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Microsoft’s “year of the AI PC” is coming to stores, and one of its exclusive retail partners is preparing tens of thousands employees to sell it to you.
Best Buy says it has trained over 30,000 sales and Geek Squad, or tech support, employees to sell and repair Microsoft’s new artificial intelligence laptops, Copilot+ PCs, which went on sale Tuesday. The retailer has exclusive sales rights to about 40% of Copilot+ PCs.
Microsoft announced its Copilot+ PCs ahead of its annual developer conference in May. The company also announced a new version of its Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop powered by Snapdragon X Elite chips from Qualcomm. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop include NPUs, or neural processing units, which are hardware accelerators built to support AI applications on the devices.
Best Buy, Microsoft, and Qualcomm worked together on instruction materials to train the retailer’s employees on the new AI-powered devices, including creating “an entirely new AI skillset for more than 1,000 Geek Squad Agents.” Starting on June 22, Best Buy said its Geek Squad employees will perform demos and trainings for customers across its stores.
“Especially because AI is such a buzzword and can be misunderstood so easily, we’ve been very thoughtful about the material and how we are putting it together,” Luke Motschenbacher, president of retail at Best Buy, told Bloomberg.
The rollout of one of Microsoft’s new AI PC features, Recall, which takes screenshots of users’ activity periodically, is being delayed after raising privacy and security concerns. The screenshots are encrypted, stored, and analyzed by AI to “understand their context,” serving as a sort of “photographic memory” for users to remember their PC activity, according to Microsoft. The tech giant previously said the feature would be off by default.