From a Singapore airport soundtrack to new AI-powered PCs, HP is looking for a new rhythm in Asia
Fortune · C · trust 35/100
The music you hear as you walk through Singapore’s Changi Airport can’t be found on any playlist or album. Instead, it’s being composed in real-time by a computer program.
“If you’re walking through Changi, you’ll be hearing a soundtrack that is literally AI,” Michael Boyle, HP’s senior vice president and managing director for Greater Asia, told Fortune in early August. “The great thing about AI is that you can shape it. If it starts raining outside, the airport gets busy, or it’s nighttime, the AI can adapt the music.”
The company behind those tunes is Wubble AI , a Singapore-based startup that participated HP’s “Garage 2.0” program, an accelerator that the company started in the Southeast Asian city in Oct. 2025. HP became a backer of Wubble AI in July.
Garage 2.0 harks back to HP’s roots in Palo Alto, where founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the company in the latter’s garage in 1939. HP runs Garage 2.0 with Antler, the global venture firm that has made more than 1,400 investments across more than 30 markets.
“We’re looking at these founders and the speed that they can go without the complexity of being in a large organization, and it’s inspiring,” Boyle said. “It gives those of us working in a large, matrix organization the chance to come back down and think about what’s really going to cut through and build scale.”
Yet the Garage 2.0 program gets at a deeper question at the heart of HP: Is the tech company that’s perhaps most responsible for Silicon Valley’s culture getting left behind? HP is now No. 276 on the Fortune Global 500, down from No. 194 in 2017. The company is now betting on AI PCs as a new growth category, wagering that consumers will prefer to run AI on their own devices rather than in the cloud.
HP’s footprint in Asia began almost 60 years ago, when the company established its first regional office in Singapore in 1969. A year later, it opened its first Asian manufacturing plant in Singapore’s Redhill neighborhood, where just over 60 workers assembled iconic devices like the HP-25 calculator.
The company operates across most Asian markets, with manufacturing and supply chain hubs in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, and major call centers in Malaysia and India. The region contributed just over 25% of HP’s revenue in its most recent quarter, which covered May, June and July.
Boyle, who joined HP in 2015 as the vice-president of its Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) operations, is most attracted by the region’s diversity. “There’s many different versions of Asia,” he said. “It’s been really interesting getting to see how HP is represented in its different markets.” For example, he notes that Southeast Asian retail still relies on brick-and-mortar stores, which means most sales happen face-to-face; in contrast, online sales now dominate in markets like South Korea.
In what he describes as a “serendipitous” bit of foreshadowing, Boyle wrote his graduate thesis on HP’s strategy long before he ever worked there, while completing an MBA program at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney.
“I visited their European operations in Germany as part of a study tour, and there was something about HP back in those days that I really identified with,” Boyle recalls. “So it was quite serendipitous that the phone rang, and all of a sudden I found myself living in Singapore and working for HP.”
HP is perhaps best known for its printers, which have long been a mainstay of offices worldwide. Boyle pushes back on any suggestion that print is dying, calling it a mainstay in sectors like education and healthcare.
Since last year, the firm has been rolling out AI-powered printers that come installed with Microsoft Copilot, which allow users to print documents from a shared cloud without ever booting up their laptop, as well as generate AI summaries from documents scanned using the printer.
“AI is now starting to play a role where it can go both ways: from creation to print, and print back to creation,” Boyle said. “You can even edit on the fly.”
Despite Boyle’s optimism, printing remains a shrinking part of HP’s business. Total print revenue fell by 2.2% in HP’s most recent quarter. The company blamed “demand softness, particularly in China,” as well as “changing consumer behaviors.”
As some of HP’s mainstay businesses show their age, the company is now looking to AI PCs as its next source of growth .
AI PCs are devices with some capability to handle AI and machine learning tasks on the device itself, rather than relying entirely on the cloud. HP first unveiled its suite of AI laptops in 2024, including the OmniBook X AI PC and HP EliteBook Ultra AI PC.
HP now expects AI PCs to make up 50% of the company’s total shipments by the end of the year, Bruce Broussard, HP’s interim CEO, told analysts at the company’s third-quarter earnings call on August 27.
“The AI PCs seem like a good idea with regard to creating value for both the customers (reduced dependence on cloud, lower costs of tokens) and HP itself (premium prices),” says Nitin Pangarkar, an associate professor of business strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS). “Yet, profitable ideas are often copied by rivals. This would reduce the margins for HP unless it has proprietary technology, which could serve as a defense against imitators.” (AI PCs are currently offered by most hardware manufacturers including Apple , ASUS, Dell and Lenovo.)
Other experts say that how effectively HP is integrating AI into its offerings still remains to be seen. “The real test for HP is whether AI becomes an organising principle for the business, rather than a feature layered onto an existing portfolio,” says Tan Joo Seng, an associate professor of strategy, international business and entrepreneurship at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “Putting an AI label on a PC is relatively easy, but using AI to fundamentally change the customer proposition is much harder.”
Boyle admits that…
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