are a surprising number of useful references — if you’re willing to do some digging. These include:
• Device Management — This is the resource on how to manage Apple devices. There are overviews and detailed descriptions of mobile device management (MDM) payloads and everything in between.
• What’s new in Apple platform deployment — As the name suggests, this is also a must-know resource, because it covers the basic information about how to deploy Apple devices at scale across all of the company’s device lineup.
• ManagedAppDistribution — This is used for managing apps once you’ve enrolled and begun to deploy apps across your fleet.
• AppleSeed for IT — This is where you set up and manage the testing of Apple’s beta programs within your organization. I’ve more than once noted how partnering with adventurous employees can help you more effectively test and plan for upcoming releases; this is the place to get started.
• Apple Business Essential user guide — For small or medium-size businesses (SMBs), Apple offers an in-house device management solution called Apple Business Essentials. For IT pros new to Apple devices, this is a great starting place, regardless of the size of your organization and it serves as a stepping stone to Apple Business Manager, which all larger organizations and MDM solutions will require. 
• Apple Training — Apple doesn’t offer the breadth of IT training and certification it once did (and that other enterprise players continue to offer). Regardless, the company does offer significant training resources. These break down into developer training (as a class with no certification and intended for budding developers, enterprise or not) and IT training.  For IT training there are four categories, only two of which offer certifications. The first two — device support and deployment training — are the ones for which Apple provides study materials and related exercises as well as a certification exam that can be proctored online. The other two — Mac Security Compliance and Apple Business Essentials — are incredibly useful courses (the latter is especially important for SMBs) but don’t come with a certification exam or credential attached. 
• Apple developer documentation and support — Again, Apple’s developer documentation is well worth studying, but its developer support forums (and support forums) focused on the enterprise community are also important resources.

MDM and cloud vendor resources

Although Apple provides incredible device and user management capabilities across its platforms, implementing them largely requires working with one or more MDM vendors — including JAMF, Kandji, Microsoft, VMWare, Fleet, JumpCloud and SimpleMDM, to name a few. 

There are two aspects to consider: the vendor that will actually be providing the management tools and the cloud-based identity management with which they’ll need to federate (generally from Microsoft or Google, but potentially also from companies like PingIdentity and OAuth). 

Into this mix, add the range of managed service providers, consultants, and trainers that are often part of the selection, deployment and management of enterprise systems — including those focused on Apple IT. 

Although the exact resources and guidance will often be dictated but your vendor relationships and infrastructure, many websites – vendors, MSPs, and others – offer an amazing wealth of information that is freely available. 

Vendor certifications

Just as Apple offers its own certifications, so do most MDM vendors that work with the company. Some of these are very in-depth and product-specific; others are broader and focused on integrating various enterprise and cloud solutions to achieve a secure, managed environment. 

• CompTIA – CompTIA is an industry trade group that offers many vendor-agnostic enterprise certifications. That list doesn’t include a certification specific to Apple, but it does include several that any Apple IT pro should consider – Mobility+ being the most Apple/MDM-focused. 
• The Mac Admins Foundation — One of the most wide-ranging resources for Apple IT pros is the Mac Admins Foundatation, a nonprofit focused on providing resources to the Apple IT community. Its offerings break down largely into a handful of key resources. The first is the MacAdmins slack channel which is probably the biggest community for learning and sharing Apple IT knowledge on the planet. Alongside this is the Mac Admins Open Source Project on GitHub and the Mac Admins Podcast. 
• The Mac Admins and Mac SysAdmin conferences — There are two major annual conferences that combined provide the biggest resource available to Apple IT pros whether they can attend or not. These are the Mac Admins Conference, held every summer in Pennsylvania, and the Mac SysAdmin conference, which takes place each fall in Sweden. Both conferences (and the vendors and presenters involved with them) put virtually all of the content online for free access, either as videos or slide decks or additional documentation from specific sessions. Don’t underestimate how useful these events and their content are as resources. 

Vendor user conferences 

I’ve already highlighted the resources vendors can offer in terms of documentation and certification, but many also have their own user and/or developer conferences. The best-known is probably JAMF’s annual JNUC conference (typically in mid-to-late fall), but Microsoft and VMWare events (those focused on mobile and others) are also worth researching.

In general, vendors make conference content freely available and there’s value exploring it, even if it comes from a company whose products you’re not planning to use. 

Online blogs, newsletters and podcasts

It often seems like many IT pros charged with managing Apple hardware sort of stumble onto the extensive range of online blogs, columns, newsletters, and podcasts that are out there; some come from vendors, but many admins and authors provide great insights into how best to use all of these technologies on a daily basis.  It’s impossible for me to cover all of these additional sources, but the following is a list of those I subscribe to and find the most useful. 

• 9 to 5 Mac’s Apple @ Work column and podcasts
• Alan Siu’s Blog
• Dan K. Nelson’s Blog
• Der Flounder
• HCS Technology Group – Technical Articles
• Kandji Blog
• macadmin.fraserhess.com
• MacAdmins.news
• Michael Tsai’s Blog
• motionbug
• Radical Admin Blog
• Scripting OS X
• Secret Chest
• Systems Management Squad
• The Big MacAdmin Blog
• The Eclectic Light Company
• The Mac Security Blog
• TidBITS

In recent months, companies have been forcing workers back into the office with increasing frequency. Annoyingly, many of these are big tech businesses that can most easily enable their workers to work remotely.

This trend, likely to continue in 2025, costs workers real money. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell succinctly pointed out: “Return-to-office mandates are, effectively, an invisible pay cut.“

Sure, it doesn’t show up as a line on your pay stub, but you save real money when you work from home. You no longer have an hour-long commute to work and all the costs that come with it. You can also choose to live (and work) somewhere far less expensive — anywhere with a decent Internet connection. 

All this adds up to serious cash savings. 

How much? Well, the numbers vary from person to person and job to job, but American workers value working from home — even two or three days a week — at an estimated 8% of their pay.

According to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and remote-work researcher, more educated workers and those with kids at home value working from home even more. They equate the option is worth up to 15% of their salary. 

Actually, the parents are underestimating how much childcare costs. According to the most recent survey from Care, a child care site, respondents spent 24% of their household income on childcare. Even cutting a few hours from that is a big savings. 

It’s not just workers who see savings. That commute savings? A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study in 2023 found that cutting down on commute time remotely saves employees, on average, 72 minutes each day. In turn, employees return 40% of that time to their employer.

Let’s get to the bottom line. One Stanford study showed that remote employees were 22% more productive than their stay-in-the-office colleagues. And Global Workplace Analytics estimates that “organizations save an average of $11,000 per year per part-time telecommute, or 21% higher profitability.”

Why? There are lots of reasons. Remote workers are happier workers, for instance. One study found that 65% of remote workers were “extremely satisfied” with their jobs, compared to 34% of office-based employees.

Other studies show similar results. A YouGov survey found that 36% of US employees would prefer to work entirely remotely, given the choice — more than any other work model. And a recent Gallup survey found that “six in 10 employees with remote-capable jobs want a hybrid work arrangement. About one-third prefer fully remote work, and less than 10% prefer to work on-site.” 

To state the obvious: Happy employees are productive employees. 

Another win for business is that remote work can help retain talent and reduce recruitment and training costs. Let’s also not forget that if someone is working in Asheville, NC, their cost of living is 73% lower than if they worked in San Francisco. And that, my friends, is why no one has yet to talk me into moving to the Bay area for a job. I and other remote workers are a lot cheaper to hire when you let us work from home. 

So, why are businesses insisting people return to the office anyway? CEOs say it’s about increasing productivity, generating better ideas from collaboration, and improving the corporate culture. If you can believe it, some top brass claim that it’s for your own good. As IBM’s CEO, Arvind Krishna, put it, “In the short term, you probably can be equally productive [working remotely], but your career does suffer.”

Yeah, right. For the record, I’ve been working remotely for the entire 21st century, and I’ve done very well for myself in a notoriously difficult field: Journalism.

So, what’s the real reason? Well, if you look closely enough, you will see that, in many cases, it’s not about getting better work from their employees. 

Some of it is that managers want to watch employees. You’ll see this from the lowest supervisor to Elon Musk, who infamously calls working from home “bullshit.” No matter the job title, it’s all about petty power games. 

It’s also about making more money, but not for the given reasons.  For example, suppose a company is tied to shareholders with large corporate real estate portfolios or is entangled with iron-clad long-term leases. In that case, it wants some return from its otherwise useless corporate offices. Office space is no small matter. There’s a billion-plus square feet of vacant office space out there at the moment losing money. 

Another, and I suspect the biggest reason, is that many companies want to get rid of employees. Of course, if they lay them off, then they must deal with bad PR and unemployment. It’s much more cost-effective and looks better if they can get remote employees just to quit rather than return to their cubicles. 

In the long run, this will bite these companies in the rump. The future of white-collar work is remote. For now, though, I fear we will see this trend of forcing people either back into the office or out the door to continue. 

Me? Sorry, you’ll never get me back into an office. 

OpenAI has failed to release the tool to opt-out or customize data collection the company promised to make available by 2025, according to Techcrunch.

OpenAI is one of several generative AI (genAI) companies that have faced criticism for training their AI models on copyrighted material without permission from the owners. The companies have instead argued that the AI ​​training should be classified as fair use (known as the concept of “fair use” in US law).

In May 2024, Open AI said a “Media Manager” tool would be able to identify copyrighted text, images, audio and video to reflect creators’ preferences across multiple sources. According to Techcrunch, however, the tool has never been further prioritized internally at the company.

OpenAI has so far not commented on the delay of Media Manager, or given any update on when the tool might be released.

Combined with its existing solutions, Apple’s strategic approach to artificial intelligence (AI) deployment could make a radical difference to public health. Here is how it could achieve that.

Apple has already told us that achieving better health through better choices is fundamental to its approach. “Our goal is to empower people to take charge of their own health journey,” said Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, in 2023. 

While knowledge is power, anyone who’s ever sent themselves into a tidal wave of panic when searching for information on their own symptoms online should know that applying it effectively isn’t always easy. Everyone is different, with varying polarities around health. What works for some might work more effectively if optimized and personalized for others, reflecting unique characteristics such as age, weight, or gender.

Help is coming. We’ve known for a while that Apple hopes to be part of that solution, which is why it is developing AI to optimize the choices people take.

What difference does it make?

Multiple studies show how making better choices can help keep you healthy. It has already been shown that the iPhone and Apple Watch can help identify early onset of dementia, Parkinsons, respiratory diseases, and sleep apnea. More recently, the Apple-introduced Vitals app seems to be providing people with early warnings that they’re about to get sick; the company has also created tools to empower Apple’s customers with better insights into their own mental health. Apple’s vision for health straddles all its devices, including AirPods Pro, which now act as bona fide hearing aids and hearing test systems. 

What problems might these technologies alleviate? 

The World Health Organization predicts diabetes will impact 1.3 billion people by 2050, up from 830 million in 2022. Cardiovascular disease kills 17.9 million people each year. The third biggest killer, chronic respiratory disease, affects around seven in every 100 people on earth. The estimated cost of chronic disease is expected to reach $47 trillion globally by 2030. What all three conditions have in common is that they can in part be mitigated by early intervention lifestyle changes and better self-care decisions. 

