Punters don’t care
The Grey Box Shifter Dell finally shut up about AI at CES after discovering its customers did not really care.
PC Gamer said Dell’s CES 2026 product briefing stood out because it dialled down the AI chant while rolling out refreshed XPS laptops, new ultraslim and entry-level Alienware notebooks, Area-51 desktop refreshes and a spread of monitors.
Dell, head of product Kevin Terwilliger said: “One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” and you could almost hear the room unclench.
Terwilliger followed with: “A bit of a shift from a year ago, where we were all about the AI PC.”
Terwilliger reckons the Grey Box Shifter has clocked that punters aren’t shopping based on AI features, even if the silicon is there, doing its little party trick in the background.
Dell, head of product Kevin Terwilliger said “We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device, in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it, but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” and the honesty stung in a good way.
Terwilliger kept going: “In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”
The Grey Box Shifter’s session kicked off with Dell vice chairman and COO Jeff Clarke taking the stage to talk about industry drift, tariffs, and a slower transition he framed as a CPU, though the writer suspects it is really the Windows 10-to-11 grind.
Clarke tossed out one sharp line on the hype cycle, saying “we have this unmet promise of AI, and the expectation of AI driving end user demand,” before swerving back to practical problems.
He warned, “We’re about ready to enter 2026 with a memory shortage that is pretty significant.”
After that, the Grey Box Shifter and Alienware got on with the hardware parade, pushing a more consumer-first angle meant to widen the net and stop every product being sold as a robot sidekick.
PC Gamer notes the AI talk stayed brief, the Q&A stayed focused, and the whole thing felt blunt in a way that most CES briefings avoid like a bad spec sheet.
