NASHVILLE—At its annual Amplify Partner Conference this week, HP CEO Enrique Lores told partners his company was not a PC or printer vendor but focused on the future of work.

It’s part of the company’s push to focus on “One HP,” a strategy that stresses a better-together message about its hardware and software and emphasizes user experiences more than the technology components themselves. To break the focus on specific hardware, the company is focusing heavily on providing a better experience for IT management and customer employees, despite those two parties often having different priorities and expectations.

“Companies want to drive growth and productivity; employees want more flexibility,” Lores said. “We need to focus on where we can add more value. Using technology, we can build a bridge between those two needs. We can help make companies more productive and, at the same time, help employees feel better about the work they do.”

Lores and his leadership team across PCs, print, collaboration and services described a “future of work” scenario where AI on all the company’s devices allows more effortless connectivity amongst devices, where there are interface similarities across the company’s various products, and where IT uses the company’s soon-to-launch Workforce Experience Platform (WXP) to manage devices and user experiences.

Lores laid out three steps in his plan to lead the future of work. First, he said the company embedded AI at the edge on all its devices and took full advantage of those capabilities to boost productivity. In the second step, Lores said HP will further improve user experience by using those AI capabilities to make connectivity more seamless, including networking, peripherals, communications and collaboration. And finally, the company will “empower CIOs with the right management and security tools,” again focusing on its WXP offering.

He said partners would find a “great opportunity” to assist their customers in discovering and fine-tuning the AI models necessary to meet their business’s particular needs, a domain where he predicted that most companies would seek assistance.

Underlying that experience-focused approach is the company’s broader “One HP” strategy that encourages partners to sell more across the whole HP portfolio and rewards customers who offer more of their technology spend to the vendor.

“Winning category by category is not enough. We need to win with a full portfolio,” Lores told partners. “Our goal is going to be for companies that maximize their portfolio with HP to get the most value out of HP.”

This approach will mean that HP will have more commonality amongst its consumer and commercial devices and will look for those who go broad with the HP portfolio. 

Finally, Lores expanded on the company’s post-pandemic supply chain lessons and how they were adapted for a world where free trade among major players is no longer a given. Last year at Amplify, the company told partners its previous strategy of building factories in one location, namely China, and selling worldwide was no longer practical. This year, he expanded that vision to include manufacturing locally and increasingly designing and selling with an eye on the specific needs of each region. 

“Events in the last year, and the last few months especially, really confirm that strategy,” Lores said. “As the world continues to change, we’re in a strong position to drive that opportunity.”

In his presentation to partners, chief enterprise operations officer Ernest Nicolas detailed new manufacturing capabilities HP has brought online in the last two years in Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand, expanded manufacturing in the U.S. and India, and has announced plans to build in Saudi Arabia. 

“We have completely changed the footprint of the organization, and we are significantly diversified,” Nicolas said, adding that by the end of the year, 90 percent of what HP sells in the U.S. market will be built outside of China, calling the company “tariff-ready.”