HP Built an AI That Fixes Your Computer Before It Breaks

0:00I'm actually in Palo Alto today and behind me is the garage where it all started 89 years ago. There's a little bit of a global memory crisis right now due to the build out of AI data centers. I just want the system to take action on these specific items and they create the workflows. And then from that point forward, here's the actions I want you to take and move forward with it to automatically happen instead of waiting for the support ticket or waiting for the call to come in. The boss has sent you a note and says, hey, we've really got to find some cost savings in IT. Well, what if you could just ask it that question?

0:35AI's advent has made it so easy to just dig in and understand things that might have taken three to five days before. Welcome, humans, to the Neuron AI Explained. I am Corey Knowles here with you as always. And today I'm joined by the man who thinks proactive IT should be a human right, Grant Harvey. How are you, Grant?

0:54Larry Meadows:I do. You know, this is my platform. Finally, people are starting to pick up the mantle. So I'm really excited to share my love with everyone else. How are you doing, Corey? I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. Who are we talking to today, Grant? So today we are talking to Larry Meadows, who is head of product strategy and evangelism for HP's workforce experience platform, WXP. Larry spent 20 plus years in product with stops at Microsoft and Raymond James. And lately, he's been pushing this idea of invisible IT. moving from reactive ticket management to proactive prevention. HP says they're using WXP internally across 80 ,000 plus PCs.

1:33Larry Meadows:We'll see if that number is the most up to date. With a meaningful reduction in help desk load and a huge jump in proactive issue detection. We're going to treat this like a build story. What data you need, how you avoid bad automation, and where DEX goes next. Larry, welcome to The Neuron. Thanks, guys. Happy to join. Look forward to the conversation. It's sure great to have you here. We appreciate you taking the time, man. I guess let's see here. To start out, can you kind of tell us what WXP is? Absolutely. Clear and simple terms, if you can. Workforce Experience Platform, or what we call WXP, is a fleet management and employee engagement solution that's specifically designed to help IT leaders understand how well the IT investment's performing and what areas of improvement might be there.

2:25In particular, we live in a world with shrinking budgets, right? So how do we help protect the investment and get the most out of the investments that are being made? And where are opportunities maybe to find cost optimization or redeployment of dollars for IT leaders? It's been out for a little over a year, seeing some great success in over 180 countries and thousands of customers and millions of devices is enrolled in it. And, you know, it's an opportunity to really get in front of emerging trends before they become a phone call.

2:58Larry Meadows:What was the original aha moment for this? You know, what made you think that this was even possible to do? You know, what changed? Was it like the data? Was it the tech? What happened? Yeah. Kind of two fold streams that were, you know, kind of coming together, if you will, at the time. In 2020, there was this worldwide party that affected supply chains all around the world and made it really difficult for all companies to be able to stay up to date on their traditional PC recycling or refreshing cycles, right? It's like if you go back to 2020, many companies were saying, I'm going to refresh my laptops every three years.

3:37I'm going to refresh desktops every four years. And what that really meant was every year, one third of my laptops got refreshed. No one was really looking at how they were performing. Do they need to be refreshed? That was just how the process worked. Well, enter COVID, enter supply chain constraints, enter all kinds of areas where HP looked at it and said, okay, it's more important for us to make sure that our customers and our partners are getting the computers that they need to fulfill their needs than it is that we refresh our PCs, our laptops, and our desktops. And so we immediately said, at the time, we had a product called Proactive Insights that was gathering telemetry on things like CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk utilization, health of devices, and how prone they were to support tickets, etc.

4:31And so we started using that data internally to say, what if we could identify people who actually needed to have a PC refreshed versus just those that were three years old? And so the first thing that we did is we looked at CPU and memory utilization. And in 2019, 2018, when we had standardized on an 8-gig machine as the standard for everybody, the first thing we did is we said, hey, what if we started playing around with upgrading memory? Maybe if we took those 8-gig machines to 16. And that's where the first of our AI models started getting created, where we started creating a model to actually test or simulate updates.

5:08and looking at and say, hey, what if we simulated Grant and Corey getting 16 gig and how that machine would run if it had that instead of eight? And what we identified was that that wiped out about 80 plus percent of the problems. Just having more memory for everything to run in a world that was now suddenly all remote, right? The dynamics changed. Suddenly we're streaming video all day, every day. Yeah. All day, every day, right? And so what we did is we said, okay, well, let's start using this kind of an approach internally. And let's identify those that only need a memory upgrade. And let's upgrade memory.

