The massive developer conference at microsoft Build2024 was a huge success this week as the company's chief Satya Nadella introduced two new Surface products: the Surface Pro11 and the Surface Laptop 7.2 These are exciting devices, especially since they are the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite processors, as Microsoft is the first Surface Pc to ship Qualcomm chips inside. These chipsets are largely driven by Intel Meteor Lake chips, which could significantly improve battery life over the best Windows laptops on the market.

The new Surface device is the first of a new wave of Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft and its hardware partners are putting in stores this summer to drive PC sales. Even to qualify as a Copilot+ PC, Microsoft requires a Windows PC with at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a CPU with an NPU capable of over 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Each of the new Snapdragon X chips has an NPU capable of 45 tops, and it is expected that more Copilot+ PCs with even higher top numbers will be launched this year. What I'm not very sure about is why everyone cares about owning or upgrading a co-pilot+ PC.

Microsoft clearly wants to drive adoption by adding features to Windows11, which is only available on Copilot+ Pcs. We know that Microsoft has used what you have used to do, going through a visual history of your PC usage over the last few days back

It's a neat feature (if it's a bit unsettling from a privacy perspective), but not enough to sell me with an upgrade to Copilot+ PC. I actually used both Surface devices during the build in 2024, and I was impressed by the new OLED screen on the Surface Pro11, but I still don't know why Microsoft is moving Windows in this direction, or if anyone who is not yet excited about AI wants to upgrade to Copilot+PC.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to ask Microsoft executives directly. During the build, we talked to Pete Kyriacou, CVP and Surface Product Manager, about the company's AI efforts and where it's happening on Copilot+ PCs. 

Of course, I also wonder how Apple's competition with the best Macbooks will affect Microsoft's decision to work on AI-focused laptops with Socs with npu, after all, Copilot+ PCs are defined by the demand for PCs with Npu.

Tom's Guide: Why does anyone need to upgrade to a PC with an NPU?

Pete Kyriacou: Well, we've come a long way, haven't we? So what's going on, you started by making the Pc back to the days when it was CPU-based. Therefore, you need to know how to run a DOS prompt to start the app. And the amount of people who could use a PC was very narrow and the amount of things you could do was very narrow. 

And when graphics appeared, vector-based graphics expanded the number of people who can play games, run 3D models and do cool things, as well as options for interaction, but who can use a PC. It was just a double click on the icon, so you don't need to know how to navigate the DOS prompt to launch anything. 

As Satya [Nadella] showed what PCs can do with the natural user interface [NUI], Npu is trying to expand it further. You may not know what a pivottable is, or what is going on in Excel, but if you have data and ask your PC to "analyze this data", it creates an extension of the input that someone can have on your PC and the output that they can generate. 

And it also starts to be built exclusively, as there are great models that can run on GPUs today, but they take up battery life and consume resources. A good example is when Pavan was running Microsoft Flight Simulator, showing what developers can do with Xbox. On the other hand, the shampoo was able to talk when the game player said "Hi" to the airport land.And offers other assistance in the game. Flight Simulator takes up resources, takes up GPUs, and it is not desirable to run AI models simultaneously. Therefore, these dedicated models can be run on NPU instead.

TG: If this is the beginning of a natural user interface for Windows, what will it look like in the future? For example, do you think people will naturally be able to talk to their PC and ask for it for what they want.

Kyriacou: Yeah, we want it to be an ambitious goal. The cool thing now at the co-pilot prompt is that you can type, you can ink it, or you use voice and it's natural language.

Windows has long been multimodal, especially when it gets to Surface devices. We have a great typing and touchpad, and a touch screen, and the next one is ink, and then the voice goes next along the way.

So it's just a natural progression of what you're talking about. You can interact with natural language, so type first, now in ink, and then by voice. There are a few steps that will be skipped along the way, and I think natural language will allow you to intuitively use co-pilot.

The cool thing about this, I think, is that Microsoft, and Windows in particular, [we] are working hard to make sure that voice becomes a top-notch citizen for people of all abilities, and accessibility is something we focus on across the board.

And we have seen that people in our community can utilize Copilot to accelerate their input, across the different functions of input. David Dame runs an accessibility lab, and he told me that his ability to respond to emails and generate employee feedback is 20 times larger than before. The amount of typing you have to try to do, or the voice input he will try to do, goes into Word and generates a document with a few bullets to the co—pilot

TG: Copilot and other AI implementations on Windows look promising, but not perfect - you still get an error when using it. How long do you think it will take until this technology is accurate enough to be used in business?

Kyriacou: Not a number I can claim in terms of accuracy, especially when thinking about the work I've done with Copilot and Bing to bring in content-related information. Before it was time-stamped in some earlier time, and now it is almost real-time information. 

What we are seeing is that Copilot for Business provides excellent access to business customers who specialize in information in their environment. There are also plenty of Copilot for business customers who use SharePoint data and can access those files using Copilot for business information. Then you have a more general windows built-in co-pilot and use the web as it goes through, and I would say you know, the accuracy is great. And again, I don't number it, but always something that someone should check at the end when they're trying to get what they want. 

In my personal use, I said it would be great to be able to curate information for what I want and get what I need from it and the co-pilot in general and then the co-pilot in the office, the co-pilot and [Microsoft]365 were incredible too. 

TG: You're now feeling pressure from Apple that Macbooks with M-series chips are so often outperforming Windows laptops.

Kyriacou: That's a great question. You know, the industry as a whole has focused on what it means for great silicon and how you leverage silicon not only for power and perf [ormance], but to bring NPU.

We are focused on the customer, and the customer wants the battery life. They've been asking for performance. We think we've done something unique and special now, not only with the power and performance we've brought, and the battery life of the whole day, but also with this NPU, which is something we've been leading since the Surface Pro X was launched with npu in 2019. you were doing eye contact correction. So now we're taking it to the next level, like something we didn't talk about today — not only do you now have the built-in eye contact correction and [Windows] Studio effects, but there are some more advanced features that make use of NPU. 

There is one for normal eye contact, right, and there is this new one called a teleprompter. If you turn it on, you can actually read the teleprompter left and right and keep your eyes on the camera. And I feel like we're leading the way here. 

It also comes in 2-in-1. Look at what we had. We had tactile on the pen, we had a long time [of function keys] F line, we now have tactile on our touchpad

So you ask us about how we compete with people who make great devices at Apple and I think it's great. I think. But we are leading the 2-in-1 path and I would like to think that we continue to advance and lead the industry with power, perf [ormance] and now NPU.