Gartner, in a new forecast, has reported that worldwide shipments of AI PCs and generative AI (GenAI) smartphones are projected to total 295 million units by the end of 2024, up from 29 million units in 2023.
Gartner defines AI PCs as PCs that are equipped with dedicated AI accelerators or cores, neural processing units (NPUs), accelerated processing units (APUs) or tensor processing units (TPUs), designed to optimize and accelerate AI tasks on the device. GenAI smartphones are designed smartphones equipped with hardware and software capabilities that enable seamless integration and efficient execution of GenAI-driven features and applications on the smartphone. Examples of this include Gemini Nano from Google, ERNIE from Baidu and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Gartner estimates 240 million GenAI smartphones and 54.5 million AI PCs will be shipped by the end of 2024. This will represent 22% of basic and premium smartphones and 22% of all PCs in 2024.
According to Gartner, the smartphone market recorded its first quarter of growth in 4Q23 after nine consecutive quarters of decline. In 2024, worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to grow 4.2%, totalling 1.2 billion units year over year.
Ranjit Atwal, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner
The rapid adoption of on-device GenAI capabilities and AI processors will eventually become a standard requirement for technology vendors. This ubiquity will pose challenges for vendors in differentiating themselves from competitors, making it harder to create unique selling points and drive increased revenues. The enhancements to smartphones evolve the current experiences with cameras and voice integration, but these capabilities are expected by users rather than demonstrating a new groundbreaking functionality. Users have the same expectation for the functionality of GenAI on their smartphone. They are unlikely to pay a premium for GenAI smartphones without the availability of any groundbreaking applications. We should not interpret the growth in smartphone shipments as a full-fledged recovery. It is more accurate to view it as a stabilization of lower level of units, which are nearly 60 million lower than in 2022.
