Michelle Biase, president and managing director of HP Canada Michelle Biase has now been in the president and managing director chair at HP Canada for eighteen months. In that time, the company has grown its Canadian sales team by fifty percent, moved from siloed PC, print, and Poly sellers to a unified One HP go-to-market model, and watched AI PC sales accelerate to nearly two-thirds of PC volume. In this episode of In The Channel, Biase sits down with Robert Dutt to talk about what HP actually learned from seeding AI PCs into partner hands more than a year ago. The candid answer: “It was early days, so we didn’t have a ton of use cases per se come out of that. But I think it really did help the partners to realize the value of AIPCs and help them think about how they’re going to help their customers deploy those devices.” The partners who are now selling AI PCs well, she says, share three common threads: they are educating themselves through programs like HP’s AI MasterClass, they are thinking about future-ready fleet strategies rather than transactional replacements, and they are using persona-based deployment tools to match the right device to the right worker. On HP IQ, which entered early access this spring, Biase positions it as a better-together play across the entire HP ecosystem – print, PC, and Poly – with AI at the edge addressing latency, token cost, and security concerns. She also points to the Elite Board, a keyboard-integrated PC with no built-in monitor, as a cost-effective and security-minded option for the roughly thirty percent of laptop users who never use their screen because they are docked. The pricing conversation is unavoidably central. With HP operating on 30-day price validity windows and memory costs expected to stay elevated, Biase’s guidance to partners is direct: accelerate the demo-to-close cycle, lean on distribution partners for available inventory, and avoid long configure-to-order cycles that risk price changes during the build. She also makes the case for moving from transactional hardware sales to solution-led conversations anchored in the Workforce Experience Platform, which she describes as a way to “change the conversation from being a transactional hardware conversation to really more of a value-added solution conversation.” Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. On today’s show, we’re catching up with a channel leader who’s now been in the chair long enough to know what’s real and what’s still aspiration. Michelle Biase is president and managing director of HP Canada. She returned to the company in December 2024, just as HP was launching its first wave of AI PCs into partner hands. 18 months later, she’s running a sales team that’s 50% larger, steering a unified One HP go-to-market model, and trying to help Canadian partners navigate memory prices that have made hardware procurement feel like a commodities trading desk. We’re going to talk about what partners actually did with those early AI PCs, how the company’s HP IQ onboard AI assistant is landing in the channel, and the reality of running a hardware business in 2026, and the one part of HP’s portfolio she thinks partners are still sleeping on. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Michelle Biase. ROBERT DUTT: Michelle, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. MICHELLE BIASE: Great to see you again, Robert. Happy to be here. ROBERT DUTT: When we first gave those AI PCs to partners, that was the early days, right? MICHELLE BIASE: Yeah, geez, that seems like a long time ago. So those are really the early days of AI PCs, right? As manufacturers, we were rolling out those AI PCs. And the intent originally was to allow partners to really get those devices in their hands so that they could experience what was possible with those devices and really start to play with them and get comfortable and explore what they might offer their customers. And I would say it was early days, and so people were still sort of figuring out what the use cases were at that time and thinking about what was possible. But we did want them to play with some of the built-in tools that we had offered and we still offer as part of our HP PCs, AI PCs. So we had our Poly Studio tools and at that time we had AI Companion. And so we had some tools built in and we wanted to show the power of those tools with AI PC. We wanted people to experience the battery life and run Copilot and understand how the PC was going to respond and be utilized. And so there was a lot of good conversations around the power of the AI PC at that time and really sparked people to think about, okay, we need to get over the hump of the hardware transition and investment and start thinking about how we’re going to move forward with this. And so we had some good experiences. I would say, to be honest, it was early days, so we didn’t have a ton of use cases per se come out of that. But I think it really did help the partners to realize the value of AI PCs and help them to think about how they’re going to help their customers deploy those devices in their environment. So it was really intended to get people rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands on the product. And I think we did accomplish that. ROBERT DUTT: A year on from that experiment, now, what do partners who are having success in selling AI PCs have in common? What are some of those common threads that you’re seeing? MICHELLE BIASE: Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of partners who are doing well, we’re definitely seeing our AI PC volumes increase pretty significantly. So first of all, I would say that those partners are educating themselves. So they’re completing training like HP AI MasterClass, which is a suite of educational series that we offer to help partners and their sellers in their organizations really understand AI and the value. And they’re also working really closely with us on how to help their customers navigate the current environment and prepare for the future. I think partners who are selling AI PCs are really thinking about equipping their customers to be future ready. You know, we’re still learning all the use cases as an industry right now, and customers are going about different ways of kind of figuring out what those use cases are going to be. But we all know that the adoption of AI is going to happen at a rapid pace, it is happening at a rapid pace. And so having the right hardware strategy in place is really important. And so partners are helping their customers, you know, deploy technology that really sets them up for that future ready conversation. And then I think the other thing they’re doing is really helping their customers and guiding them to think about a persona-based fleet deployment strategy. So as we think about, you know, costs increasing, and the, you know, number of options that are out there in terms of devices, we have tools like WXP, which is our Workforce Experience Platform, which is a single pane of glass IT management tool that when deployed can help customers to see in their environment, who within their organization based on persona and workflows and work streams need what type of devices. So maybe not everyone needs an AI PC today. I think that, you know, this tool then helps them to understand who needs an AI PC right now, who needs a refresh, who doesn’t, you know, and really help them to kind of manage the deployment of those devices, you know, considering cost and AI adoption and all the things that customers are considering. So I think those are some of the things partners are doing is really educating themselves, thinking about being future ready, and then thinking about new ways of fleet deployment and management to help their customers navigate current situation. ROBERT DUTT: So since that initial test run, we’ve had the rollout of HP IQ in early access since the spring. The idea being more onboard capabilities, basically running a full LLM on the machine. How is that landing with partners and their customers so far? Is it one of those… is it a today conversation? Is it early adopter? Or is it in that kind of future ready mode that you were just touching on? MICHELLE BIASE: Yeah, HP IQ is a really exciting advancement for us in terms of our One HP strategy. So I would say it’s early days, we’ve just launched it recently at our event. It’s only available on some PCs, so not available on our full fleet of products at this point. But HP IQ really represents HP’s vision for a true better together connected, intelligent workplace experience. So, you know, when you think about, you know, some of the opportunities it presents, one is around leveraging AI at the edge, right? So, you know, we know that as customers are thinking about deploying AI, and I talked to a lot of customers who are going to a more, what I would say is like a distributed rollout model now where instead of it kind of holding the reins, they’re putting AI tools in the hands of their employees and saying, here’s a tool you figure out, you know, how to make this make sense for you in your day to day job, and then having a reaction to their cloud and token costs as a response to that, they’re quickly sort of thinking, okay, well, how are we going to manage security, cost, latency, all these things. And so having functionality work at the edge on the device is an interesting opportunity and something that we’re talking a lot to customers about. So, you know, that’s one opportunity is around AI at the edge. And then the other is really around what I said around better together. So, HP IQ provides this connected opportunity for all of the HP devices across our entire One HP portfoli
