AI PCs need a stronger enterprise value proposition than more processing power. At HP’s event in Modena, Italy, near Ferrari’s Fiorano circuit, last week I saw a broader ambition: connect devices, software, and agents to reshape how work gets done. For technology leaders, the question is whether HP can translate that ambition into integrated capabilities and measurable business outcomes.

The event highlighted HP and Ferrari’s growing technology collaboration. Ferrari offers a demanding environment where precision, reliability, and speed directly influence outcomes. The message: balance standardization with customization, focus on business results rather than products, and co-create solutions to real operational problems.

HP’s ambition extends beyond PCs and printers. Its vision combines hybrid AI, contextual intelligence, local execution, and agent orchestration through HP IQ and Workforce Experience Platform (WXP). Rather than bringing all data to AI, HP wants to bring intelligence closer to where work happens.

The Edge Is Bigger Than The Device

In our research on the future of software and agentic development, Joe Cicman and I distinguish between the core and the edge. The core comprises authoritative business systems and systems of record. The software edge comprises the workflows, experiences, applications, and agents surrounding them.

Historically, that edge lived in applications, portals, and workflow platforms. HP’s strategy suggests that devices are becoming part of it. Agents could span applications, collaboration tools, and endpoints, drawing on enterprise and personal context.

This is more than a hardware upgrade. HP is seeking a role in the intelligence architecture that connects people, data, and work. The distinction matters: supplying compute is different from orchestrating what runs on it.

The strategic question is who controls the intelligence layer orchestrating work across devices, applications, workflows, and agents.

What This Means For Software Development

The same shift is reshaping the Agentic Development Platform (ADP) market. The core will continue to be modernized and augmented; the edge will increasingly be generated. ADPs lower the effort required to create workflows, applications, automations, and agents around enterprise systems.

HP’s emphasis on local models challenges the assumption that every development task needs a cloud-based frontier model. Code completion, scaffolding, and bounded engineering tasks may run locally, while cloud models handle more demanding reasoning and orchestration. The opportunity is selective routing, not replacing cloud AI altogether.

For CIOs, this could reduce cloud inference consumption and keep sensitive code and context closer to developers. But savings depend on model quality, hardware utilization, integration, and operating costs. Local execution alone does not guarantee security or better economics.

Nor is software’s future purely agentic. Enterprises still need deterministic applications, predictable business logic, and explicit controls. Developers remain responsible for architecture, governance, and engineering decisions. Agents can accelerate execution without making every application an autonomous system; deterministic software does not inherently require model inference.

That creates a potential opening for HP: developer laptops configured for hybrid AI, combining local models, cloud routing, agent orchestration, and governance. This is an opportunity, not an established outcome. It requires hardware and software optimized together for enterprise development.

The Bigger Question For HP

HP is trying to move from supplying endpoints toward enabling intelligence and orchestration. Meanwhile, ADPs are bringing development agents closer to execution environments. Their paths may converge, but complementary capabilities can also create overlapping ambitions.

Whether HP IQ becomes a strategic intelligence layer remains uncertain. HP faces competition from hyperscalers, enterprise software vendors, workplace platforms, and ADPs. Its channel could help deliver and support integrated solutions, but success requires remaining a valuable partner to companies that also control models, development tools, and cloud infrastructure.

The test is interoperability: how will HP’s local telemetry, controls, and orchestration connect with partners’ environments? Enterprises need clear answers about integration, accountability, governance, and measurable value—not another disconnected control plane. HP must explain which problems it solves better together with its ecosystem.

As the software edge expands across devices and agents, the differentiator will be how coherently the ecosystem enables work—not who owns the hardware.

Stay Tuned And Reach Out

Alongside my research on Agentic Development Platforms (ADPs), I’m researching how agentic development differs at the software edge versus the core. If you are Forrester client schedule a guidance session to discuss strategy, tools, and governance; vendors can request a briefing to share solutions, capabilities and roadmaps.

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