HP has been searching for a permanent chief executive for about six months.
Former CEO Enrique Lores retired in February, and HP appointed board member Bruce Broussard as interim CEO. The board formed a search committee and retained an executive search firm, but a permanent replacement is yet to be named.
Research suggests that filling a Fortune 500 CEO position often takes six to nine months. That does not necessarily mean HP’s search has been going badly or is excessively overdue. CEO searches at large public companies can take time, especially when boards consider candidates from several industries.
Still, the delay raises an awkward question: Is HP having trouble finding the right person, or persuading that person to take the job?
HP has said little publicly about the process.
The next CEO will inherit a daunting set of challenges. This is not a typical turnaround assignment where a new leader cuts costs, streamlines operations, and restores discipline. HP already knows how to do those things.
The harder job is deciding what HP should become as the printing business continues its long decline and the PCs settle into the economics of a mature category. Finding a meaningful new growth business must be the next CEO’s first priority.
HP’s Strategic Trap
HP remains a large, profitable, and technically capable company. It has one of the strongest brands in technology, global distribution, deep commercial relationships, a massive installed base, sophisticated supply-chain operations, and generations of hardware-engineering expertise.
Recent performance does not point to an imminent financial crisis. HP reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $14.4 billion, up 9% from a year earlier. Personal Systems revenue increased 13% to $10.2 billion, driven by AI PCs and the Windows 11 upgrade cycle. Printing generated $4.2 billion with an operating margin of 18.3%.
However, those numbers can mask the deeper problem: PC unit volume declined 7% year over year despite revenue growth. Consumer printing revenue fell 10% year over year, while total printing hardware units dropped 7%. Better pricing, product mix, and commercial demand helped HP. Those levers can support earnings, but they cannot produce endless growth.
AI PCs matter, but every major PC vendor will sell them. They represented 44% of HP’s shipments in the second quarter, yet AI functionality is quickly becoming a category requirement for all PC OEMs rather than a durable source of differentiation.
The next CEO cannot confuse participation in a technology transition with ownership of it.
HP can sell powerful AI PCs without changing its long-term growth profile. It can make printers smarter, add services, improve its commercial mix, and reduce costs.
Those moves may protect margins, but they will not create the substantial revenue growth HP ultimately needs.
That is the strategic decision facing the board: HP can remain an efficient PC-and-print company, manage two mature franchises, and return cash to shareholders. The company already missed major waves in smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, and autonomous digital AI.
Or — it can use its legacy businesses to finance a serious effort to build its next growth engine, potentially in physical AI robotics, ambient computing, or AI wearables.
HP’s Real Challenge Is Cultural
The next CEO will inherit another hurdle that is harder to measure: HP’s intensely conservative management culture.
HP has spent decades mastering large hardware businesses. Its systems reward predictability, cost control, channel execution, launch discipline, and quarterly performance.
Those capabilities remain valuable. Unfortunately, they can also create resistance to disruptive ideas.
Large hardware companies naturally want new initiatives to fit existing financial targets, sales channels, compensation systems, and management processes. They often evaluate unfamiliar businesses using the economics of businesses they already understand.
That becomes a liability when a company needs to build something fundamentally different. Software subscriptions, intelligent devices, commercial wearables, robotics, and physical AI require continuous development, faster experimentation, protected investment, customer-success teams, and a greater tolerance for uncertainty. They cannot be managed like another PC line or printer program.
HP’s challenge is not simply choosing the right market. It must build an operating model capable of winning in that market.
New businesses may need separate leadership, dedicated funding, different performance measures, and protection from premature integration into HP’s traditional structure.
An aggressive CEO could quickly discover that changing HP’s direction will require leaders experienced in creating and scaling new businesses.
That change may involve replacing otherwise capable executives who are unwilling or unable to support concentrated, higher-risk businesses. It may require dismantling decision structures designed to shoot holes in new ideas rather than develop them. It may also mean killing respectable programs that consume resources but will never become meaningful businesses.
This is where the CEO search becomes especially difficult. The board may want a bold strategist. But will it support that person when the strategy disrupts internal power structures, pressures near-term margins, or redirects capital away from familiar businesses?
To be blunt, HP needs a disruptive leader who knows how to disrupt a company.
HP Needs Its Next Growth Engine
HP already has sensible initiatives underway in commercial PCs, AI PCs, Poly collaboration products, device lifecycle services, security, subscriptions, industrial print, and the Workforce Experience Platform. Those efforts should continue.
Still, most simply extend HP’s existing businesses. They can improve attachment rates, recurring revenue, and customer retention without materially expanding the company’s addressable market.
HP needs an adjacent growth platform that can deliver durable growth within a few years and a larger bet that could reshape the company over the next decade. Meeting and conversation intelligence is a natural near-term opportunity. HP already owns Poly, giving it cameras, headsets, microphones, and meeting-room hardware. NearSense adds proximity and contextual awareness.
Potential growth platforms beyond HP’s core PC and printing businesses
HP could move beyond meeting hardware into software that reduces friction, captures decisions, assigns actions, and tracks whether commitments become completed work.
The objective should not simply be getting more people into a meeting. The goal should be determining whether the meeting was needed, who should have attended, what decisions were made, which actions were assigned, and whether the work was completed. That would likely require acquisitions in meeting intelligence, workflow automation, and AI scheduling.
