Tech giant HP sees AI and SMEs as key to unlocking SL’s digital potential

By Shabiya Ali Ahlam

As Sri Lanka’s digital economy gathers pace, technology giant HP Inc. said it is positioning itself at the forefront, betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to drive the next wave of growth. 

With PC penetration still below 20 percent and AI adoption gaining momentum, the tech giant sees a landscape ripe for innovation and expansion.

Visiting HP Inc. Senior Vice President and Managing Director for India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Ipsita Dasgupta said AI-enabled PCs, capable of performing up to 60 trillion operations per second, now account for roughly 25 percent of HP’s sales. 

According to HP, by 2027–28, more than half of global PC sales could be AI-driven as customers refresh their devices to keep pace with emerging workloads.

“In Sri Lanka, the SME sector is a major growth area, alongside retail and financial services. PC penetration in homes is still below 20 percent, which represents significant opportunity as remote and hybrid work expand. Education and skilling also present major growth potential,” said Dasgupta at a media round table in Colombo yesterday.

She noted that freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs could leverage AI PCs as productivity tools to manage and scale their businesses. In the public sector, AI adoption is expected to grow in K–12 education and workforce skilling, complementing current applications in productivity and generative AI tools.

HP views Sri Lanka and other emerging markets as strategic test beds. 

“HP is good for countries like Sri Lanka and India and other emerging markets. But actually these emerging markets are great for HP. These markets force us to understand and think about the next frontier of consumers,” Dasgupta said. 

“About 80–90 countries resemble Sri Lanka, India, or Bangladesh, they are not like Europe or the West. The more we understand these markets, the better positioned we are to capture global growth.”

Sri Lanka, she added, is “one of the fastest-growing markets for HP in South Asia,” with opportunities to expand digitisation and device adoption across households, businesses, and public institutions.