Better health, one step at a time

Sure, it’s not a panacea — people near you will still suffer from health problems. But positive lifestyle changes can mitigate, prevent, and manage these conditions, at least some of the time. But, ultimately, it’s not just the lives saved when using Emergency SOS via Satellite from a remote location that matter, it’s also the many that may never encounter problems as a direct result of taking 10,000 steps a day and closing all the Activity rings on their Apple Watch.

The Health app is a major component of all of this. Think of it as a digital hub. Not only does it gather information from all your devices, but it also sucks in data from some third-party services and has the capacity to share and ingest information with health professionals. All those insights are private and personal to you, and Apple wants to keep it that way. 

All of its systems aim to gather as little data as possible about you. When it comes to health, the intention is to ensure your data doesn’t enter the surveillance economy, (though Apple’s privacy commitment could yet be torn apart by clumsy regulation).

But is it safe?

In taking this approach, Apple is grappling with the biggest challenge to wider deployment of AI. In response to the ever-corroding experience of intrusive surveillance advertising and the challenge of privacy protection in a digital age, people are reluctant to share health data. By crafting systems that don’t require direct access to your data, Apple has an opportunity to unlock the potential benefits of personal health AI without also creating another attack surface against digital privacy. 

The risk is that if the company is forced to open up its systems, it might also be forced to open up your personal health data to third-party firms with which you don’t have the same depth of trust. With that in mind, it’s understandable the company might not introduce these systems if regulators insist on exposing personal information to outside companies less committed to privacy.

To avoid this, Apple must convince governments that the benefits of digital privacy far outweigh the costs of removing it. It needs to be able to build a health OS that can support third-party developers while also protecting user data. The prize? The opportunity to build a powerful personalized preventative AI-augmented health care anyone can hook themselves into for the price of an Apple One subscription. The risk? An incredibly intrusive exfiltration of personal information. 

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Download the January 2025 issue of the Enterprise Spotlight from the editors of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World.

Apple launched its highly anticipated Vision Pro “spatial computing” headset last Feb. 2 amid significant hype — and hopes it could finally push virtual or mixed reality into mainstream use. 

But with a price tag of $3,499 and a staggered rollout to countries outside the US, the idea of widespread adoption was always optimistic; fewer than 500,000 of the devices have been sold to date, according to Bloomberg. (Others have provided similar estimates for first-year sales, though Apple itself declined to comment.)

“When you get right down to it, the numbers aren’t terrifically huge — I wouldn’t consider that something to jump up and down about,” said Ramon Llamas, research director for IDC’s Devices and Displays team. He described the Vision Pro as a first iteration that, like other first-gen Apple devices, will take some time to find a broader audience. 

“You’ve got to start somewhere, and Apple swung for the fences,” Llamas said. “They did a very good job in terms of UI and also in terms of display. So, do I consider it a flop? Absolutely not.” 

JLStock / Shutterstock

Despite shortcomings — the high price and a paucity of use cases, chief among them — it’s too early to write off the device or Apple’s broader strategy around augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), according to Llamas. “Apple is very quick to iterate and improve, such that a Gen. 2 or Gen. 3 Vision Pro is going to make the current device look quaint,” he said.

Vision Pro sales represent a small fraction of the number of iPhones sold each year (passing 200 million annually in recent years). The same goes for other devices in Apple’s line-up: iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches sell in the tens of millions a year. But those are well-established products, whereas the market for AR/VR devices is in its infancy: around 6.8 million devices were sold globally in 2023, according to the latest IDC data available, compared to more than 1 billion smartphones. (IDC expected about 9.7 million AR/VR devices to be sold in 2024.)

IDC expects continued growth for AR/VR devices during the next few years.

IDC

It could be more than a decade before widespread adoption occurs, said Tuong Nguyen, director analyst and part of Gartner’s Emerging Technology and Trends team. “So, a few hundred thousand [Vision Pro devices sold], I think that’s plenty good,” he said. “It’s a great start to a long journey.”

Vision Pro’s growing pains 

Reviews of the Vision Pro at launch pegged it as an impressive feat of engineering with significant drawbacks that preclude regular use. Those issues included a lack of content, short battery life, the neck-straining weight, and — perhaps the biggest drawback — the price. Most saw it more as a glimpse at the future of computing rather than a mainstream device. 

Nearly a year since launch, the Vision Pro remains a devise still in search of identity, with a key use case that has so far remained elusive. 

“There was a lot of hype when the Apple Vision Pro was first announced,” said Avi Greengart, president and founder of Techsponential. “And that hype hasn’t quite been matched with a killer app, or a set of killer apps, that have made people say: ‘Forget the cost or the comfort, I must have this device.’ But that’s how platforms evolve — VisiCalc didn’t show up on day one, or Excel. So, it will take time.”

Apple has cast a broad net in offering up potential uses for the headset.

Entertainment has been a prominent one, and the Vision Pro has been praised for its immersive — albeit solitary — entertainment experience. But Apple has struggled to cultivate an ecosystem of apps and content that can keep users returning to the headset. A Wall Street Journal report in October highlighted the difficulty in attracting developers to the platform, with native apps from big names such as YouTube and Netflix missing, though HBO Max and Disney+ are available. 

“Some of the most remarkable entertainment experiences are already available for the Apple Vision Pro, but they tend to be relatively short,” said Greengart. “We don’t yet see regular sports or music content that you can experience, like a subscription to your favorite NBA or NFL team where you get 50-yard line seats.” 

The slow uptake has put some consumer-facing companies off creating Vision Pro apps, said Jan Solecki, head of product strategy and growth at Nomtek, a software development agency that focuses on mobile and AR/VR apps. “They’re just waiting to see how the platform will perform: they’re not rushing to launch,” he said. Nomtek talked to a number of meditation app providers that considered the Vision Pro “and decided, ‘We don’t really have that user base there,’” he said.

Aside from video and virtual environments, one notable feature in the VisionOS 2.0 release is the ability to turn old photos into “spatial” 3D images; it’s a relatively simple addition, yet has proven popular with users.

Google Trends shows interest in the Vision Pro peaked around the time it launched, then flatlined after.

Google

Though gaming is often a primary use for virtual of mixed reality devices, but it’s not one Apple seems particularly interested in pursuing. Apple’s eye detection and hand gesture inputs are well suited to some tasks, but most games require a controller and the Vision Pro is hampered by a lack of hardware support. To perhaps remedy that, Apple is reportedly partnering with Sony to enable the use of its PlayStation VR hand controllers.

Personal productivity is another potential use, and one Apple has leaned into in its marketing materials. Work apps available on the Vision Pro include Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint alongside Apple’s own productivity tools. 

VisionOS updates in recent months have made it easier to use the headset in conjunction with a Macbook laptop, including the ability to connect a Bluetooth mouse and view a Macbook keyboard while in a virtual setting. There’s also wide-screen mode (and with the VisionOS 2.2 release an ultrawide screen option). “You can array windows all around your space, physical space, and create the equivalent of a six-monitor setup, and that’s pretty exciting,” said Greengart. 

Apple

The weight of the device — about 1.3 pounds — makes it harder for people to use it for long periods. But replacement head straps developed by third-party vendors do promise some relief, said Greengart. 

“One of the things that has made the biggest improvement is not a software update, but a hardware one,” he said, pointing to options from the likes of Annapro and medical device manufacturer ResMed. Still, neither of them “can completely negate the fact that this is still a rather heavy computer you’re strapping to your face,” he said. “That is one of the biggest constraints of the device today. It is not the most comfortable thing to wear over long periods of time.”

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ANNAPRO says its AVP Strap for Vision Pro can reduce facial pressure by about 60%-90%.

ANNAPRO

Of course, those complaints can leveled at all mixed-reality headsets, and Apple has been lauded for the Vision Pro’s interface. “There’s no question that the price and the weight are inhibitors, but the user experience you get on an Apple Vision Pro is as of yet unmatched by anything else on the market,” said Greengart.

Apple targets the enterprise

Apple also sees the Vision Pro as an enterprise tool, and has pitched as being useful for collaboration, employee training, and remote assistance for frontline workers. 

“I would say they focus more on enterprise than they usually do with other products they’ve launched in the past, at least early on,” said Nguyen.

With a less-than-expected consumer interest in the Vision Pro, Nomtek shifted its attention to developing apps for business customers. “Very early on, we noticed a switch in Apple’s strategy to move more towards the enterprise customer.… With that in mind, we’ve been also following this strategy and targeting enterprises,” said Solecki. 

The company has worked on a variety of business-focused projects, including developing a Vision Pro app that provides step-by-step guidance and training for maintenance technicians at a jet manufacturer firm. A building material manufacturer is also exploring the development of a Vision Pro app to aid machinery maintenance for hundreds of factories around the world, Solecki said.

The arrival of VisionOS 2.0 helped broaden the number of potential enterprise use cases, he said, with a set of enterprise APIs. 

One API opens access to the main camera feed, allowing developers to create an “anomaly detection” app for a production worker to detect faulty components, according to Apple. Another enables QR code scanning and detection; that could be  useful for a warehouse worker scanning bar codes to verify packages have the correct item without the need for a hand-held scanner. It’s also now possible for developers to exceed the default limits on the Vision Pro’s processors to handle more demanding scenarios, such as rendering a high-fidelity, mixed-reality display of a race car. (That kind of use, however, can reduce battery life and increase fan noise.)

Teams users can join meetings using their Persona via the Vision Pro.

Microsoft

The addition of device management capabilities earlier this year also made it easier for enterprises to deploy multiple Vision Pro headsets, said Solecki, with more parameters to manage and restrict usage. “We are looking to implement this for an airline as an in-flight entertainment solution — we can really narrow down what they can do and they cannot do, to only access the apps that we’ve approved,” he said.

More generally, the Vision Pro launch served to reignite business interest in mixed reality. 

“Regardless of the actual sales of Apple Vision Pro, it has been very good for the XR scene as a whole industry,” said Solecki. “One company that came to us and wanted to build something on Vision Pro said: ‘We tried HoloLens years ago, and we didn’t like it and we just dropped it, but now Apple has released [the Vision Pro] and we want to try it.’ …People got excited again by an XR headset.”

As with consumer adoption, business demand has been cautious. An IDC survey of US-based IT managers with responsibility for purchasing AR/VR devices showed that only around a third of respondents are keen on acquiring the Vision Pro for their organization.

“I think Apple has a lot to do on both a software and hardware front before the Vision Pro will become a ‘must have’ device, even at a pilot level, at the typical US business,” Lewis Ward, senior research analyst at IDC and the report author, told Computerworld last year. 

Some industry sectors, such as finance and healthcare, remain more bullish, however. “The interest is there [from businesses], but there are still many hurdles that need to be overcome to make it viable for an enterprise,” said Nguyen. “One [is] price; two, we’ll just call it content: what can I do with this to make it worth this investment?”

If Vision Pro is just the start, what’s next?

Almost as soon as the Vision Pro launched, rumors of follow-up devices began to spread, including talk of a lower-priced version that strips out some premium features, such as the front-facing EyeSight display. 

A cheaper version could help attract a wider audience of users (and developers), at least until a “killer app” arrives that convinces people to invest serious money in a headset. “I don’t know if they will release something cheaper, but I will say they need to in order to get any meaningful adoption beyond what they’ve gotten already,” said Nguyen. 

