- AI's role in business is growing, with 30% of employees using AI tools weekly by 2026.
- AI laptops will make up 58.7% of shipments by 2026, highlighting the shift to on-device AI.
- Seamless productivity requires more than battery life; agents must run across all devices.
AI has moved quickly from novel technology to a routine part of everyday business practices. A 2026 Gallup Poll found that 30% of U.S. employees use AI at work at least a few times a week, up from 11% in 2023.
"We already moved from AI being the second or third approach that an employee tried, to AI being their go-to first approach," says Jason Banta, vice president of global go-to-market compute sales at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "Employees are providing more context to AI and are now getting better answers."
Indeed, the majority of the Gallup respondents who use AI (65%) reported that AI has improved their productivity. Employees are developing and deploying agents, Banta says, with agentic workflows that work effectively across teams in different ways, such as providing critical information to end users and interacting directly with human team members. And as work becomes increasingly distributed across laptops, phones, and wearables, these agents can provide continuity across devices.
Laptops as command centers
As the hub of today's work experience, the PC plays a critical role in helping employees stay productive, connected, and efficient.
"Laptops are moving from being an application-centric device to more agent-centric, which requires additional capability," says Banta. "The PC remains the center place and key anchor of work because of the rich content and the amount of compute needed in the AI era."
To meet the changing way work gets done, businesses are increasingly purchasing AI PCs for employees — laptops that can run AI workloads directly on the device instead of using cloud-based models. Gartner found that AI laptops will represent 58.7% of all laptops shipped by the end of 2026, up from 19.4% in 2024.
Increased AI usage, especially agentic AI, is a key consideration when purchasing new devices. Instead of focusing solely on laptop speed and performance, organizations must also prioritize battery life during purchasing decisions. While several-hour battery life used to be sufficient, multi-day battery life is now considered necessary due to the nature of how and where modern work gets done. CNET Group research found that 72% of purchasers demand a fast processor and long battery life.
Building seamless productivity with low-power architecture
Battery life is one key consideration — low-power architecture is another.
"Low-power architecture makes it possible to run agents in a very low-power fashion so they can perform, gather context, and ultimately take actions without draining the battery," Banta says. "Even though the agent is still running, you need the device to last through the transcontinental flight. You don't want the outcome to be that the employee performed the task but can't send out a critical email because the battery burned down."
With low-power architecture devices, employees can design their workflow with power efficiency in mind, such as using AI workloads in the background for pre-work, Banta says. For example, an IT professional who works across multiple time zones can use their agent to analyze emails sent overnight and create briefs, which jumpstarts their day, he says.
Agentic AI also affects how organizations measure performance and productivity. In the past, Banta says, the metric for agents and AI inference was raw performance, such as time to first token and time to first response. However, due to power availability and increasing costs, he sees performance per watt and tokens per watt becoming the preeminent metrics. In the AI era, the best device isn't simply the fastest. It's the device that can continuously run AI workloads throughout a workday without sacrificing mobility or requiring constant charging.
"Agents and AI make it more straightforward to take the next step by providing supporting evidence and context by constantly running in the background, which changes the way you make decisions and collaborate," Banta says. "Employees are able to be more present and more interactive with coworkers, while at the same time having more confidence in their final decisions by having more data."
How much agentic autonomy are workers comfortable with?
Devices that can keep up are only part of the equation; another challenge is overcoming employees' resistance to agents making decisions on their behalf. The PwC 2026 Trust and Safety Outlook reported that 28% of executives ranked lack of trust in AI agents as a top-three challenge.
Banta says that transparency is key to building trust. "What we are seeing across enterprises is a very graduated approach where agents are earning more and more autonomy in the enterprise," he says. "There is experimenting going on, but a lot of it is controlled and sandboxed."
Employees using agents in a sandbox often have a better understanding of what the agent did, how it interacted, and what information it used, which helps the employee feel more confident, he says.
"Utilizing an agent on-device also helps provide more understanding," Banta says. "Having that transparency into how the agent acted and what it did, what data it used, is really a necessary step to further autonomy. We are seeing some caution but also progress in how folks are deploying further and further autonomy."
A connected ecosystem built around the modern PC
As the modern workplace evolves with workers using personal computers to manage agents across their devices, hardware decisions play a key role in the organization's ability to provide business value through AI. PCs powered by Snapdragon combine exceptional performance per watt, multi-day battery life, and AI-enhanced experiences to help workers accomplish more from virtually anywhere.
The modern PC is becoming the command center for agentic work, but its value grows when AI-powered experiences extend beyond a single device. Snapdragon can extend these benefits across a broader ecosystem of devices, including smartphones, wearables, and hearables, thereby reducing friction across workflows. In this way, employees have the information, insights, and AI-powered assistance they need to redesign how work gets done and move closer toward seamless productivity.
See how Snapdragon is helping enterprises build the foundation for the next generation of work.
Thissponsored post was created by BI Studios and sponsored by Snapdragon.
Battery life varies significantly based on device, settings, usage, and other factors.
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