Achieving AI PC success: Your BenchSmart advantage is here

From document summarization and meeting transcription to routine task automation and multimodal content drafting, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a luxury – it’s essential to your productivity. But without the right hardware, your efforts to embrace AI workflows could inadvertently drag you down.

AI places high performance demands on your device’s CPU and GPU, so units even just a few years old likely aren’t configured for this shift – especially if they don’t have neural processing units (NPUs) purpose-built for AI tasks.

As you refresh your hardware with AI in mind, how can you truly understand how prospective devices, OEMs, and silicon platforms perform AI tasks under real-world conditions?

That’s where BenchSmart, SHI’s proprietary performance evaluation tool, comes in.

BenchSmart moves beyond generic performance scores to deliver customized, data-driven insights aligned with real AI workloads. Purpose-built for AI PCs and completely vendor neutral, BenchSmart empowers you with detailed metrics and the flexibility to weigh what matters most to your organization.

The problem with single-score benchmarking

Traditional endpoint benchmarking has always chased a single figure of merit: a composite score or letter grade that supposedly tells you which device “wins.” That simplicity may look appealing, but becomes a liability when AI enters the picture.

AI workloads vary wildly in their behavior and resource mix, and the value they create isn’t captured in a monolithic number. Even when two systems post similar all‑up scores, their behaviors can diverge dramatically once you introduce on‑device inference, AI‑assisted security, or concurrency with collaboration apps.

With BenchSmart, we’ve addressed this gap.

As Senior Director – End User Compute Adam Reiser explains, BenchSmart is designed specifically for AI-powered devices and use cases, not a generic performance suite.  Rather than produce a headline score, BenchSmart exposes the underlying signals that actually determine user experience and business outcomes for AI tasks.

That means you get the evidence you need to support decisions – without having to reverse‑engineer a composite score.

Sr. Director – End User Compute Adam Reiser breaks down the key differentiators of BenchSmart, SHI’s innovative AI PC benchmarking tool.

BenchSmart is built for AI workloads, not “speeds and feeds”

BenchSmart is intentionally focused, specializing in the intersection of endpoints and AI. In practice, that means our tool:

• Captures AI-relevant metrics, including responsiveness and throughput under AI workload pressure, efficiency during concurrent background tasks, and how behavior shifts on battery.
• Customizes tests to match your environment, including your payloads, apps, and network conditions.
• Maintains consistency across evaluations and eliminates interference by ensuring only specific test scripts run on the tested devices.
• Produces completely vendor-neutral results, regardless of OEM or silicon vendor.

Our goal is to give you a clear, unbiased view of system performance so you can make data-driven decisions about your device fleet – without anyone else putting their finger on the scale.

What IT leaders actually gain

BenchSmart delivers four practical advantages that help you make your device refresh decisions:

1. AI readiness clarity. We help determine whether your shortlisted devices sustain performance under AI load or degrade in ways that would frustrate users.
2. Evidence for trade-offs. Our tool identifies the compromises necessary to meet your priorities – from how favoring battery life impacts AI responsiveness to the effect high performance has on internal temperatures.
3. Vendor-neutral information. BenchSmart compares devices across OEMs and silicon families, giving you a fair analysis free from bias or buzz.
4. Bringing lab results to the real world. At our Next-Gen Device Lab, you can physically test and validate real AI PCs to start an evidence-backed dialog with your stakeholders.

How you can use BenchSmart

When you first use BenchSmart, we start by identifying what matters for your personas: the sales leader on the road expects smooth AI‑assisted meetings even when on the go; the knowledge worker relies on local AI features to jumpstart writing, analysis, and summarization; the security‑sensitive role needs always‑on protection that doesn’t affect the battery life.

BenchSmart then runs targeted, AI‑relevant tests across your shortlist of devices and configurations. Instead of returning a single rank, it surfaces the dimensions you identified: responsiveness under load, steadiness on battery, behavior alongside security tools, and the impact of background AI features. We provide the dataset and, if you’d like, guidance on how to weigh those dimensions.

Finally, results translate into plain‑language recommendations your procurement, finance, and security stakeholders can trust: which device pairings fit each persona, where there are genuine, measurable differences, and where perceived differences don’t hold up under AI pressure.

Inform your next device refresh with comprehensive reports and stress tests

If your organization is evaluating AI PCs, the answer you need isn’t “which device got an A+.” You need to know which device sustains your specific AI workloads under your constraints. BenchSmart reframes endpoint selection from a generic bake-off to a business-aligned evaluation, giving you the ability to weigh performance, endurance, and security according to your strategic priorities.

Ditch the single scores. Experience the type of benchmarking AI PCs truly require.

Ready to see BenchSmart in action? Learn how BenchSmart can de-risk your AI device evaluations or contact us today to schedule a personalized consultation.