There’s also talk of Apple developing lightweight augmented reality glasses — the Holy Grail for Apple and others. But, similar to Meta’s Project Orion prototype, any  augmented reality glasses from Apple are likely years away from release. 

In the meantime, the existence of the Vision Pro and Apple’s presence in the market could spur wider innovation. It “reinvigorated the competition” said Greengart, pointing to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who publicly talked up his company’s devices as a more affordable rival to the Vision Pro. 

In addition, Google recently announced its Android XR operating system, which will be used in a new Samsung headset due to launch this year. The device and OS bear a resemblance to Apple’s own hardware and software, with mixed reality pass-through and a multi-screen interface. 

Android XR places greater emphasis on the use of artificial intelligence — a strategy Apple’s likely to pursue, too, with potential to integrate Apple Intelligence into the mixed reality headset. 

“The competitive environment is what fosters the innovation,” said Nguyen. “That’s an opportunity for you to improve your product, your solution, your offering, whatever it happens to be.

“One thing that all can agree on is that the Vision Pro has given the market a much-needed boost. The announcement and launch advanced us a few steps closer to creating the conditions necessary for meaningful adoption growth.”

It’s the calm before the storm.

Today, on New Year’s Day, we have a brief moment to pause and prepare — and set ourselves up for success.

From a tech perspective, that means taking the time to clean up and optimize your smartphone setup. That way, when the inevitable craziness hits, you’ll be ready to tackle whatever comes your way with smart, sensible systems and all the best apps already in place and ready to serve you.

We’ve already thought through the top Android tips and Google Android app tricks from 2024 — and even the most noteworthy Pixel-specific advice from the past year. Today, it’s time to shift our focus and look at some of the most exceptional (and often off-the-beaten-path) third-party Android apps that can really expand your experience and grant you some exceptionally effective new productivity powers.

Take a peek through the following standout suggestions — 44 awesome apps to explore, spread out over a dozen different articles! — and for even more Android Intelligence, make sure you’re set to receive my free Android Intelligence newsletter, too. You’ll get three new things to try in your inbox every Friday, and you’ll get my game-changing Android Notification Power Pack as a special welcome bonus.

Here we go!

2024’s top Android app advice Meet the floating Android note app of the future

This dazzlingly different Android note app floats your most important info in an incredibly interesting way.

The secret to summarizing notifications on Android

With about 60 seconds of simple setup, you can have Google’s Gemini AI genie sum up your incoming notifications this instant — no matter what Android device you’re using.

11 Android Quick Settings additions that’ll supercharge your efficiency

These out-of-sight tiles will turn your favorite phone into an even more powerful productivity powerhouse.

3 secrets to a smarter Android status bar

A trio of quick ‘n’ easy enhancements to transform the top of your screen into a time-saving power-hub.

22 must-have Android widgets for busy professionals

The most exceptional widgets around for making your favorite device’s home screen much more useful.

Android widgets gone wild

Why stop with the home screen? This wow-worthy widget wonder will make whatever Android device you’re using infinitely more efficient — in a way that only Android could provide.

An awesome Android audio upgrade

Whether you’re dealing with mumblings from meetings, noises from notifications, or music from commute-time streaming, you’ve never experienced sound on your phone like this.

The best Android app drawer enhancement you’ll ever make

Free your phone’s app drawer from its shackles and watch your efficiency soar.

An instant Android motion sickness upgrade

Ever wish you could look down at your phone or tablet in a car without getting queasy? Here’s your answer.

60 seconds to a smarter Android screen timeout

This quick ‘n’ simple enhancement will make your day-to-day Android doings meaningfully more pleasant.

This awesome Android weather app reads the forecast out loud

A thoughtful interface, on-demand audio forecasts, and actual human meteorologists set this app apart.

Bonus: 8 AI-powered apps that’ll actually save you time

Most AI apps are buzzword-chasing hype-mongers. These eight off-the-beaten-path supertools — while not entirely Android-specific — are rare exceptions.

A very happy New Year to you. Here’s to many new geeky, Googley adventures ahead!

Give yourself the gift of endless Android Intelligence in 2025 with my free weekly newsletter — three new things to try in your inbox every Friday and six powerful new notification enhancements the second you sign up!

Need ideas or motivation to help you build a spreadsheet in Google Sheets? You can browse through the templates that are included in this office app and select one to customize. But a more intriguing option is to use the tool in Sheets called Help Me Organize. Powered by Google’s generative AI technology, Gemini, you can use it to generate a template that’s more tailored for you.

Based on a brief description that you write (referred to as a “prompt”), Help Me Organize generates a table with headings, placeholder text, and possible formulas in its cells that you can then adjust to your needs. It’s mainly designed to create templates for project management. But you can tease it to make templates that include some formulas and tables that can be used to create charts.

This guide explains how to use Help Me Organize and provides tips for getting best results.

Who can use Gemini AI in Google Sheets

If you have a Google Workspace account, the Gemini AI tools that include Help Me Organize are available as an add-on — called Gemini for Google Workspace — for an extra subscription charge. If you have a regular Google personal account, you can pay for a Google One AI Premium subscription to have access to these tools. Or, for no cost, you can sign up for access to Workspace Labs with your Google account to be permitted to try out Help Me Organize.

How to access Help Me Organize in Google Sheets

You access the Help Me Organize tool from a right side panel that you open while in a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. The spreadsheet can have existing data on it. But for generating templates, it’s best to use Help Me Organize on a new, blank spreadsheet or on a new sheet in an existing spreadsheet. You can add a new sheet to a spreadsheet by clicking the + sign that’s toward the lower-left corner of the opened spreadsheet.

To launch the “Help me organize” panel, click Insert and select Help me organize at the very bottom of the menu that opens.

In the “Help me organize” panel that opens to the right of the page, a large text entry box invites you to write a prompt inside it. Some example prompts that are meant to show you how you can write your own cycle through this box.

When you open the “Help me organize” panel, its entry box shows example prompts.

Howard Wen / IDG

How to use Help Me Organize

Click inside the entry box on the “Help me organize” panel, type a description of the kind of template you want Gemini to generate, and click Create.

Type a prompt into the box on the “Help me organize” panel and click Create.

Howard Wen / IDG

Depending on the complexity of your prompt, it may take several seconds for the AI to generate a template — but it may not be able to generate anything. If it’s unable to, try entering your description again but use fewer words.

Gemini may “think” for a while as it generates a template.

Howard Wen / IDG

How to insert a template generated by Gemini

If Gemini produces a result, the template will appear over your spreadsheet. It’ll start from the upper-leftmost cell, with the template’s columns and rows spreading out from here.

Review the template Gemini generated, then insert it in your spreadsheet or start over.

Howard Wen / IDG

You can scroll through the template to see what you think of it. Keep in mind that you should always consider what Gemini generates as a rough draft that you’ll need to modify to make it more suitable for your use (such as replacing placeholder text and scrutinizing and modifying any formulas). It is a template, after all.

Scroll to the bottom of the template — you’ll find a small toolbar attached to it. If you like this template, click Insert. It’ll then be inserted into your spreadsheet.

If you don’t, click the X. The template will be removed from your spreadsheet. You can try writing another prompt in the “Help me organize” panel. Note that if you create a new template, you can’t go back to the previous version.

Optionally, you can rate if you like this template or not by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down icon. Your feedback is used to help train Gemini to produce results in the future that may be more preferable.

Once you’ve inserted a template in your spreadsheet, you can tweak it however you like: change heading names, add rows or columns, adjust formulas, enter real data, and so on. See “How to use Google Sheets for project management” for details on working with templates in Sheets.

How to write a prompt in Help Me Organize

Unsure about how to write a prompt? Need inspiration? Here are some general tips that can elicit useful templates from Gemini:

1. First, describe a specific project that you want to track.

Examples:

• budget breakdown
• business travel itinerary
• payroll schedule

2. Describe or specifically name headings that you’d like to see in the template.

• budget breakdown that includes in the following order: revenue, rent, utilities, internet, expenses
• business travel itinerary with sections for travel to airport, airline, flight number, hotel, and so on
• payroll schedule for employees named Mike, Pedro, Shawna, and Tasha

Including specifics in a prompt will help Gemini generate a better template.

Howard Wen / IDG

3. Use numbers and math formulas.

• a table depicting 12 months with 3 categories per month
• payroll schedule that’s monthly across one year
• a table that calculates compound interest at 3.5% over 3 years

Gemini can create a template that includes formulas.

Howard Wen / IDG

4. Describe dropdowns, lists, task lists, or to-dos.

• a dropdown with selections that include Greek, Japanese, Italian for a business luncheon
• a project tracker with task lists assigned to people
• a to-do list for onboarding a new employee

A generated to-do list with status dropdowns.

Howard Wen / IDG

For more on working with dropdowns, see “Google Sheets power tips: How to use dropdown lists.”

5. Describe a chart.

Gemini can’t generate charts directly, but you can prompt it to create a template (table) that you can then derive a chart from. Examples:

• a bar chart with 9 labels
• a line chart with 4 categories
• a pie chart depicting 3 categories

Describe a chart you’d like to create.

Howard Wen / IDG

Insert the generated template in your spreadsheet.

Next, select the template by clicking its top-leftmost cell.

Then, on the menu bar over your spreadsheet, click Insert > Chart. By default, a pie chart will be generated. The “Chart editor” panel will also open along the right of the page, so you can change the pie chart to another type or make other adjustments to it.

A pie chart based on a template that Gemini generated from a prompt.

Howard Wen / IDG

It’s worth noting that in this pie chart example, Gemini went beyond what was asked for, breaking each of the three categories into three sections with different colors. Thus, the resulting pie chart has nine sections instead of three. That’s unlikely to be what most people would be looking for from the original prompt — a good illustration of why you always need to check and adjust Gemini’s output, or simply discard it and start over.

6. Don’t be afraid to describe something complicated.

• a budget for at least 12 departments in my office for one year and assign supervision to employees
• a project manager for 8 salespersons who have to sell seashells to the 10 biggest cities in the US Midwest with an April deadline
• a weekly restaurant employee work schedule for 10 back-of-house kitchen employees and 6 front-of-house employees over 4 weeks

Gemini can often handle complicated prompts.

Howard Wen / IDG

Remember that the best way to use Help Me Organize (or any generative AI tool) is to experiment and play around with the wording of your prompts. You never know — Gemini may surprise you with a result that’s better or more useful than what you originally envisioned.

In summary

Keep these tips in mind to write prompts that will trigger Gemini to give you the best (or at least most interesting) results in Help Me Organize:

• Define exactly what you want to use the template for. How would you describe it in three words?
• Use headings or numbers (such as dates or math formulas). These can imply columns and rows in the template.
• If you want the template to have a dropdown or other list type, describe it.
• Use Gemini to generate a table that you can then derive a chart from.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment — even if your request sounds complicated.

As with all AI-generated content, the templates created with Help Me Organize should never be seen as final — but they can give you a big head start for all sorts of spreadsheet-related tasks, from setting up complex schedules to creating charts to performing time-oriented calculations.

This article was originally published in February 2024 and updated in December 2024.

