The tech industry has leaped to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services, but the technology isn't always an automatic revenue booster.

Intel, for example, has seen the rising popularity of AI workloads detract from customer interest in its standard compute offerings. "Big cloud customers, in particular, have put a lot of energy into building out their high-end AI training environments. And that is putting more of their budgets focused or prioritized into the AI portion of their build-out," CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

Intel reported $12.9 billion in Q2 revenue, down 15% compared to last year. Gelsinger explained the "near-term wallet share focus on AI accelerators" has taken demand away from the company's general purpose cloud computing CPUs, and he expects those CPU sales will continue to decline into a "soft" third quarter.

That revenue stream should recover by Q4, however, with the CEO touting Intel's "accelerated product portfolio" as "well-positioned" to capture market share in 2024. By building an open ecosystem founded on silicon that optimizes performance, cost and security, Intel aims to "democratize AI from cloud to enterprise, edge and client," Gelsinger said.

But at the end of the day, Gelsinger doesn't see the boom in AI accelerators as a genuine threat to Intel's longstanding focus areas. "This is a near-term surge that we expect will balance over time," he said.

In the company's eyes, AI is a workload – not a market – and will affect all aspects of Intel's business. Despite the current trend, Gelsinger doubled down on AI as part of Intel's broader strategy.

"We're seeing real opportunity for the CPU as that workload balances over time between CPU and [AI] accelerator. And obviously, we have a strong position to democratize AI across our entire portfolio of products," he said.

To that point, Intel plans to ramp up its participation in the AI accelerator market with its Flex, MAX and Gaudi product portfolios – the last of which "is gaining a lot of momentum," Gelsinger said. "We now have over $1 billion of pipeline," he added, which is six-times higher than Q1.

But investors remain concerned about the cautious server trends currently impacting Intel. If AI chips dramatically increase productivity and draw demand away from CPUs, how can Intel continue increasing unit sales?

According to Gelsinger, AI will drive workloads across a broad spectrum of applications, and it won't be any more threatening to the CPU than virtualization was.

"If you think about a DGX platform, the leading edge AI platform, it includes CPUs, right? Why? Head nodes, data processing, [and] data prep dominate certain portions of the workload," he explained. "AI is going to be in every hearing aid in the future, including mine," he added.