The music heard by people walking through Singapore’s Changi Airport is not drawn from a playlist or an album. It is being composed in real time by a computer program.

“If you’re walking through Changi, you’ll be hearing a soundtrack that is literally AI,” Michael Boyle, HP’s senior vice president and managing director for Greater Asia, told Fortune in early August. “The great thing about AI is that you can shape it. If it starts raining outside, the airport gets busy, or it’s nighttime, the AI can adapt the music.”

The company behind the music is Wubble AI, a Singapore-based startup that took part in HP’s “Garage 2.0” program, an accelerator the company launched in the Southeast Asian city in October 2025. HP became a backer of Wubble AI in July.

Garage 2.0 is a nod to HP’s origins in Palo Alto, where founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the company in a garage in 1939. HP runs the program with Antler, the global venture firm that has made more than 1,400 investments across more than 30 markets.

“We’re looking at these founders and the speed that they can go without the complexity of being in a large organization, and it’s inspiring,” Boyle said. “It gives those of us working in a large, matrix organization the chance to come back down and think about what’s really going to cut through and build scale.”

Even so, the initiative raises a broader question inside HP: Is the company that is arguably most associated with Silicon Valley’s culture being left behind? HP is now No. 276 on the Fortune Global 500, down from No. 194 in 2017. The company is betting on AI PCs as a new growth category, assuming consumers will prefer to run AI on their own devices rather than in the cloud.

HP’s Asia bet

HP’s presence in Asia dates back almost 60 years, when the company opened its first regional office in Singapore in 1969. A year later, it launched its first Asian manufacturing plant in Singapore’s Redhill neighborhood, where just over 60 workers assembled devices such as the HP-25 calculator.

Today, HP operates across most Asian markets, with manufacturing and supply-chain hubs in China, Thailand and Vietnam, and major call centers in Malaysia and India. The region accounted for just over 25% of HP’s revenue in its latest quarter, which covered May, June and July.

Boyle, who joined HP in 2015 as vice president of Asia-Pacific and Japan operations, says the region’s diversity is what attracts him most.

“There’s many different versions of Asia,” he said. “It’s been really interesting getting to see how HP is represented in its different markets.” He noted that Southeast Asian retail still depends heavily on brick-and-mortar stores, meaning most sales happen face-to-face, while online sales now dominate in markets such as South Korea.

Boyle also said there was a “serendipitous” element to his career path. While completing an MBA at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney, he wrote his graduate thesis on HP’s strategy before he ever joined the company.

“I visited their European operations in Germany as part of a study tour, and there was something about HP back in those days that I really identified with,” Boyle recalled. “So it was quite serendipitous that the phone rang, and all of a sudden I found myself living in Singapore and working for HP.”

Bullish on print

HP is best known for its printers, which have long been a fixture in offices around the world. Boyle rejected any suggestion that print is dying, saying it remains a staple in sectors such as education and health care.

Since last year, the company has been rolling out AI-powered printers that come with Microsoft Copilot installed, allowing users to print documents from a shared cloud without booting up a laptop and to generate AI summaries from documents scanned on the printer. That pitch fits a broader effort across enterprise hardware to keep workflows moving between physical and digital formats, rather than treating printing as a standalone legacy business.

“AI is now starting to play a role where it can go both ways: from creation to print, and print back to creation,” Boyle said. “You can even edit on the fly.”

Despite that optimism, printing remains a shrinking part of HP’s business. Total print revenue fell 2.2% in the company’s most recent quarter. HP said the decline reflected “demand softness, particularly in China,” as well as “changing consumer behaviors.”

Pushed to the edge

As some of HP’s core businesses mature, the company is turning to AI PCs as a new source of growth.

AI PCs are devices that can handle some AI and machine learning tasks on the device itself, rather than relying entirely on the cloud. HP first introduced its AI laptop lineup in 2024, including the OmniBook X AI PC and HP EliteBook Ultra AI PC.

At the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Aug. 27, interim CEO Bruce Broussard told analysts that HP expects AI PCs to account for 50% of total shipments by the end of the year.

“The AI PCs seem like a good idea with regard to creating value for both the customers (reduced dependence on cloud, lower costs of tokens) and HP itself (premium prices),” said Nitin Pangarkar, an associate professor of business strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS). “Yet profitable ideas are often copied by rivals. This would reduce the margins for HP unless it has proprietary technology, which could serve as a defense against imitators.” AI PCs are currently offered by most hardware manufacturers, including Apple, ASUS, Dell and Lenovo.

Other experts say it remains to be seen how fully HP is integrating AI into its products. “The real test for HP is whether AI becomes an organizing principle for the business, rather than a feature layered onto an existing portfolio,” said Tan Joo Seng, an associate professor of strategy, international business and entrepreneurship at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “Putting an AI label on a PC is relatively easy, but using AI to fundamentally change the customer proposition is much harder.”

Boyle acknowledged that AI PC adoption is uneven across Asia and remains weak in more traditional markets.

“Japan, for example, is a lot more conservative,” he said. “Organizations are waiting for strong proof points before they adopt the tech.”

AI PCs also cost 10% to 30% more than regular PCs because they include a built-in neural processing unit, or NPU.

Boyle argued that the devices are still worth the investment, particularly as companies face rising token costs. Even handling smaller AI tasks locally could reduce the expense of relying on third-party AI providers.

“Cloud and token costs were not a part of IT budgets just a few years ago,” he said. “But they’re costs people now have to think about.”

Edge AI devices also offer lower latency and additional security. By moving AI processing from the cloud to on-board hardware, they eliminate network transit time and roundtrip delays, enabling near-instant response.

“From an IP perspective, many companies are very wary of putting things into the cloud,” Boyle said, adding that AI PCs reduce those risks by keeping data local.

Earlier this year, HP introduced HP IQ, an on-device virtual assistant built on a 20-billion-parameter model that runs entirely on a device instead of in the cloud. Boyle said that reflects how quickly HP expects customers to adopt AI.

“People and agents will be running models 24/7, and having a virtual assistant working round-the-clock for you will become commonplace in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.

Musician at heart

For all his talk of AI PCs and edge computing, Boyle said he remains a musician at heart. While working in HP’s Australia office, he joined a band called Paper Jam, a reference to a printer tray jam.

Boyle still writes a song every year, and his staff performs it. This year, he used Wubble AI to create a track called “Greater Asia Will Amaze Ya,” giving the tool prompts such as “energetic,” “anthem” and “rock.”

“I made the song in literally three minutes—and everyone can’t get it out of their heads,” Boyle said. Still, he said the technology only goes so far.

“The song’s only good because it’s got human performance, which actually makes it meaningful.”

Michael Boyle will speak at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sep. 8.

In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, published at least twice a month, the publication speaks with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they have drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest-growing and most dynamic regions.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com