In a surprising move that goes against the prevailing trend in the technology sector, Dell decided to remove the mention of “artificial intelligence” almost completely from its official advertisements for new laptops at CES 2026. Although the new XPS 14, New devices.
The company’s marketing materials were completely devoid of the loud promotion of AI capabilities that other companies pursued, as AI was only mentioned in one orphan sentence in the “About Dell” section in the footer of press releases. Kevin Terwilliger, head of product at Dell, made this position clear, pointing out that they have learned over the past year that the consumer does not buy a device based on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, but rather that too much talk about it may confuse him more than it helps him understand the true benefit of the product.
This pragmatic approach from Dell seems justified in light of the current challenges, as local AI applications for content generation are still relatively inaccessible to the average user, many of the features that companies are currently promoting are in fact old software that has been rebranded to keep up with the trend, and features such as Microsoft Copilot do not work offline, which reduces their tangible added value to users today.