5:48All the machines that can take it, of course, right? And let's update that. And then those that aren't, let's identify those that are actually not performing. And what's the cause behind why they're not performing? Are they not performing well because somebody installed Spotify and they're running it all day long? or are they not performing well because of the applications that are actually needed to do the job? And that allowed us to create kind of these segments, if you will, and look at it even by department and say, you know, the people who need a new PC are these, and they need it because a memory upgrade won't help, memory overutilization, CPU overutilization, disk utilization, everything's maxed.

6:26And it allowed us to decrease our refreshes by about 28%. So doing that and then saying, what if we now turn this into an internal project, what was an internal project, into an external facing capability or a platform that allows you to look, our customers to look at, you know, what actually needs to be replaced? Or as Enrique put it back in 2020, I know everybody wants a new PC, but who needs a new PC? Who needs one? Yeah. And that was the start of where we wound up. Now, here's where it got interesting. The other thing we noticed, the second stream was the IT world has been surrounded by portals.

7:10There's nothing that you want to do you can't do, given you have enough time to go to all of the different tools that you need to do it, right? I go to this place to manage PCs. I go to a different system to manage what's going on with my printers. I go to a third for endpoint security. I've got a fourth for networking and what network speeds look like. I've got something else for managing, you know, probably software asset management or license management, et cetera. And it's like, you know, we created this world where we surrounded IT leaders with technology as opposed to creating a platform that allowed them to invoke what they needed.

7:45And that was where we shifted from what used to be proactive insights designed for PCs into workforce experience platform, which was focused on the entire IT investment from PCs to printers to collaboration tools and software and hardware, et cetera, to start to pull that together. And that is how we wound up today with workforce experience platform. Gotcha. That makes sense. so insanely cool. I was really just thinking of the value that could bring and, you know, being able to recognize the difference in, you know, who needs a new computer, who needs something hotter than what they have, who needs, you know, to be able to do that.

8:24It seems like it would create, save a ton of money for companies, for starters. So we actually call that now smart refresh, and it's a capability inside of Workforce Experience Platform. And the idea is it's not just who needs a new PC, but how do you put the right device in each person's hands, not based on their role or their persona, but based on what they actually do? And I love picking on me, right? So three years ago, when I moved into the role that I'm in now, I was classified under engineering. Okay. So as any good engineer would, right? I was given a wonderful device. It was an HP Fury 15 workstation.

9:02Great device. I actually never had a problem with it, right? It's beautiful. Now, enter Larry. I'm not writing code. I'm not compiling programs. I am traveling 50 % to 60 % of the time, and the device weighs about eight pounds. Right. You might as well just put that in your backpack, and it's great. Or you pull it out on the plane because you've got a four-hour flight to Palo Alto or San Francisco or something, right? I'm 6 '1", so I'm like T-Rexing the keyboard with a 15-inch laptop where everything's pulled together there. So it's like, okay, well, I didn't need a workstation based on what I actually did, which was PowerPoint, Power BI, the Jira Suite.

9:52I'm working in an area that's defining requirements. So how do we look at what I actually do and create a persona of me that shows that I'm a road warrior office collaborator as opposed to an engineer or coder? And then what is the right device based on the catalog defined by my IT leadership? Which one of those catalog devices is the right one to put in my hands? Now, in my instance, it was a 1040X360, which converts to a tablet. I've got a pen. I can write on it. It's a 13-inch instead of 15-inch, and it weighs about two pounds as opposed to seven or eight. So it's like that is key. And I think that's where a lot of people lose a lot of money is not everybody in engineering needs the workstation.

10:40Not everyone needs the$4 ,000 device. Maybe they need the$1 ,100 device. And that's real dollars when you start saving it.

10:48Larry Meadows:So the other thing I was thinking that I was going to bring up before Corey perfectly set me up is the supposed RAM crisis or DRAM crisis, whatever. You need to know, like, what do you need to upgrade now versus what, you know, you can wait on because the prices are going to just go crazy, I'm sure. Well, and they have been for a while, right? The one thing that I will say I've noticed in particular in the last three years is how rapidly IT is shifting away from being a cost center at many companies to a strategic business partner to drive results. And they've always been it. It's just that the other departments didn't necessarily know it in the same way that they do now, right?

11:28And so what we see is like, okay, so the RAM crisis, maybe it's not just who needs a new PC, but maybe it's what's taking up the memory on the machine that they have. Is it actually devices or is it actually software and programs that they need in order to accomplish their job? Or is it other third-party items or areas that have been added that help make it a better situation, right? Like I'm never going to tell someone you shouldn't like listen to music, as you can see on the back wall, while they're doing something. But at the same time, I might be able to run that on a different device in my house while I'm working remote as opposed to on the PC.

12:08So I think there's the combination of do they have the right device with the right memory, but also what is capturing that memory and where is it going to? And is there something that can be done in order to improve that memory leak, if you will? Everything kind of starts with budget management, I think, in IT anymore, right? It's like, how do I get you onboarded for the most cost-efficient way possible? How do I get you the tools that you need to do your job so that you can be productive? And how do I make sure that those tools are running well across the board? Are you hitting the limits of siloed AI?

