The Killer AI App isn’t coming, but it’s also already here

When it comes to AI, there’s still a lot of building to go in terms of what to use it for. Many of us are seemingly waiting for an inflection point that heralds the AI era – but in the background, the AI revolution has arrived and it’s continuing to arrive every day.

In a session with Qualcomm, SVP & GM, Compute and Gaming, Kedar Kondap he said 

“Everybody’s looking for this killer use case. There isn’t going to be one that is going to be very specific to each and every person”

And when I think about it, he’s right. 

Like many out there, I’m an AI sceptic. We’ve all dabbled with the AI assistants and they’re fun, but we’ve been waiting for that killer app to really blow my mind. What I’ve been missing is the work AI is doing in the back-end.

It all starts with the NPU. The Neural Processing Unit, which we’ve seen most recently highlighted in the new Copilot+ PCs.

NPUs have been around for a long time and powering a lot of the experiences we’ve come to accept as standard like identifying scenes when taking photos to apply the best settings, but also more recently with things like blurred background for video calls. 

Mr Kondap gave further examples, 

“Watching a live soccer match. You’re like, I can’t deal with this [crowd] noise. I just want to watch soccer. You can actually run parts of it on the NPU and disable all of the background noise and just focus on the soccer part. Simple things, but when you start to see them, it’s like limitless on what you can do.’ 

A small problem is that there’s still not parity across the platforms, with only the Snapdragon X series processors getting full Copilot+ features. A number of Microsoft support sites point out absences which have only just been filled in, or are coming soon. 

That’s on the Microsoft side, but a lot of your favourite apps that are already running natively on the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform, and this is a good thing for your overall PC performance.

In a demo of on-device AI you can really see the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU in the Snapdragon X series active in things like Task Manager in Windows when you kick off AI related tasks.

The most obvious benefit is that there’s load added to your CPU when you use AI features in apps that are AI ready. 

The other, often unseen, but very appreciated benefit is the awesome battery life we’ve seen in systems like the ASUS Zenbook A14 released earlier this year, and HP Omnibook 5 series announced at Computex which can run for over 30 hours.

So the killer AI app we want, has already arrived. That said, there’s still space for a killer AI app to come, and from the many developers I’ve seen here at Computex, there may still be one very soon. At this stage though, a Snapdragon X powered Copilot+ PC is already running a pretty impressively complete AI package. 

EFTM’s Coverage of Computex 2025 is made possible in part by Qualcomm