In 2024, the surge in generative AI (genAI) pilot projects sparked concerns over high experimentation costs and uncertain benefits. That prompted companies to then shift their focus to delivering business outcomes, enhancing data quality, and developing talent.

In 2025, enterprises are expected to prioritize strategy, add business-IT partnerships to assist with genAI projects and move from large language model (LLM) pilots to production instances. And small language models will also likely come into their own, addressing specific tasks without overburdening data center processing and power.

Organizations will also adopt new technologies and architectures to better govern data and AI, with a return to predictive AI, according to Forrester Research.

Predictive AI uses historical data and techniques such as machine learning and statistics to forecast future events or behaviors, said Forrester analyst Jayesh Chaurasia. GenAI, on the other hand, creates new content — such as images, text, videos, or synthetic data — leveraging deep learning methods such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). Chaurasia predicts the AI pendulum will swing back to predictive AI for over 50% of use cases.

LLMs are, of course, central to genAI, helping enterprises tackle complex tasks and improve operations. Forrester reported that 55% of US genAI decision-makers with a strategy use LLMs embedded in applications, while 33% purchase domain-specific genAI apps. Meanwhile, SLMs are quickly gaining attention.

The rise of small and mid-sized language models should enable customers to better meet the trade-offs on accuracy, speed and costs, said Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice president analyst with Gartner Research, noting that “Most organizations are still struggling to realize business value from their genAI investment.”

Gartner

In the coming year, SLM integration could surge by as much as 60%, according to a Forrester report.

As nearly eight-in-10 IT decision makers report software costs rising over the past year, they’re looking to SLMs because they’re more cost-effective and offer better accuracy, relevance, and trustworthiness by training on specific domains. They’re also easier to integrate and excel in specialized industries such as finance, healthcare, and legal services.

By 2025, 750 million apps are expected to use LLMs, underscoring the genAI market’s rapid growth. Forrester predicts the market will grow in value from $1.59 billion in 2023 to $259.8 billion by 2030,. 

Even with that growth, many AI experts argue that LLMs may be excessive for automating workflows and repetitive tasks, both in terms of performance and environmental impact. A Cornell University study found that training OpenAI’s GPT-3 LLM consumed 500 metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of 1.1 million pounds.

As enterprises face challenges meeting expectations, gen AI investments in 2025 will likely shift toward proven predictive AI applications like maintenance, personalization, supply chain optimization, and demand forecasting. Forward-thinking organizations will also recognize the synergy between predictive and generative AI, using predictions to enhance generative outputs. That approach is expected to boost the share of combined use cases from 28% today to 35%, according to Forrester.

What are small language models?

In the simplest of terms, an SLM is a lightweight genAI model. The “small” in this context refers to the size of the model’s neural network, the number of parameters, and the volume of data on which it is trained, according to Rosemary Thomas, a senior technical researcher in the AI lab at Version 1, a management consulting and software development firm.

SLMs use fewer computational resources, enabling on-premises or private cloud deployment, which natively enhances privacy and security.

While some SLM implementations can require substantial compute and memory resources, several models can have more than 5 billion parameters and run on a single GPU, Thomas said.

Gartner Research defines SLMs differently, as language models with 10 billion parameters or less. Compared to LLMs, they are two to three orders of magnitude (around 100-1,000x) smaller, making them significantly more cost-efficient to use or customize.

SLMs include Google Gemini Nano, Microsoft’s Orca-2–7b and Orca-2–13b, Meta’s Llama-2–13b, and others, Thomas noted in a recent post, arguing that SLM growth is being driven by the need for more efficient models and the speed at which they can be trained and set up.

Gartner

“SLMs have gained popularity due to practical considerations such as computational resources, training time, and specific application requirements,” Thomas said. “Over the past couple of years, SLMs have become increasingly relevant, especially in scenarios where sustainability and efficiency are crucial.”

SLMs enable most organizations to achieve task specialization, improving the accuracy, robustness, and reliability of genAI solutions, according to Gartner. And because deployment costs, data privacy, and risk mitigation are key challenges when using genAI, SLMs offer a cost-effective and energy-efficient alternative to LLMs for most organizations, Gartner said.

Three out of four (75%) of IT-decision makers believe SLMs outperform LLMs in speed, cost, accuracy and ROI, according to a Harris Poll of more than 500 users commissioned by the start-up Hyperscience.

“Data is the lifeblood of any AI initiative, and the success of these projects hinges on the quality of the data that feeds the models,” said Andrew Joiner, CEO of Hyperscience, which develops AI-based office work automation tools. “Alarmingly, three out of five decision makers report their lack of understanding of their own data inhibits their ability to utilize genAI to its maximum potential. The true potential…lies in adopting tailored SLMs, which can transform document processing and enhance operational efficiency.”

Gartner recommends that organizations customize SLMs to specific needs for better accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. “Task specialization improves alignment, while embedding static organizational knowledge reduces costs. Dynamic information can still be provided as needed, making this hybrid approach both effective and efficient,” the research firm said.

In highly regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, the future of LLMs is definitely small, according to  Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO of Yseop, a vendor that offers pre-trained genAI models for the BioPharma industry.

Smaller, more specialized models will reduce wasted time and energy spent on building large models that aren’t needed for current tasks, according to Yseop.

Agentic AI holds promise, but it’s not yet mature

In the year ahead, there is likely to be a rise in domain-specific AI agents, “although it is unclear how many of these agents can live up to the lofty expectations,” according to Gartner’s Chandrasekaran.

While Agentic AI architectures are a top emerging technology, they’re still two years away from reaching the lofty automation expected of them, according to Forrester.

While companies are eager to push genAI into complex tasks through AI agents, the technology remains challenging to develop because it mostly relies on synergies between multiple models, customization through retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and specialized expertise. “Aligning these components for specific outcomes is an unresolved hurdle, leaving developers frustrated,” Forrester said in its report.

A recent Capital One survey of 4,000 business leaders and technical practitioners across industries found that while 87% believe their data ecosystem is ready for AI at scale, 70% of technologists spend hours daily fixing data issues.

Still, Capital One’s survey revealed strong optimism among business leaders about their companies’ AI readiness. Notably, 87% believe they have a modern data ecosystem for scaling AI solutions, 84% report having centralized tools and processes for data management, 82% are confident in their data strategy for AI adoption, and 78% feel prepared to manage the increasing volume and complexity of AI-driven data.

And yet, 75% of enterprises attempting to build AI agents in-house next year are expected to fail, opting instead for consulting services or pre-integrated agents from existing software vendors. To address the mismatch between AI data preparedness and real-world complexities in 2025, 30% of enterprise CIOs will integrate Chief Data Officers (CDOs) into their IT teams as they lead AI initiatives, according to Forrester Research. CEOs will rely on CIOs to bridge the gap between technical and business expertise, recognizing that successful AI requires both solid data foundations and effective stakeholder collaboration.

Forrester’s 2024 survey also showed that 39% of senior data leaders report to CIOs, with a similar 37% reporting to CEOs — and that trend is growing. To drive AI success, CIOs and CEOs must elevate CDOs beyond being mere liaisons, positioning them as key leaders in AI strategy, change management, and delivering ROI.

A growing interest in multi-modality — and upskilling

Emerging use cases for multi-modality, particularly image and speech as modalities in both genAI inputs and outputs, will also see more adoption in 2025.

Multimodal learning, a subfield of AI, enhances machine learning by training models on diverse data types, including text, images, videos, and audio. The approach enables models to identify patterns and correlations between text and associated sensory data.

By integrating multiple data types, multimodal AI expands the capabilities of intelligent systems. These models can process various input types and generate diverse outputs. For example, GPT-4, the foundation of ChatGPT, accepts both text and image inputs to produce text outputs, while OpenAI’s Sora model generates videos from text.

Other examples include medical imaging, patient history, and lab results that can be integrated to enhance pateitn diagnosis and treatment. In financial services, multimodal AI can analyze customer phone queries to assist contact center employees in resolving issues. And in the automotive industry inputs from cameras, GPS, and LiDAR can be integrated by AI to enhance autonomous driving, emergency response, and navigation for companies, such as Tesla, Waymo and Li Auto.

AI leaders have also realized they need to prioritize business outcomes, clean their data houses, and start building AI talent. The latter is especially important given the growing gap between enterprise genAI needs and the workers with skills to meet those needs.

“In the year ahead, you’ll need to put your nose to the grindstone to develop an effective AI strategy and implementation plan,” Forrester said in its report. “In 2025, organizational success will depend on strong leadership, strategic refinement, and recalibration of enterprise data and AI initiatives commensurate with AI aspirations.”

Microsoft is a little sneaky. Sure, there’s just one “big” update for Windows 11 each year. But Microsoft’s Windows team is always working on something, and new Windows 11 features are arriving on PCs every month — even outside of those high-profile updates.

So as we arrive at the end of 2024, let’s review the most interesting and useful new features that have shown up on Windows 11 in the past year. I bet you’ll find at least a few features you haven’t yet discovered!

And be sure to sign up for my free Windows Intelligence newsletter for even more useful knowledge. I’ll keep you up to date on all the interesting new features you can find and explore as we get into the new year.

New Windows 11 features #1—3: Phone integration powers Use an Android phone as a webcam, wirelessly

Windows now lets you use your Android phone as a webcam. It all happens entirely wirelessly, if you like — no cables! The setup process is quick, and it’s particularly useful if you’re not a big fan of your PC’s on-board webcam quality.

Get PC notifications when you take new photos or screenshots on Android

Windows can now pop up a notification whenever you take a new photo or screenshot on your Android phone. Then you can click that notification to immediately transfer the photo and open it for viewing, editing, or sharing on your PC.

Transfer files to and from Android phones, wirelessly

Once you’ve connected your Android phone to your PC for the above wireless features, you’ll also see your phone pop up in File Explorer. You can transfer files to and from your Android phone right from File Explorer — wirelessly!

New Windows 11 features #4—5: Windows taming tricks Why Widgets on Windows 11 are finally worth using

Windows 11’s built-in Widgets menu got some big updates in 2024. It’s worth giving it a second chance now that you can tweak various options to hide the viral article feed and customize it further.

Remove stocks and sports from your PC’s lock screen

Windows now shows stock prices and sports updates alongside the weather on your lock screen — it’s a recent update, too! (That said, many people won’t be fans of this.)

New Windows 11 features #6—8: New Microsoft apps Try the new Sticky Notes app

Out with the old and in with the new! Windows has a new Sticky Notes app that’s more closely integrated with OneNote.

The ultimate Windows app launcher

Microsoft’s PowerToys package isn’t included with Windows, but it’s an honorary part of the operating system as far as I’m concerned. In 2024, Microsoft released an especially powerful application-launcher-and-arranger named PowerToys Workspaces. It’s a big productivity upgrade for many people.

Activate and use the PowerToys New+ menu

Speaking of PowerToys, Microsoft also launched an even more powerful and flexible “New+” menu that lets you quickly create new files and folders from templates right in File Explorer. I’m already putting this one to good use myself.

New Windows 11 features #9—12: AI grab bag Erase objects from photos with AI on your PC

Microsoft’s Photos app includes a new Generative Erase feature that works on all Windows 11 PCs — and on Windows 10 PCs, too! You can select objects in photos and use this AI-powered erase to get rid of them.