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13:20Larry Meadows:So we just got the scoop on how you moved into proactive prevention. So I guess, like, what are the building blocks? Like, what makes up WXP? How does it work? How is it able to coordinate all these different machines and know what's going on on all of them? Yeah, great question, Grant. So, one, and I'll go ahead and share my screen here and look at, I think I'm actually sharing my screen now. You know, the solution itself is designed. So there is a Windows client. There is a Mac OS client. We have an API connection for Google Admin Console for enterprise and education Chromebooks. And essentially, those agents run native on the machine underneath and they capture telemetry from devices and then share it up to the cloud of WXP.

14:12So it's sharing items. So like when we talk about workforce experience, it's not just about digital employee experience. We see it as a broader world. We see it as truly understanding what's actually happening inside the investment. And it does all start with experience in our view, right? So this overall score of 83 is based on what I would call a mixture of facts and perception. Sentiment is based on surveys that are sent to end users. That asks three questions, right? How satisfied are you with the digital tools you have to do your job? One to five stars. And then what areas are you seeing most issues with?

14:54And then free text field. Everything else, system health and network health, security down through collaboration is just facts. It's data from the actual endpoints, whether it be a PC, whether it be the network that someone's connected to, whether it be the video cameras that we're all using or the collaboration rooms that we're using, including software and endpoint security, just the facts around how well the tools are working. And the experience, if you think about it, is a combination of what you think you're able to accomplish with the tools you've been given, along with the reality of what is actually showing up as how that's performed.

15:30And then, you know, directly underneath of it, we talked about, you know, kind of identifying issues or those trends, right? So being able to see things like where BitLocker is disabled or critical Windows updates are missing or multiple crashes, kind of highlighting these alerts on issues that are impacting these schools. All in one dashboard. And make it really easy to come. One dashboard, all in one. And if I keep going down, hardware support incidents. So for our customers who do have HP devices in their fleet that have also purchased extended warranty for those devices. It uses the same telemetry to identify battery issues, hard drive issues, fan speed, GPU issues, and automatically create the case so that it can be resolved.

16:16And in this case, we don't have any incidents right now. But then fleet inventory, where we start to see PCs and printers, and we can see virtual machines and video endpoints, and even IP telephones. And you'll notice that it's not all just HP devices. It's, you know, we know that customers are investing across a wide range. We want to help them get the most out of it. And then when you think about a meeting, the meetings themselves are not always that was the meeting bad. We can have a meeting that is overall fine, but some participants in it have a bad experience in that meeting and being able to understand who are the people who had a poor experience in a Teams meeting.

16:59so that you can dig a little bit deeper into it. And that's where we see the world kind of heading toward is the technology industry has done a fabulous job of surrounding customers with portals. There's nothing you can't do if you want to do it, provided you have the time to go and use all of the different tools to do it. And we see a world where you have one tool that starts to bring all of that together, synchronizes the telemetry across there so that you can understand and take action from one window instead of having to use multiple tools.

17:28Larry Meadows:So is this compiling all of the information across like a given fleet? So if, for example, you're looking at the top app crashes, that's top app crashes across all of the computers in the fleet. All of the computers in the fleet. And if I take it a step further, right, so it's let's say that we have seen issues with Office. And if I click into Office, then I can start to see all of the versions that are deployed in my fleet. and which of those versions are crashing or freezing most frequently. But where it really gets fun, Grant, is it's not just about crashing and freezing. It's about having a data lake with about 50 million devices in it where our AI model can cruise around and look at all of the versions of Office that are installed everywhere in the data lake and identify the most stable version.

18:19And then instead of saying, how do I manage which of these versions I want to go to, our AI model is going to tell you in order to have the best experience, you should update these 6 ,000 devices to this version of Office because that's the one that is crashing and freezing the least frequently across the entire data lake. Wow. That's a huge amount of control. And to be able to do that at that granular level is really fascinating to me. And again, not just on HP devices. It's a Windows agent that will work across there. But when you are on an HP device, we can even take it a little bit step further.

18:58And if you look at some of these analytics, HP driver update insights. So for our customers, for the HP portion of their fleet, being able to tie into our soft pack database and tell them, hey, here's the missing soft packs in your fleet. Here's the missing soft packs by chipset or network or keyboard mouse or drivers. and even drill down and say, I only want to look at the 100 missing soft packs at network and being able to see, okay, well, here's the network driver soft packs that are missing. Here's the soft pack, download it so that it can stage it for deployment, either through our scripting engine or Intune or whatever somebody uses.

