Lenovo was first established in 1984 with only 11 entrepreneurs. Now hitting its 40-year anniversary, Lenovo has become a multinational corporation with $62 billion in revenue and 77,000 employees worldwide, ranking at 217 in the Fortune Global 500. In 2014, Lenovo began diversifying its business by acquiring Motorola Mobility and IBM’s x86 server division. Despite these significant expansions, many enterprise decision-makers around the world still primarily view Lenovo as the leading consumer PC manufacturer.
Last week, I attended Lenovo’s first APAC analyst briefing in Shanghai. Over two days of insightful sessions, I observed how Lenovo’s strategic investments in AI-powered solutions and related services are rapidly transforming the company into a comprehensive solution provider. This shift complements its rapidly expanding AI PC businesses. For AI leaders in APAC and worldwide, here are key elements of Lenovo’s strategy and offerings to consider when shortlisting vendors for your AI initiatives.
- A “Lenovo Powers Lenovo” AI strategy. Lenovo takes a “drink your own champagne” mindset in its business evolution. Its AI solutions and services achieved strategic business benefits in three areas. First, the personalized and AI-driven online support enhanced customer satisfaction by 10% and increased agent productivity by 15%. Second, the data management initiatives across the value chain tracked over 250 data points for ESG, and the near-real-time 3D visualization of carbon data effectively improved the observability and effectiveness of ESG initiatives. Third, AI/ML solutions helped Lenovo improve the speed of decision-making by 60% and reduce the cost in manufacturing and logistics by 20%, paving the way to an ultra-resilient supply chain.
- A selection of AI-powered solutions. Lenovo’s solutions span four key areas: digital workplace, hybrid cloud, sustainability, and AI-powered verticals including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and smart cities. The solutions in each area not only offer rich features in specific domains. It also incorporates generative AI (genAI) to differentiate user experience and accelerate adoption. For example, in the Care of One Platform within its digital workplace solution, Lenovo uses genAI to deliver highly automated and personalized services for end users, such as the intelligent virtual assistant, preemptive anomaly detection and issue resolution, smart search, and persona-based customer insights.
- An outcomes-driven AI service portfolio. Lenovo aims to help firms be AI-ready by providing a solid path to fully managed, secure, and scalable AI systems. Its AI service portfolio consists of three traditional categories of IT services. An AI advisory services category aims to identify the business cases, define outcomes and roadmaps, and design and build AI building blocks to justify investment; the AI professional services category focuses on implementing a fully secure and scalable AI system; and the AI managed services category targets continued management and outcome optimization of the AI system.
- A growing customer base across the globe with proven outcomes. For Lotus Cars, Lenovo’s Smart Eye, an AI-powered quality inspection solution, achieved 99% accuracy in defect detection and reduced installation errors by 80%, increasing overall manufacturing performance by 50%. For Bridge AI, an e-learning service provider for students with special educational needs (SEN), Lenovo built a solution to evaluate human interactions in real time and automate the customization of 12,000 tasks. As a result, more students can participate in the therapy, with better experiences for SEN students, parents, and therapists.
- A solid software and hardware AI partner ecosystem. For software, Lenovo has built partnerships with over 60 AI solution providers, offering more than 165 enterprise AI solutions, such as Microsoft Copilot+, Red Hat OpenShift AI, and the VMware Private AI platform. Specifically, Lenovo is partnering with Microsoft to bring a range of security offerings to enterprise clients, such as Security Copilot, Azure Lighthouse, and Microsoft Purview. From a hardware perspective, Lenovo is working with industry-leading partners, such as the AI chipsets from NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, as well as Nutanix’s GPT-in-a-Box and NetApp’s AIPod for converged AI infrastructure. Lenovo is part of the Hybrid AI Alliance of NVIDIA as well as its top OVX partners. In addition, Lenovo has also attracted over 30,000 channel and delivery partners into its ecosystem.
- A balanced R&D roadmap for AI innovation. Lenovo’s AI Lab has shaped a comprehensive technology vision across various AI domains, such as machine learning/deep learning, natural language processing and knowledge graphs, computer vision, speech analytics, and an AI platform. Lenovo’s roadmap is closely aligned with its overall business strategy, emphasizing smart solutions. Key focus areas include smart manufacturing, smart infrastructure with a focus on AI servers, and smart internet-of-things capabilities for AI-powered PCs and smartphone devices. It launched the Daystar hexapod robots, powered by large vision models and 5G for industrial inspection. Budget constraints are a persistent challenge for companies with manufacturing as their core revenue stream. To address this, Lenovo collaborates with partners to drive the research and development of essential AI capabilities, including foundational models for generative AI.
Lenovo emphasized that it is not competing with global service integrators such as Infosys and TCS, but with its significant achievements in the AI service market over the past three years, Lenovo has emerged as a promising AI service provider, particularly in the APAC market. Its strength in AI PCs offers unique benefits for helping enterprise clients develop hybrid AI architectures. But in order to enhance its strategy and offerings, Lenovo needs to continue investing in several key areas. These include expanding AI partnerships in the public cloud, advancing the maturity of AI solutions, broadening AI capabilities in emerging fields like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic AI, and improving AI service coverage in areas such as integration with legacy systems and digital process reengineering.
AI adoption is a long journey, and most enterprises require AI platform and service providers as partners to support them throughout this process. Lenovo is transforming itself with AI, and Forrester can help you choose the right partners to accelerate your transformation. Please feel free to request an inquiry with me to discuss your transformation needs further.
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