Microsoft wants Copilot to be your new AI best friend

Windows got a brand-spanking-new Copilot app this year. Beyond productivity, Copilot now wants to be your best buddy!

5 Copilot+ PC AI features you can use at launch

Some of the newest PCs are branded “Copilot+ PCs,” and they have access to new AI-based Windows features. Again, these don’t work on most Windows 11 PCs — these need a new Copilot+ PC. Here are the AI features you can use on those PCs.

Hands on with Microsoft’s Windows Recall

Recall is the most controversial Windows feature of the year. It’s still available only in testing form right now — but I’m experimenting with it, and you can see how it works.

Bonus: More Windows AI features 10 Windows 11 AI features you can use today

Okay — technically this one is from December 2023, but who’s counting? All Windows 11 PCs include AI features, even if they aren’t Copilot+ PCs. This guide reveals what you can use today on any Windows 11 PC.

Stay tuned: 2025 promises to be even more of a busy year when it comes to Windows development. We’ll explore it all together, every step of the way.

Don’t wait for next year’s December review! Sign up for my free Windows Intelligence newsletter now, and I’ll send you three new things to know and try every single Friday.

OpenAI thinks it has found a way to make its transformation from non-profit to for-profit a little more palatable: make the for-profit part a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, while quietly limiting the ability of the non-profit board to oversee commercial operations.

It outlined its plans in a blog post on Friday, saying that giving the for-profit arm more freedom, albeit as a public benefit corporation, “would result in one of the best resourced non-profits in history.”

The blog post — unsigned, and attributed only to “OpenAI” — said that under the current structure, the board’s main function is to control the for-profit arm, while under the new structure it will pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science while leaving management of the commercial operations to the public benefit corporation.

“As we enter 2025, we will have to become more than a lab and a startup — we have to become an enduring company,” the blog post said. 

OpenAI’s goal, when it was founded as a non-profit company (the “lab”) in 2015, was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” It began life with promises of $1 billion in donations in cash or kind from individual and corporate donors — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research — although it has received less than $140 million of that in cash, and upwards of $100 million in compute credits and discounts from hyperscalers, according to its website.

In 2019, realizing that the computing capacity necessary to build an artificial generation intelligence would cost closer to $10 billion, OpenAI created a for-profit business (the “startup”) under its control, capping investors’ share of profits and keeping the rest to fund its research.

As it became clear that OpenAI’s generative AI technology could be immensely profitable, the pressure from shareholders and would-be shareholders has grown to lift that profit cap and open the company up to more investment. It has been trying to allay concerns about what this means for its revised mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” — while at the same time pushing OpenAI investors to stifle AI innovation elsewhere.

Over the last year, this has led to tensions within the management team, prompting a number of key staff to leave and create their own generative AI companies, many of them citing a desire to place more emphasis on the safety of their designs than on profit.

Structuring OpenAI’s for-profit activities as a public benefit corporation under Delaware state law is what the board hopes will make it “an enduring company,” it Friday’s blog post said.

In Delaware, public benefit corporations must be managed in a way that balances the interests of stockholders and stakeholders with the realization of specific public benefits defined in its certificate of incorporation. Those benefits can be artistic, charitable, cultural, economic, educational, environmental, literary, medical, religious, scientific, or technological, and favor one or more categories of persons, communities, or interests.

How exactly OpenAI defines the public benefit or benefits to be pursued by its for-profit arm, could help determine the idea’s reception.

Some, though, are against the changes at any price. Musk — who OpenAI said donated less than one-third of its initial funding — and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have both sought to block OpenAI’s move to become a for-profit.

We may be on the brink of 2025, but PDFs are still unavoidable in the professional world. No matter what industry you work in, you’re bound to whittle away precious moments wading through reports, white papers, and other dense documents in that clunky-feeling form.

If that sounds all too familiar, take heed: Adobe thinks it’s at long last found a way to bring PDFs into the current century — thanks to the power of AI.

Acrobat AI Assistant is a new AI chatbot built right into Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Adobe offered me a sneak peek, so I gave it a spin to see how well it’d work for professional Windows users.

Here’s what to expect.

Want to keep an eye on the future of AI in Windows — and everything else Windows-related, too? Check out my free Windows Intelligence newsletter. Plus, get free Windows Field Guides as a bonus when you sign up!

The ins and outs of Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant

Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant is an AI chatbot sidebar in Acrobat and Reader. No matter which application you’re using, it will cost you an extra $5 per person per month. And speaking of AI: Adobe now also offers easy AI image generation features right in Adobe Acrobat, too.

Adobe is using GPT 4o technology here, which means it’s the same generative AI (genAI) tech that powers both ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

As an alternative, it’s worth noting that you can also provide ChatGPT itself with PDF files and ask questions about them directly using that service. If you’re already a big ChatGPT user who pays $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus and you have a workflow that works well with it, Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant might not be quite as tempting.

But for people who use Acrobat at work, that extra $5 add-on fee to gain an AI assistant built right into the same application could be an enticing option.

How the Acrobat AI Assistant chatbot works

The Acrobat AI Assistant is easy to use and find: Just open a PDF in Adobe Acrobat or Reader. Then, click the colorful “AI Assistant” button on the toolbar. Adobe’s AI chatbot will open in a sidebar, providing you with a summary of the document and suggesting questions. You can also click a “Generative Summary” button in the All Tools sidebar to immediately get a summary of your document.

Adobe’s AI chatbot is always just one click away.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

It works with PDFs up to 600 pages long, and you can use the “Add files” button to add additional PDFs into the mix. In total, you can provide the Adobe AI Assistant with up to 10 PDF files at a time. Then you can ask questions and get answers based on all the files you provided.

In my experience, the Acrobat AI Assistant works well, by and large. That’s no surprise, since it’s using GPT 4o technology under the hood. It provides answers very similar to what you’d get from ChatGPT — which is exactly what people who want AI integration in a productivity app are looking for.

One thing that really jumped out at me is that the Acrobat AI Assistant gives you the ability to fact check its answers. This is a critical capability with AI, which notoriously has a tendency to spew out inaccurate info at times. The Acrobat AI Assistant provides easily identifiable sources, pointing to specific pages where it found pieces of information. 

That means it’s not just a tool that will do all the work for you — it’s a powerful research assistant that can sift through information and let you confirm it’s actually getting things right.

The AI Assistant provides suggested questions, but you can ask anything you like.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

Acrobat AI and Adobe Firefly

Speaking of AI, Adobe Acrobat also has built-in access to Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s genAI image model. You can right-click right in a PDF and select Add Image > Generate Image to open the Adobe Express interface in Acrobat. Then you can quickly generate and insert an image. You can also use this to replace an existing image in a PDF.

Once again, it works well, which is no surprise: Adobe’s Firefly is a capable image generator.

Adobe’s Firefly image generation model is just a few clicks away, too.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

The value of integration

Whether it’s the chatbot that uses the same underlying technology as ChatGPT or the Adobe Firefly-powered image insertion features, one thing is clear: Adobe’s aim here is all about integration. Adobe isn’t delivering any new and unheard-of AI features; rather, it’s bringing all that power directly into a tool you already rely on during your workday.

That’s not a bad thing — in fact, it’s a good one: By integrating AI chatbots and image generation tools into a standard business productivity tool, Adobe makes it easy to access those features and reduces the friction of having to copy-paste text and images between multiple tools just to get things accomplished.

That sort of polished package is especially important for businesses, as Adobe promises to safeguard data privacy and prevent all info from being used to train AI models. Most businesses don’t want their employees providing business data to consumer AI tools, as it’s often unclear whether that data is protected in the same way. In other words, copy-pasting business data into external AI tools doesn’t just make for an inconvenient workflow — it’s potentially dangerous for sensitive business data.

For Acrobat AI Assistant for enterprise customers, Adobe has a detailed document describing how it uses and respects customer data. 

Plus, since Adobe’s assistant is also available as an add-on for the Adobe Reader application, organizations can easily roll out the chatbot even to employees who don’t need the full-fledged Acrobat program.

The future of AI in Acrobat

Adobe sees this current assistant as the first step in a long plan to bring useful AI tools into the Acrobat environment. An Adobe representative tells me “the [current] features are just the beginning of Adobe’s vision to leverage generative AI to reimagine the value of documents for Acrobat customers.”

Specifically, Adobe says it plans to enable “AI-powered authoring, editing, and formatting” in Acrobat before long. This includes the ability to have AI generate first drafts, copy-edit, rewrite text, and suggest layout options for documents.

In addition, Adobe has plans to use AI for collaboration in Acrobat: Adobe’s generative AI will analyze feedback and comments, suggest changes, and help deal with conflicting pieces of feedback.

It’s something I expect to see more of — not just in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, but across all productivity apps. As these technologies grow more mature, we’re learning how they’re best used for professional purposes — and they’re increasingly being built right into the business applications we use every day with those same sorts of purposes in mind.

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The Silicon Valley hype cycle follows a familiar pattern: an emerging technology or tech product or service is hinted at, rumored, leaked, reported on, announced, and then shipped. 

That’s the cycle for what actually happens. At any point during this cycle, the rumors or leaks might turn out to be wrong. Companies could change their minds, or internal trials might show that they shouldn’t pursue an actual direction.

In other cases, specific ideas, products, or trends do arrive, but fail to capture the world and fizzle out. Products and ideas that everyone thought would become the Next Big Thing now populate the graveyard of failed tech. These include the Apple Newton, 3D television, the Segway, Theranos blood testing technology, Google Wave, WebTV, the Pebble smartwatch, Project Ara, and many more. 

In 2024, we gained clarity on several of these tech promises and assumptions.

1. Apple won’t make a car

Rumors about Apple developing a car started circulating in 2015. It partnered with car companies, hired a large number of car specialists, patented car-related patents, and more. But in February 2024, we learned that Apple had dropped its so-called “Project Titan.”

Apple began testing self-driving vehicles on public roads in California after getting a California Department of Motor Vehicles permit in 2017. The company used a fleet of modified Lexus SUVs equipped with sensors to test self-driving technologies. But in September 2024, Apple formally terminated its self-driving vehicle testing permit in California. The project’s 600 or so employees were reassigned internally or laid off.

2. Glasses are The Next Big Thing

While wearables have served as an interesting hobby and object of fascination for tech-obsessed or fitness-obsessed users for decades, it became clear in 2024 that face-top computers, also known as AR glasses, AI glasses, VR glasses, spatial computing glasses, and smart glasses will dominate the world of wearables in the near future, Beyond that they’re also likely to become the only user interface to replace smartphones as the main way people interact with computers and the cloud. 

The surprise hit of the year was Ray-Ban Meta glasses. At the beginning of the year, sales were very slow. But thanks to generally positive word-of-mouth recommendations, an estimated 2 million glasses have been sold. 

At Meta’s 2024 Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta Orion, an advanced AR glasses platform running Meta AI with a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and waveguides in silicon carbide lenses — all weighing only 98 grams. 

XREAL impressed with its One Series, featuring the world’s first cinematic AR glasses with an independent spatial computing chip. Snap enhanced its Spectacles line with gesture control and integrated AI.

Also this year, Google announced Project Astra, which aims to integrate AI assistants into camera-equipped glasses.