19:35And even just keep drilling down. Well, I want to focus on this one soft pack. Here's the soft pack. Here's how many devices have it 90 days out of date, 60 to 90 days out. Here's the files to download. And here's the devices. So that you can actually now just choose to focus on the devices that are missing this one specific soft pack. This is for HP devices because that's how we deploy drivers to HP devices. So we want to make it easy to manage that HP part of your fleet. And if you're not using HP in the entire fleet, then we can help you understand, you know, using scripting or others, you can still deploy those driver updates.

20:14So can you then from right there just click a button and update all of those? You know, a couple of ways to do that, Corey, is like if I look at here and I say, you know, over here that memory utilization is high on more than, you know, 1 % of device. So you guys may or may not have heard, but there's a little bit of a global memory crisis right now due to the build out of AI data centers. A little bit. Mine is bogged down at all times. Well, and that's where it gets fun, right? So memory utilization is high. There's one question of which devices actually do I need to update and who needs 8 versus 16 versus 32.

20:55And to be honest, memory is kind of like megapixels on your cameras. Nobody has ever gone to buy a camera and said that I want to find the right megapixel setup that's just right for me. They always want whatever is the biggest number. That's the one that I want, right? And people tend to think of memory the same way, but the cost increases in memory are really making IT leaders rethink, does someone really need 32 or would 16 be what they need? And what's consuming the memory? And how do we take advantage of that? You know, it's like Corey really needs a new machine. Grant looks like he needs a new machine, but Grant just has 152 tabs open in Edge and one of them is playing Spotify all day long.

21:36You know me too well. Boy, that's both of us. Yeah. Hold it. So now there's a behavioral element that's taken up. So I come in here and I see that, hey, here's the devices that are – that memory utilization is more than 85 percent for the last 30 days. And you see remediate here. And, you know, if we really want to have fun with it, if I click remediate, then you'll see the little AI model that will pop up and say, hey, it's looking across the fleet to see what might be happening here. looking into our scripting and our policy engine and it's saying, hey, you have a lot of these devices using Google Chrome that don't have Google Chrome Memory Saver enabled.

22:18So here's a script that you could use in order to enable Google Chrome Memory Saver, which will help with some of the memory consumption, right? For HP devices, maybe you want to set a policy. Yeah. Maybe you want to do a memory utilization driver policy so that your drivers on those HP machines are always kept up to date. But if I do this, I need to be able to just hit next, take an action, continue, run it now, review it. I'm not going to push this out right now, but, you know, within three, four clicks, I've now taken an action to eliminate some of that memory consumption tied back into the Google Chrome Saver.

22:59And that's the same for any of the alerts or any of the issues that are popping up. It's like, identify what's going on and then help me resolve it.

23:08Larry Meadows:I have a question because as we record this, there's a lot of been supply chain attacks on NPM and different software packages lately. Does this handle security updates as well? Or how does that how does it work with that? Great question, Grant. If you think about security, there's really two elements to security at every company, right? There's security posture, which is why have antivirus and firewall and BitLocker and Secure Boot and all that enable or disable. That's one element, right, is in here. So if you see that we do have a security score, and if I click into security score, then you can start digging into it and see, okay, what are the issues that are happening, right?

23:50Disk encryption not being enabled, Secure Boot not enabled, firewall not enabled, and is it, you know, how many are resolved and what are the trends happening? And then even some benchmarks that we're working on to look at how are we doing against companies of my size or others in my industry. So security posture is built in by default. It's just part of the core platform. The next step, though, is an area that I call add-ons. So WXP is a modular platform. So having And given the ability to say, now add on HP Wolf Security, which could be anything from endpoint protection to protect and trace to now we get into true endpoint security elements.

24:33And HP's Wolf Security tool is an add-on to the WXP core platform. So if that's something that you wanted to add in, then you can add it in. And then it just starts to show up over here. Like you see collaboration experiences enabled here. And it's a side menu item. When we enable Wolf Security, it's also over here, et cetera. And the design is specifically to make sure that you're purchasing what you need to manage what you need and you can extend it as your needs grow. And you're not having to buy things you maybe don't need as well. Absolutely. The other thing I will add is, you know, investment has always been a huge item.

25:12And when we look at things like our smart refresh, smart refresh was actually built based upon how we do things inside of HP. And like I said earlier, right in 2020, the worldwide party, we had to start to understand who needed new PCs. Yeah. And we built that into the system here where you see that now all of the devices that are in the fleet get a grade. Refresh now, refresh soon, healthy. Unknown simply means we're still gathering the telemetry to classify it as one of the other three. And, you know, so it's like if I go through here, what we do is we, one, we always evaluate and we say, OK, let's take a look at which devices maybe need to be replaced.