On the sidelines of GITEX Global, we caught up with Ertuğ Ayık, Managing Director – MEA at HP, to discuss how the company is rethinking the workplace — not just through devices, but through a deeper philosophy about technology, productivity, and people.
The conversation around the “future of work” has become one of the most overused phrases in the industry, but HP has attached a different weight to the term. It sees work not as a location or a device, but a dynamic interaction of technology, human wellbeing, collaboration, and experience. And according to Ayık, this shift is now accelerating faster than organisations are structurally ready for.
“For us as HP, our biggest strategy as a company is to be the leading company to help our customers in the future of work,” he says. But he is quick to clarify that the future of work is not simply hybrid meetings and faster laptops. “It’s not only about being able to work remotely, but what we do in the office space is also changing dramatically.”
HP’s approach starts from a simple premise: devices alone don’t move productivity — ecosystems do. A PC, a printer, a conferencing device or a management suite, individually, no longer define user value. “It’s not only products because we have great products, but it’s also about how those products are working together so that they can create a very efficient environment for our customers,” Ayık explains.
This is a strategic subtlety many tech vendors still miss — that productivity isn’t about deploying more infrastructure, but about removing friction. “This is why it’s all about the different experiences in the office,” he adds, referring to HP’s demonstration zones at GITEX that showcased collaboration spaces, computing, printing and amore — not as separate pillars of IT, but as a unified experience.
That integrated design philosophy is rooted in what HP now sees as the most critical issue shaping modern work — not automation or device performance, but employee exhaustion. HP’s global Employee Relationship Index — a survey of more than 15,000 respondents across multiple markets — revealed a startling deterioration in sentiment: just 20 percent of employees today feel satisfied or fulfilled at work, down from 28 percent last year. “Unfortunately, the results are very bad… it’s the worst in the last five years,” Ayık reveals. “Employees are overworking. They are working more than they were. I thought all these technologies would help us to do it, but it seems to be in the opposite direction.”
It is a paradox of digitisation: organisations have invested heavily in modernising systems, yet the human experience of work has often become more fragmented, more administrative, and less meaningful. That is where HP believes AI can have the greatest impact — not as a headline feature, but as a silent force that removes friction.
“AI is a big hype,” Ayık admits, “but today, a lot of companies are looking: ‘How can I make use of it in my own company?’” HP is focusing on what he describes as “real-world solutions” — AI that improves call quality and context, strengthens endpoint security, or anticipates settings and rights during collaboration — outcomes that cumulatively restore time and mental energy to people. The company’s research shows that wherever AI is used to remove low-value work, “employee satisfaction is five times more.”
Ayık uses a simple but powerful analogy to illustrate the gap between expectation and reality — teachers moving marks from one spreadsheet to another instead of spending that time actually teaching. “This is not why they chose this profession,” he says. “Technology today can make those mundane tasks done by something else so the employees will have more time to spend with the things that really matter.”
This belief is shaping HP’s product development roadmap. Rather than designing devices and then layering experience on top, the company is developing solutions around engagement, fulfilment and cognitive load — an inversion of the traditional enterprise hardware model. And it’s not doing it alone. “There’s no one company who can do everything,” Ayık says, pointing to HP’s deep partnerships with Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Google. The rise of CPUs, GPUs and now NPUs — each powering different types of workloads — has only made collaborative innovation more essential.
Looking ahead, he believes the next defining change in the workplace isn’t a new form factor or a radical hardware leap, but intelligent orchestration between devices. “Today, we all do Zoom calls or Teams calls and it takes 10 minutes to set up the call,” he says. HP wants to collapse that inefficiency through seamless negotiation between machines — PCs that recognise a meeting host when they enter the room, collaboration devices that select the optimal camera or microphone, and settings that adapt automatically based on context. “This is devices working together, and AI is enabling that,” Ayık explains.
In other words, the breakthrough won’t come from what a device can do, but from what it can take care of on behalf of the user. HP is not chasing a “future of devices,” but a future of experience — one where AI is not a feature but a quiet equaliser, giving people time back instead of draining them of it.
Because in HP’s framing, the future of work has never really been about technology at all — it’s about restoring meaning. “We believe that actually technology and AI is the solution for employees to be more happy in their world — and when they’re happy, the companies are more successful.”
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