Common sense favors glasses, as they enable screens directly in front of the eyes, speakers very close to the ears, cameras that look wherever the head turns, and microphones close to mouths. And glasses are a general form factor already accepted by more than 4 billion people worldwide who wear corrective lenses. 

3. Drones are the future of warfare

At the beginning of the year, it appeared drones might actually have some military application, most likely for battlefield surveillance and other limited uses. Now that 2024 has come to an end, it’s clear that drones are by far the most important military platform since the tank. 

Speaking of tanks, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and the current owner of a secretive military drone company called Project Eagle (formerly White Stork), said, “A $5,000 drone can destroy a $5,000,000 tank,” calling tanks “largely useless now.” 

After Russia began jamming Ukrainian drone control and GPS signals, state-of-the-art drones chose their own targets and navigated using AI, making them autonomous killing machines.

Drones have revolutionized modern warfare by providing cost-effective, precise, and versatile capabilities that significantly alter military strategies and operations. They enhance intelligence gathering and enable highly accurate strikes. Drones have democratized airpower, allowing smaller nations and non-state actors to challenge larger militaries. This has forced larger nation-states (including the United States, China, and Russia) to scramble to develop anti-drone solutions and drone innovations of their own. (China alone is reportedly working on roughly 50 different kinds of military drones.)

Let’s be clear, though — war-like drones are not hovering routinely over New Jersey.

4. AI is indispensable for cyber security

In 2024, cyberattackers used AI to greatly increase the sophistication, scale, and speed of cyberattacks, making it clear that the best defense against AI-powered attacks is an AI-powered defense. 

AI-based attacks can adapt in real time, evade detection systems, and exploit vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale. To counter these advanced threats, cybersecurity professionals must leverage AI-powered tools that can analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, detect anomalies, and respond to threats with greater speed and accuracy than is possible without AI tools. This is especially true because of the ongoing skills shortage in cybersecurity. 

5. Self-driving cars work

Self-driving cars might not be reliable or safe enough anytime soon to operate on public roads. But developments in 2024 proved that self-driving cars are really happening, especially from Alphabet’s Waymo. That company unveiled the sixth generation of its Waymo Driver autonomous driving system this year and expanded services to the public in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. 

This year, we also learned that Waymo’s self-driving cars are far safer than human-driven vehicles. A 2024 study found an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human drivers.

6. Generative AI will be our teachers

Moral panic about AI chatbots and other tools “dumbing people down” is widespread. However, the public generally ignores the use of those same AI technologies to accelerate human learning.

The best example of this capability is Google’s NotebookLM. 

While the company announced the service and ran a very limited beta program in 2023, it opened NotebookLM to US users a year ago and to the world in June 2024. Most importantly, Google added an “Audio Overviews” feature in September and made NotebookLM a real product called NotebookLM Plus for enterprises and paid subscribers. 

While NotebookLM is described as a smart note-taking tool, it really excels at consuming highly complex material — scientific papers, lectures, and whole books — and transforming it into explanations at any level. 

Rather than reading advanced material, it’s far faster and more engaging to let NotebookLM’s “Audio Overviews” feature create a life-like podcast for you to listen to. It will create a “study guide,” a FAQ, a “briefing guide,” and a timeline, enabling you to quickly look at dense content from multiple angles, perspectives, and levels. You can start by asking the chatbot to explain it to you like you’re a sixth-grader, then a high school senior, then an undergrad, and on up until you’ve mastered the material. 

LLM-based AI brings to education: Thanks to tools like NotebookLM, there’s literally no such thing as content too complicated or advanced to understand. We can now learn practically anything very quickly. 

The year 2024 was a groundbreaking year for technology, with many big tech questions finally answered once and for all. 

The computing industry was founded with mainframes intended for the few. Bringing computers to the masses was the work of generations, such as the trailblazers we honor in this story. Whether they shrank transistors, crafted new programming languages, or connected people online and off, these software developers, hardware designers, and business executives took expensive, inscrutable technologies and made them accessible to all.

As Computerworld looks back at 2024, we celebrate the lives and accomplishments of these fifteen remarkable IT pioneers who passed away this year — but not before leaving their mark.

Niklaus Wirth: Pascal pioneer

February 15, 1934 – January 1, 2024

Niklaus Wirth

Tyomitch

After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, followed by master’s and Ph.D. degrees, Niklaus Wirth began his career in teaching — first at Stanford University, then at his undergraduate alma mater, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), where he remained from 1968 until his retirement in 1999.

When tasked with starting the school’s computer science department, Wirth found the programming languages available at the time too complex — so he created his own. He released Pascal and its source code to the community in 1970 and introduced it to the classroom in 1971.

The result was a success, recalled Wirth: “It allowed the teacher to concentrate more heavily on structures and concepts than features and peculiarities — that is, on principles rather than techniques.” Pascal became an introduction to programming for generations of students — though it was not merely an academic exercise.

“I do not believe in using tools and formalisms in teaching that are inadequate for any practical task,” said Wirth. “[Pascal] represented a sensible compromise between what was desirable and what was effective.”

During his time at ETH, Wirth took two sabbaticals to work at Xerox PARC. There, he encountered the Alto computer, his first time using a personal computer that he didn’t need to timeshare with others. The experience inspired him to return to Switzerland and build his own personal computers and their accompanying software. Languages he developed for these computers included Modula-2 (1979) and Oberon (1988). Ultimately, Wirth was his own best student: “One learns best when inventing,” he said.

Wirth was honored in 1984 with ACM’s Turing Award and in 2004 as a Computer History Museum Fellow. He died at 89.

John Walker: Design revolutionary

May 16, 1949 – February 2, 2024

John Walker

Shaan Hurley

John Walker didn’t find his success overnight: the son of a doctor and a nurse, he studied astronomy before switching to electrical engineering; founded the hardware company Marinchip Systems in 1976; and then co-founded Autodesk in 1982. The company’s first product was an eponymous office automation program.

It was AutoCAD that finally gave Autodesk and Walker their fame. Walker didn’t invent computer-assisted design — the term “CAD” was coined in 1959 — but previous CAD software had largely been limited to more powerful mainframe computers; AutoCAD was one of the first implementations to be available to the masses.

Originally developed as Interact CAD, AutoCAD was demoed for CP/M computers at the 1982 Comdex industry trade show, where it was met with wild acclaim. It ushered in a design revolution in architecture, engineering, interior design, manufacturing, and more. AutoCAD is still used and supported today, with the latest version having been released for Windows and macOS in May 2024.

Walker himself was a talented software developer and author who enjoyed writing more than he did managing: shortly after Autodesk went public in 1985, he stepped down as CEO. He moved to Switzerland in 1991 and retired in 1994 at the age of 45.

In retirement, Walker wrote many books, including The Hacker’s Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Nutrition (which, “notwithstanding its silly subtitle, is a serious book about how to lose weight,” wrote Walker); and The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience, an 889-page PDF that saw its fifth and final revision in 2017.

Walker was 74 when he died from head injuries sustained from a fall at home.

Herbert Kroemer: Taking big steps

August 25, 1928 – March 8, 2024

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Herbert Kroemer

Javier Chagoya

Some inventors have ideas ahead of their time; it takes decades for technology and society to catch up. That’s why it wasn’t until 2000 that Herbert Kroemer received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in heterostructures dating back to the 1960s.

Kroemer earned his Ph.D. at the age of 23 before joining a semiconductor research group in the German postal service in 1952. Charged with improving the rate and reliability of transistors (still fairly new at the time, having been invented in 1947), Kroemer proposed improvements that required technology that did not yet exist. Kroemer’s proposals were eventually implemented in what became known as heterostructure transistors.

In 1963, while working at one of Silicon Valley’s first high-tech companies, Varian Associates, Kroemer recommended using heterostructures for lasers as well, enabling them to operate continuously at room temperature. He received the patent for his idea in 1967, which led to the creation of laser diodes — a technology with applications both small (disc players, barcode scanners) and large (satellite communications, fiber optics).

In 1976, after eight years on the faculty at the University of Colorado, Kroemer moved to University of California, Santa Barbara, where he remained until his retirement in 2012.

Kroemer once said, “Small steps didn’t really interest me. I was interested in big steps.” Those big steps earned him not only the 2000 Nobel Prize, but also the 2001 Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 2002 IEEE Medal of Honor. He was 95 when he passed.

Daniel C. Lynch: Making connections

August 16, 1941 – March 30, 2024

Daniel C. Lynch

Informa Tech

Bringing people and ideas together and assuring they work well is what good leaders do. And that’s what Daniel Lynch did throughout his career.

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics, Lynch worked in the United States Air Force, where he learned to program. That skill set led him to positions at Lockheed Martin and then Stanford Research Institute, where he encountered the ARPANET. The precursor to the internet inspired his passion for computer networking, and he helped replace the ARPANET’s NCP protocol with TCP/IP, offering broader compatibility and networking.

Nonetheless, early internet developers proliferated a variety of incompatible applications and protocols. To get them all talking to each other, Lynch founded Interop, an annual conference that launched in 1986 with internet pioneer Vint Cerf as the keynote speaker. The show was an instant success, providing a much-needed space for direct communication among industry peers.

One of the early draws of Interop was the InteropNet, a local-area network (LAN) consisting of 120 miles of wires connecting 7,000 machines. With each of the show’s vendors being part of the InteropNet, it was an opportunity to test how hardware and software from different manufacturers would or could talk to each other. Interop also published 117 issues of a monthly technical journal, ConneXions (1987–1996).

Interop was sold to Ziff-Davis in 1991 and merged with their Networld event in 1994; the conference became known as Networld+Interop until 2005, when it again adopted the name Interop. The show hit its peak in 2001 with 61,000 attendees.

In 1994 — one year before he left Interop, and four years before PayPal was founded — Lynch co-founded CyberCash, an online payment service. CyberCash filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and was acquired by VeriSign — then, in 2005, by PayPal.

Lynch was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019. He died at 82 from kidney failure.

Robert Dennard: Memory man

September 5, 1932 – April 23, 2024

Robert Dennard

Fred Holland

Entering college on a French horn music scholarship, Robert Dennard earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering. He then joined IBM as a researcher in 1954.

At that time, storing a single bit of information in memory required six transistors — a relatively expensive and limiting technique. In 1966, Dennard delivered dramatic improvements in speed and capacity when he invented the one-transistor memory cell. This design became the basis for dynamic RAM, or DRAM, which is used in practically all computing devices to this day.

Dennard also worked on metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). In a 1974 paper he co-authored, Dennard described how transistors could become smaller (in accordance with Moore’s Law) while retaining the same energy consumption — a principle that became known as Dennard scaling.

Dennard’s innovations earned him the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1988 and the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology in 2013. Yet Dennard remained humble, saying, “I’m a very ordinary person, with a very ordinary background and upbringing… It’s not enough to just think creatively. Once you’ve posed the question, you’ve got to answer the question.”

Dennard stayed at IBM until his retirement in 2014. He died at 91 from a bacterial infection.