Doing so would also give HP direct experience building a hardware-enabled subscription platform, something the company has historically struggled to do at meaningful scale. From there, HP could expand into commercial wearables. A small AI capture device, smart badge, specialized headset, or pair of commercial smart glasses could connect physical conversations and frontline work to enterprise systems.
The strategic lesson is simple: Use purpose-built hardware to create a recurring software-and-services relationship, which in turn allows HP to own more of the solution stack.
Apple has demonstrated how powerful that model can be.
HP should avoid another broad consumer-device experiment. It should focus on commercial workflows where hands-free computing creates measurable value, including field service, manufacturing, healthcare documentation, training, inspection, and remote assistance.
Beyond the Smartphone
A more disruptive opportunity would be an ambient computing device that reduces reliance on the smartphone.
Smartphones are not disappearing anytime soon, but they have become overloaded with apps, notifications, authentication, communications, photography, search, payments, and AI interaction. Their interfaces still require users to stop what they are doing, look at a screen, and navigate software.
Ambient computing could change that model. Imagine an HP device that combines voice, vision, proximity sensing, contextual AI, secure identity, and always-on connectivity.
Such a device could take the form of lightweight glasses, a wearable clip, an intelligent headset, or an entirely new form factor.
The device would understand where the user is, what equipment is nearby, what conversation is taking place, and which task needs to be completed. It could capture information, retrieve relevant knowledge, summarize conversations, manage nearby systems, and coordinate workflows without forcing the user to open multiple applications.
Few companies have HP’s engineering depth to pursue such a category. HP understands personal computing, industrial design, audio, cameras, security, enterprise device management, edge processing, global sourcing, and large-scale manufacturing.
Its purchase of Humane’s AI platform, technical talent, and intellectual property also gives HP assets that could support multimodal and ambient computing experiences.
The mistake would be recreating the failed AI Pin or shipping a new gadget without a compelling workflow. Instead, the company should begin with commercial users whose jobs require hands-free computing, then expand the platform over time.
It should own the device-management layer, security, customer relationships, operational data, and recurring services. HP can partner on foundational AI models, cloud infrastructure, silicon, and other technologies it does not need to control.
This approach has the potential to eventually integrate meeting intelligence, wearables, ambient devices, and robotics into a unified platform. The progression is logical:
Meeting intelligence enables HP to comprehend the coordination of knowledge work.
Commercial wearables extend this intelligence to physical work environments.
Ambient computing mitigates the reliance on screens and applications.
Robotics expands the platform’s capabilities from assisting individuals to coordinating work performed by both humans and machines.
The larger opportunity is not simply the future of office work. It is the future of human and machine work.
HP Needs a Platform Builder
HP does not need another legacy executive who plays not to lose, acts primarily as a cost cutter, or manages the company like a traditional PC business. It needs a hardware-and-software platform builder with direct experience scaling subscription revenue.
The successful candidate must understand supply chains, channel strategy, product reliability, and global operations.
That person must also understand annual recurring revenue, customer acquisition costs, churn, retention, software margins, product adoption, and customer success.
HP has spent years talking about subscriptions and services. The next CEO must know how to turn those concepts into a material business targeting higher-value workflows.
The leader will also need strong acquisition judgment.
HP will likely need to acquire software capabilities, customers, intellectual property, and specialized talent. The goal should not be to add more products to an already broad portfolio. It should be acquiring strategic assets HP cannot build or take to market quickly enough on its own.
HP’s sales force needs to develop the muscles to drive workflow/solutions-oriented sales conversations. The new CEO will have to ensure that a newly acquired business is not smothered by legacy HP processes, which could dull its impact.
Final Thoughts
HP’s problem is not a shortage of ideas. It is spreading investment across too many reasonable initiatives instead of committing enough resources to one capable of changing the company.
HP cannot drift through another year. The company said in late 2025 that it planned to eliminate 4,000 to 6,000 jobs by the end of fiscal 2028 and save about $1 billion annually. That may improve efficiency, but restructuring cannot replace growth.
The board needs to move with urgency. The longer interim leadership remains in place, the greater the temptation to preserve continuity, delay major commitments, and continue optimizing the current portfolio. Stability has value during a transition. It is not a long-term strategy.
HP needs a CEO willing to tell the board, investors, and employees that better execution in PCs and printing will not be enough.
That person must challenge the company’s assumptions, replace leaders who cannot support the new direction, and create structures that protect emerging businesses from HP’s traditional culture.
Finding someone with the technical credibility, operating discipline, and appetite for disruption to do all of that will not be easy. Convincing that person that HP’s board will actually allow it may be even harder.
HP cannot cost-cut its way to relevance. It cannot repurchase enough shares to create a new growth market. Nor should it assume that adding AI features to familiar products amounts to reinvention.
Ironically, the new CEO will need to revive the attributes that made HP great in the early days of the company: cutting-edge, reliable products, pioneering hardware and technology, continuous product innovation, aggressive leadership, solving real problems and, most importantly, employees empowered to innovate and take chances.
What comes after the PC may matter more to HP’s future than building a better PC.
The bottom line is the next HP CEO must be ready to answer that question quickly, confidently, and without excessive deference to the status quo.
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