Dubai is loud during GITEX. Screens glow. Buzzwords fly. Everyone promises an AI future. Peter Oganesean keeps circling back to one idea. Personalisation. He does not mean a slogan. He means the gritty work of matching tools to people inside real companies.
“I would go from customer to customer,” he said when asked how the Middle East and East Africa compare with other regions. He pointed to a clear split. The UAE is talking about advanced and agentic AI. Other markets are taking first steps and putting in place the basics for digital transformation. His point lands with the tone of an operator. Meet people where they are. Build from there.
Inside a single company the spread is just as wide. “One size fits all doesn’t work for anybody anymore,” he said. “By loading an AI on top of the hardware, I can get that personalisation for people.” He sketches a lobby receptionist, a product manager, and a chief executive. Three jobs. Three setups. “The right tool and the right technology for the right persona so that the outcome is positive.”
He returns to the theme again. “Personalisation is the key here,” he said, noting that different teams need different AI tools to be productive. The job is not to hand everyone the same shiny app. The job is to raise output by fitting tools to tasks.
This is where HP’s current hardware push fits in. Oganesean explains why the company is leaning into AI PCs with a neural processing unit on the chip. “We are moving into a technology that is on device,” he said. It is a shift with practical benefits. Better performance. Better energy efficiency. Less dependence on the cloud. And a simple promise that matters to every legal and security team. Keep sensitive data on the machine. “The biggest advantage is your data privacy,” he said. “You run an AI application on the device itself. You don’t need to use the cloud.”
There is a human aim behind the silicon. Strip away the repetitive work and let people focus on the parts of the job that matter. “If whatever is repetitive is taken away and you leave only meaningful work, then as a user, you do a lot more,” he said. “You naturally enjoy what you’re doing. You give back to the company more.” That is the management case for all the talk about AI in the workplace. It is not about hype. It is about freeing time and attention.
Hardware is only half of the story. Oganesean uses GITEX to push a second pillar. HP’s Workforce Experience Platform. He calls it an AI powered layer that lets IT leaders and executives see what is happening across their device fleets in real time. “This is a tool for IT managers, for C level, for procurement,” he said. He describes a live dashboard that tracks devices and users across the organisation. It helps teams monitor, manage, and support mixed environments, not only HP.
The examples are blunt and useful. An ROI view for leadership. In product feedback that you can request from a specific set of users. And a predictive model that will flag a device at risk before it knocks someone out of action. “If your hard disk is about to break, your computer is going to send a message to the tool and the IT manager can see that,” he said. “Let me send my engineer and replace proactively that hard disk so I don’t compromise on productivity.” The pitch is simple. Less downtime. Faster decisions. Happier users.
He links that back to budgeting and lifecycle planning. The platform helps procurement see when to invest and where to optimise. It aims to connect the dots between daily device health and the bigger questions of cost and experience. That is a practical thread companies in the Gulf and East Africa keep asking for. Visibility and control that work across different teams, locations, and levels of digital maturity.
Oganesean also answers a common confusion in the market. Many users in the UAE say they use AI, and they mean a chatbot. He widens the frame. “AI is a lot bigger than ChatGPT,” he said. The message is that assistant tools help, but the real gains come from a stack that blends devices, secure on device inference, and an operations layer that keeps everything running.
The regional lesson is not to chase a single killer app. It is to design around people and context. In a newsroom you would not equip editors the same way you equip a field videographer. In a hospital you would not set up front desk staff like you set up an imaging team. HP is betting that companies will reward vendors who can map those differences and deliver the right mix.
The GITEX floor can make the future sound abstract. Oganesean keeps dragging it back to the desk and the device. He talks about dashboards, batteries, privacy, and shipping products. He talks about saving an employee from a dead laptop before a big meeting. He talks about giving a product manager more time for insight and less time for digital friction. The tone is clear. AI should feel like quiet help in the background. It should move work forward without shouting about itself.
That is the thread through his answers. Start with the person. Fit the tool to the job. Keep data close when it matters. Watch the fleet and act before things break. Do that and teams will feel the future in the best way. Less noise. More output. More of the work that counts.