C. Gordon Bell: VAX visionary

August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024

C. Gordon Bell

Queensland University of Technology

In 1958, after returning to the USA from a Fulbright scholarship teaching computer design in Australia, Chester Gordon Bell enrolled in a Ph.D. program at his undergraduate alma mater, MIT. But Bell was lured by Digital Equipment Corporation to drop out of school in 1960 and become DEC’s second-ever engineer. There, he contributed to the architecture of the PDP-1, PDP-5, and PDP-11 minicomputers and was the principal architect of the PDP-4 and PDP-6. The PDP-1 was DEC’s first computer, and although only about fifty were manufactured, it paved the way for the commercial success of later models.

After a six-year hiatus to teach at Carnegie Mellon University, Bell returned to DEC in 1972 as vice president of engineering. During this stint, Bell co-architected and oversaw the development of the VAX series of “superminicomputers,” as DEC referred to them. Along with the PDP line, the VAX computers were so successful, they led DEC to become the industry’s second biggest computer manufacturer.

In 1983, Bell had a heart attack, which he blamed on the stress of working for DEC’s often overbearing co-founder, Ken Olsen. Bell retired from DEC — but his career stretched on for decades more. He went on to be an assistant director at the National Science Foundation; vice president of research and development at Ardent Computer; and principal researcher at Microsoft, where he championed lifelogging — recording and storing every aspect of one’s life digitally.

Bell also co-founded what is now the Computer History Museum of Mountain View, California; established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to honor innovations in high-performance computing; and was granted the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1991. He died at 89 from pneumonia.

Lynn Conway: Breaking down barriers

January 2, 1938 – June 9, 2024

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Lynn Conway

Charles Rogers

While working at IBM on the Advanced Computing Systems project in the 1960s, Lynn Conway developed dynamic instruction scheduling (DIS), a computing architecture technique that enabled computers to perform multiple operations simultaneously, paving the way for the first superscalar computer.

Conway’s reward: she was fired from IBM and all record of her work expunged — all because she’d come out to her employer as being transgender. With her career erased, Conway underwent gender-affirming surgery and began a new career under a new name.

Despite the professional setback, Conway continued building a legacy of profound innovations. In 1973, while working at Xerox PARC with Carver Mead and Bert Sutherland, she co-developed very large-scale integration (VLSI), enabling microchips to hold millions of circuits — kicking off a revolution in computer architecture and design. She returned to MIT, a school she’d previously dropped out of in the 1950s after a physician threatened her with institutionalization, to teach the university’s first VLSI design course.

Related reading: Unsung innovators: Lynn Conway and Carver Mead

Conway then worked at DARPA before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan, where she remained for 13 years until her retirement in 1998. She did not come out about her work at IBM until 2000, after which she became an outspoken advocate for transgender rights. Conway was heartened by the changing landscape compared to when she grew up, saying: “Parents who have transgender children are discovering that if they… let that person blossom into who they need to be, they often see just remarkable flourishing of a life force.”

In 2020, fifty-two years after Conway was fired, IBM issued a formal apology.

She passed away at the age of 86 from a heart condition.

Trygve Reenskaug: A model for success

June 21, 1930 – June 14, 2024

Trygve Reenskaug

Trygve Reenskaug

When Xerox PARC developed the Alto computer in 1973, it debuted a new paradigm: the graphical user interface (GUI), an abstraction between the user and the computer’s underlying data. To develop GUI programs, developers also needed a new model to work with.

University of Oslo computer science professor Trygve Reenskaug was visiting PARC in 1979 when he came up with the solution: the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. Originally designed in Smalltalk, an object-oriented language that was developed at PARC from 1972 to 1980, MVC eventually became popular for developing web applications, including in Ruby on Rails.

MVC wasn’t Reenskaug’s only innovation: in 1963, he developed an early CAD program, Autokon, which was widely used in maritime and offshore industries. And in 1986, he founded software company Taskon, where he developed the software package OOram (Object-Oriented role analysis and modeling). OOram later evolved into data, content, and interaction (DCI), a software development model that continues to be used to this day, such as in Tinder’s mobile app.

Reenskaug remained humble about his contributions, writing, “I have sometimes been given more credit than is my due.” He cited teammates Alan Kay, Jim Althoff, Per Wold, and Odd Arild Lehne, among others, who carried the baton before and after him.

Reenskaug was 93 when he died.

Bruce Bastian: Perfecting the word

March 23, 1948 – June 16, 2024

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Bruce Bastian

B W Bastian Foundation

In 1979, while earning his master’s degree in computer science at Brigham Young University, Bruce Bastian partnered with his professor, Alan Ashton, to co-found Satellite Software International. Their flagship product was word processing software that they had co-developed for the city of Orem, Utah. That program later became the new name of their company: WordPerfect Corporation.

The WordPerfect software debuted several innovations, including function-key shortcuts, numbering of lines in legal documents, and a scripting capability. It went toe-to-toe with Microsoft Word, trouncing it in the MS-DOS era but proving slow to catch up in Windows, where Microsoft bundled Word in its Office suite. But over the years, versions of WordPerfect also proliferated for Atari, Amiga, Unix, Linux, Macintosh, and iOS devices.

WordPerfect was acquired by Novell in 1994 and by Corel, now Alludo, in 1996. Only the Windows version is still supported, having been most recently updated in 2021; it remains popular, especially among lawyers.

Bastian left the Mormon church in the 1980s when he came out as gay. He became a staunch advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights, sitting on the board of the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign and donating $1 million to defeat California’s Proposition 8 to outlaw same-sex marriage in 2008. His own nonprofit, the B.W. Bastian Foundation, continues to support organizations that further human rights and the LGBTQIA+ community.

“I’m doing this for the kid in Idaho, growing up on a farm. I don’t want him to go through the s— I went through,” Bastian told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Bastian died at 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis.

Lubomyr Romankiw: Magnetic personality

April 17, 1931 – June 27, 2024

Lubomyr Romankiw

Qhuang75

Born in Zhovkva, Ukraine (then part of Poland), Romankiw emigrated to Canada, where he attained citizenship and earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. After earning a master’s and Ph.D. in metallurgy and materials in 1962 from MIT, he joined IBM.

At that time, IBM’s mainframes relied on drum storage for memory, which was slow, heavy, expensive, and limited to a few hundred kilobytes. In the 1970s, Romankiw partnered with co-worker David Thompson to invent magnetic thin film storage heads. The innovation spanned almost a dozen patents that reduced the size and increased the density of data storage devices. Any modern device that uses magnetic-head hard drives (as opposed to solid-state drives) still employs Romankiw’s innovations. His work earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012.

Romankiw spent his entire career at IBM, earning the rank of IBM Fellow in 1986. He also became a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 1990. Among Romankiw’s other developments and 65 patents were inductive power converters and inductors for high-efficiency solar cells.

He was 93 when he passed.

Susan Wojcicki: Channeling innovation

July 5, 1968 – August 9, 2024

Susan Wojcicki

TechCrunch

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, they needed office space. Management consultant Susan Wojcicki provided her garage — and, over the years, so much more.

Hired as Google employee #16, Wojcicki went on to play several defining roles in the company: she was Google’s first marketing manager in 1999; she product-managed the launch of Google Image Search in 2001; she was AdSense’s first product manager in 2003; and, while heading the nascent Google Video division, she initiated and managed Google’s acquisition of competitor YouTube in 2006.

In 2014, Wojcicki was appointed CEO of YouTube. Over the next nine years, she oversaw the service’s expansion into multiple countries, languages, and brands, including YouTube Premium, TV, Shorts, Music, and Gaming. The platform’s annual advertising revenue now exceeds $50 billion.

Throughout her career, Wojcicki’s work embodied the early days of Google, which she defined as “incredible product and technology innovation, huge opportunities, and a healthy disregard for the impossible.” She stepped down as YouTube CEO in February 2023, remaining in an advisory role at parent company Alphabet. She passed away 18 months later at age 56 from lung cancer.

Roy L. Clay Sr.: Godfather of Silicon Valley

August 22, 1929 – September 22, 2024

Roy L. Clay Sr.

Palo Alto Historical Association

Roy Clay was one of nine children raised in a household without electricity or a toilet. He nonetheless grew up to become the one of the first Black Americans to graduate from St. Louis University, earning his degree in mathematics.

After being denied a job interview at McDonnell Aircraft Manufacturing on account of his skin color, Clay persisted in applying until he finally got a job. He worked at McDonnell as a computer programmer for two years, then joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he wrote software to monitor an atomic explosion’s radiation diffusion. The reputation he developed there as a talented software developer landed him a job at Hewlett-Packard.

At HP, Clay wrote software for and led the development of the company’s first minicomputer, the 2116A, released in 1966. The computer and its immediate successors sold exceptionally well for decades, helping cement HP’s leadership in the early computer industry. Rising through the ranks at HP, Clay helped expand its talent pool by hiring engineers from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Clay left HP in 1971 to start a consulting firm that advised the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm that helped shape Silicon Valley. In 1977, he formed his own company, ROD-L Electronics, a manufacturer of electrical safety test equipment. ROD-L hired a diverse workforce and offered employees a flex-time schedule as well as full tuition reimbursement. Said Clay, “If you’re not bothering to learn more, then you’re becoming unproductive.”

Clay was a pioneer not just in IT, but in politics: he was the first Black council member for the city of Palo Alto, California (1973–1979) and was elected to the position of city vice mayor (1976–1977).

As a trailblazer who worked tirelessly to diversify the tech industry, he earned the nickname “Godfather of Silicon Valley” — an honorific he adopted for his 2022 self-published memoir, Unstoppable: The Unlikely Story of a Silicon Valley Godfather.

Clay passed away at 95.

Ward Christensen: Modem maverick

October 23, 1945 – October 11, 2024

Ward Christensen

Jason Scott

Ward Christensen spent his entire 44-year career as a systems engineer at IBM — but it was his hobbies that earned him a place in history.

In 1977, when Christensen needed to convert a CP/M floppy disk to an audio cassette, he developed a transfer protocol consisting of 128-byte blocks, the sector size used by CP/M floppies. The protocol proved so versatile and reliable for a variety of platforms that it evolved into XMODEM, which became a standard for transferring data files across dial-up modem connections, especially at slower speeds such as 300 baud.

Christensen’s work on XMODEM earned him a sponsorship from the White Sands Missile Range to dial into the ARPANET. But he was frustrated by the organization’s design-by-committee approach, where ideas languished. When Chicago’s Great Blizzard of 1978 left Christensen and his fellow computing enthusiasts stranded in their homes, Christensen called his friend Randy Suess to develop a way for their local hobby computer club to meet virtually. The two collaborated, with Suess providing the hardware and Christensen the software. Within two weeks, the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) was up and running.

CBBS became the first of tens of thousands of dial-up BBSes that proliferated over the next twenty years. BBSes formed some of the first online communities and became important shareware distribution nodes for early game companies. The groundbreaking innovation earned Christensen multiple awards and recognition, including a 1993 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Christensen retired from IBM in 2012, after which he remained active in Build-a-Blinkie, a nonprofit that teaches basic computer hardware skills. “I [can] think of no finer testimony to the soul behind this pioneer than the fact that up to the end of his life, he was teaching very young children how to solder together electronics to get them interested in science and engineering,” said Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary.

Christensen died at home from a heart attack at the age of 78.

