Indians aren’t paying more just for AI in phones, but laptops may hold key

livemint.com:

Samsung, in January this year, brought along Galaxy AI—a suite of features that add AI across voice calls, audio recording, photography, general web browsing and more. And, in the past two months, China-headquartered Oppo and Xiaomi have also made moves to bring similar AI features to their phones, too.

The five brands mentioned above control over 45% of India’s $40-billion smartphone market. But, they have a problem: Despite heavy marketing to push AI as the next big thing, consumers aren’t buying it.

Industry analysts, consultants and retailers that Mint spoke to all concurred that while it is still early days for AI in consumer devices, smartphone makers are likely to struggle to convince Indian buyers that the AI features in question are truly innovative. Instead, laptops running native and on-cloud AI features could hold the key to bringing the new smarts to the masses—giving personal computer sellers potential room to boost revenue even as smartphone sales stutter, at least for the next one year.

One of the biggest reasons for this divergence in potential sales of AI-enabled smartphones and laptops is the use cases that AI offers across these two devices. In a phone, AI features offer live transcription, translation, photo and audio editing, and prioritization of notifications as its key features.

Meanwhile, laptops—which come with significantly higher computing power than smartphones, have greater productivity use cases, while including most of the features that AI on smartphones can bring. Navkendar Singh, associate vice-president for client devices at market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) India, said that it is because of this that for consumers, it is laptops that are likely to lead