MS is making a strong push in AI business, e.g. I was told their salespeople are highly incentivized to sell copilot products, and not much else. At a big company that is strategic partner & key account (etc.) for MS, we are looking at MS Dynamics implementation for CRM, and they barely answered our emails, while on a copilot related project they are throwing people at us.

They are betting they can make a lot of money from it if they capture and monetize the corporate AI market early (whatever that might actually be), the demand / customer need is definitely not high currently.

I suppose a better way to phrase it is- why is an NPU necessary? What does it enable these machines to do that a Surface sans NPU can’t?

It can basically handle neural network/AI tasks more efficiently than a regular CPU/GPU can.

And yes, these are business-oriented. But my question remains the same - is built-in AI a feature that businesses, as consumers of this product, are asking for?

Yes, deserved or not, AI is currently on everyone's mind in the business world. Working as a software dev, every client these days asks if we "do AI", so we pretty much have to reluctantly learn and use it. And many of those clients are very protective of their data and don't just want to put them on some web service, like OpenAI. So there's certainly demand for locally running AI tasks.

It can run leela chess zero faster, for example (if it's implemented)