Thomas E. Kurtz: Keeping it BASIC

February 22, 1928 – November 12, 2024

Thomas Kurtz

Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth

After earning his Ph.D., Thomas Kurtz joined Dartmouth College in 1956 as a mathematics professor and the director of the university’s computing center, which consisted of a single computer. Kurtz and colleague John Kemeny worked around this hardware limitation by developing the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), which operated from 1964 to 1999.

Having solved the problem of the computer’s accessibility, Kurtz and Kemeny set out to improve its usability for students. Existing programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL could be esoteric, so the pair developed an alternative: Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC. The school described the new language as “a simple combination of ordinary English and algebra, which can be mastered by the novice in a very few hours… There is enough power in the language BASIC to solve the most complicated computer problems.”

As a small, portable, easy-to-use language, BASIC proliferated, with variations for almost all platforms, becoming the introduction to software development for generations of computer users. It also launched countless careers and institutions: Microsoft BASIC was one of the first products from Microsoft when it was founded in 1975; the company later developed Applesoft BASIC to help launch Apple Computer’s Apple II personal computer. A young Richard Garriott used Applesoft to write the first Ultima computer role-playing game.

Kurtz retired from teaching in 1993. He received the IEEE’s Computer Pioneer Award in 1991 and was named an ACM Fellow in 1994. In 2023, he was inducted as a Computer History Museum Fellow, with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates presenting the award. Dartmouth College produced a documentary about BASIC for the language’s 50th anniversary.

Kurtz died at 96 from sepsis.

Donald Bitzer: Platonic principles

January 1, 1934 – December 10, 2024

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Donald Bitzer

NC State University College of Engineering

In 1959, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Control Systems Laboratory set out to develop a computerized learning system. They hired Don Bitzer, who’d just earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the school.

Bitzer accomplished what a committee could not, and the result was Program Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, or PLATO. The system was jam-packed with content, including tens of thousands of hours of course materials, Star Trek-inspired games, and a message board that constituted an early online community. The hardware, initially based on the ILLIAC I computer, was equally groundbreaking: PLATO was one of the first computers to combine a touchscreen with graphics, and it was an early example of timesharing — an innovation University of Illinois might’ve earned a patent for, had the paperwork not been misfiled.

In 1964, the PLATO IV model debuted another innovation: the flat-panel plasma display. This alternative to traditional cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, invented by Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson, rippled far beyond academic computers: decades later, it became the basis for flatscreen, high-definition televisions, used in computers and entertainment worldwide. For this work, Bitzer received a 2002 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award.

In 1989, Bitzer joined the faculty of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he remained until retirement. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013, the National Academy of Inventors in 2018, and as a fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2022.

“He was a rare systems-level individual who could easily move between hardware and software, and wrangled both sets of people, all while evangelizing the entire PLATO platform to any individual or organization who would listen,” said Thom Cherryhomes, creator of IRATA.ONLINE, a modern online community based on the PLATO system.

Bitzer was 90 when he died at home.

More and more, there are Android tips — and then there are Pixel tips.

Owning a Google Pixel phone has become a ticket of sorts to a uniquely top-tier type of Android experience. With Google’s pure vision for the way the operating system itself should work (and none of the experience-harming and often even privacy-compromising layers other device-makers love to lard into the software) — not to mention all the extra bits of exceptionally helpful Googley goodness that are available only in the Pixel environment — the Google Pixel increasingly represents Android at its best. And as anyone who’s spent any amount of time living with a Pixel can tell you, nothing else comes close to comparing.

That’s why I wanted to put together a special series of Pixel-specific tips to complement my collections of more general-interest Android tips and Google Android app tricks from 2024. Increasingly, some of the most interesting and beneficial bits of Googley intelligence are relevant only to those of us who are actively palming Pixels. And if you’re lucky enough to be part of that group, you deserve to have the best Pixel experience possible.

So here, without further ado, are the most memorable Google Pixel tips from Android Intelligence over the past year. Read ’em, remember ’em, and then do yourself a favor and come check out my free (and freshly updated!) Pixel Academy e-course to treat yourself to an entire treasure trove of advanced Pixel knowledge.

2024’s top Google Pixel tips 15 new Android 15 features to find on your Google Pixel phone

These experience-enhancing treasures are probably already present on your Pixel, but it’s up to you to find ’em.

5 handy hidden tricks for Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold (and Pixel Tablet, too!)

If you’ve got one of Google’s big-screen-packin’ Pixels, you’ll absolutely want to embrace these out-of-sight extras.

The barely-mentioned Pixel 9 wonder that’s completely won me over

Google’s latest Pixel phones have plenty of high-profile features, but a tiny-seeming detail most people aren’t even mentioning might be the most meaningful addition of all.

Google Pixel 9 vs. every past Pixel: To upgrade or not to upgrade?

Some balanced and thoughtful advice on Google’s Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro compared to every other Pixel model — from someone who’s lived with ’em all.

9 hidden Google Pixel features for smarter calling

Let your Pixel phone make your life easier with these exceptionally effective annoyance-eliminating options.

Get early access to Google’s Pixel Scam Detection system

Step up your scam-stopping intelligence with this free new feature for Google’s Pixel phones.

Bonus: A crafty new Chrome power-up

If you’re using Chrome on your computer in addition to your Pixel, this easy add-on will bring a big boost to your browser-based productivity in the desktop domain.

Hey, thanks for making the most of your precious Pixel with me over the past 12 months. Stay tuned for even more Pixel pondering in 2025!

And in the meantime, don’t let yourself miss an ounce of Pixel magic. Sign up for my free Pixel Academy e-course to discover tons more hidden features and time-savers for your favorite Pixel phone — on demand and anytime you want.

From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT staff understand what the various videoconferencing options can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.

This was an important year for Microsoft: it added approximately a half-trillion dollars to its market valuation and cemented its lead as the world’s leading generative AI (genAI) company. But 2024 has also been a transitional one for the company, as the US government increasingly turns its focus on reining in Big Tech.

As always, Microsoft was in and out of the news throughout the year (sometimes for good, sometimes not). These are the five most important hits and misses the company faced.

Microsoft goes all in on Copilot for Microsoft 365

Microsoft became more than a $3 trillion company this year, thanks not to Windows or the cloud – its valuation soared because it’s now an all-out genAI company.  This past year, it completed the integration of its core genAI product Copilot into Microsoft 365 (for additional user subscription fees, of course). A rollout that began in late 2023 to larger enterprises continued in early January, when Microsoft released versions for businesses of all sizes and for individuals. 

The results were mixed. I found the technology useful for creating first drafts in Word and PowerPoint and a potential big time-saver, although the quality of its writing often left something to be desired. I also found it Copilot had a tendency to “hallucinate” – that is, make things up – meaning its output needed to be double-checked. While adept at summarizing conversation threads in Outlook, it wasn’t particularly useful in Excel.

Presumably, Copilot’s quality will improve, because so much money is at stake. Think of it this way: at the start of 2024, Microsoft had 400 million subscribers to Microsoft 365. If only 10% of those  users subscribe to Copilot, Microsoft could rake in an additional $12 billion a year in revenue.

Though Microsoft hasn’t released information about the total number of Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers, it’s clear it could become one of the company’s biggest cash cows and portends financial good times to come.

Blistering security criticism burns Microsoft again

The year brought another serious round of criticism of Microsoft’s lax approach to security. In April, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) excoriated sloppy security practices that allowed Chinese spies to hack into the accounts of high-level government officials in charge of the country’s relationship with China. Among the officials who got burned: US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE).

A blistering 29-page DHS report detailed the company’s security failures, and pointed to “the cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors that allowed this intrusion to succeed.” The report said Microsoft’s security infrastructure is so weak that it failed “to detect the compromise of its cryptographic crown jewels on its own, relying instead on a customer to reach out to identify anomalies the customer had observed.”

The report’s conclusion: Microsoft’s security is “inadequate and requires an overhaul.”

Microsoft promised it would change. But we’ve been through this before, and the government hasn’t done anything about it in the past. I don’t expect this time to be different.

Thumbs down on Copilot+ PCs…for now

In an genAI-driven world, you need a PC built from the ground up to get the most from the technology. Or so Microsoft argued when it unveiled the Copilot+ PC line mid-year. The company might well have a point, but it has yet to prove it.

The first wave of Copilot+ PCs were underwhelming and overpriced. Although they had AI coprocessors onboard, it’s not clear why, because Copilot+ PCs were launched without what the company claimed was the best reason for buying them – the Recall feature that was supposed to let you find any file, email, or web site you visited in a snap. That feature was so insecure that Microsoft pulled it before Copilot+ PCs were released. 

Jeff Pollard, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told Computerworld, “I think a built-in keylogger and screen-shotter that perfectly captures everything you do on the machine within a certain time frame is a tremendous privacy nightmare for users.” He’s right. Since then, though, Microsoft has reworked the feature, and has begun offering a public preview of it.

Even more confounding: the AI technology on Copilot+ PCs is less powerful than the one on regular PCs, unable to do some basic Windows tasks for you, such as turning dark mode on or off.

Microsoft is right that PCs with AI coprocessors are better suited for then rapidly advancing technology than PCs without them. But Copilot+ PCs aren’t those machines. One day, every PC shipped will likely have onboard AI coprocessor. But we’re not there yet.

The Feds target Microsoft for antitrust violations

Until November, Microsoft had managed to avoid the antitrust investigations and prosecutions targeting much of Big Tech. Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple were all slapped with serious actions that threaten the core of their respective businesses. Google, for example, might be split up after the US Federal Trade Commission won a lawsuit claiming the company violated antitrust law by actions it took to protect its search business. 

Microsoft might get whacked, as well. In late November, the FTC launched a wide-ranging investigation into the company’s AI, cloud computing, security and Teams products. The agency is focusing on ways in which Microsoft bundles cloud computing products and Teams with its office and security products, as well as whether it’s gaining too much market dominance in AI.

It’s not clear yet whether the FTC will eventually prosecute Microsoft, and whether any action against the company would be allowed to proceed once Donald Trump takes over as president in January. (See below for more about Trump and Microsoft.) But if the prosecution does move forward, it could be as problematic for the company as the Department of Justice’s Windows antitrust suit in 1998 that sent the company into a 15-year tailspin.

Trump wins the presidential election

The biggest wildcard for Microsoft came late in the year with Trump’s election, which has potential long-range consequences for its AI plans, as well as the cloud, Teams, and more. Trump could squash antitrust actions against Microsoft — or double-down on them. He could award billions of dollars in government contracts to the company — or rescind them. He could use the power of the bully pulpit to badmouth Microsoft — or praise it. 

There’s no way to know what the president-elect might do; Trump himself often doesn’t seem to know. With him, everything is personal. Stroke his ego and good things happen. Criticize him and he’ll loose the power of the government against you.

Since his election, most of Big Tech has been busy doing the former. Meta, AI and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman have all given $1 million donations for his inauguration. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Google founder Sergey Brin and Apple honcho Tim Cook have had dinners with him. Jeff Bezos has plans to do so soon, and also killed a Washington Postendorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the run-up to the election.

So far, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has kept Trump at arm’s length. All the better for him, and for Microsoft’s culture and values. Doing that has been one of the best things he’s done all year. We’ll have to see whether there will be consequences for it in 2025, or whether Nadella gives in.