Lenovo unveils ‘AI for All’

Lenovo has unveiled its most comprehensive AI capabilities to date, as well as its vision of ‘AI for All’ at the company’s annual global innovation event Tech World held in Austin, Texas. This year’s event, the 9th the company has hosted, focused on how Lenovo is unleashing the power of AI to drive intelligent transformation in every aspect of our lives and in every industry - from pocket to cloud with purpose-built AI-ready devices, infrastructure, solutions, and services that empower industries, enterprises, and individuals around the world.

As part of a unifying vision of ‘AI for All’, and following its announcement of a further US$1 billion investment in AI innovation, Lenovo shared its dynamic approach to hybrid AI where it believes public, private, and personal foundation models will co-exist in order to enable AI for All. To keep data secure and protect the privacy of users, Lenovo AI can operate exclusively within a device or securely with on-premises servers. In both instances, Lenovo AI learns from data provided by an individual user or through the proprietary data of an enterprise, but ensures no information is shared publicly or enters open training data sets. Not only is this more secure, but the results can be more powerful and personalized.

Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang was joined on stage by leaders from Lenovo’s global partners, including NVIDIA Founder, President and CEO, Jensen Huang; AMD Chair and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and Formula 1® President and CEO, Stefano Domenicali. Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, Qualcomm CEO and President, Cristiano Amon, and Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger joined Tech World via video link.

During his keynote address, Yang shared Lenovo’s plans to deliver industry-leading AI technology to organizations of all sizes, “I am delighted to share our innovative vision for delivering AI for all – individuals and enterprises – around the world, through Lenovo’s pocket-to-cloud computing capabilities, with personalized, tailored knowledge about the individuals and enterprises while protecting privacy and data security. This is also a celebration of partnerships with key leaders in the AI era. Together, we are unleashing the power of AI to help build a smarter, more inclusive, and more sustainable world.”

On stage in Austin, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su spoke about the deep partnership between Lenovo and AMD, “We have a long history of co-innovating with Lenovo, from ThinkSystem in the data center to ThinkStation workstations and ThinkPad laptops. Moving forward, we are excited to extend our collaboration to power AI-optimized solutions across Lenovo’s PC and data center portfolio powered by AMD Ryzen, EPYC™ and Instinct™ processors.”

Via video, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, added, “At Microsoft we are committed to helping people and organizations apply digital technology to adapt and thrive in this new age of AI. That’s why our long-standing partnership with Lenovo is so important. Over the years, we’ve brought Lenovo’s devices and services together with the power of technology to help customers around the world in every industry and across every sector of the economy. And together we will build on these investments to help drive the next level of value for our shared customers.”

Lenovo is working on the next generation of AI-ready and AI-optimized infrastructure to bring powerful, tailored, scalable, and energy-efficient AI to customers around the world through a hybrid approach. The new era of Hybrid AI will help businesses unlock the power of their data anywhere it is created and simplify the path to intelligent transformation by extending AI beyond the cloud and delivering it to businesses at the far edge in real-time. On stage, Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang and NVIDIA CEO and Founder Jensen Huang announced an expanded partnership with new, hybrid solutions and engineering collaboration to deliver the power of generative AI to every enterprise.

As a time to market partner with NVIDIA, Lenovo will deliver fully integrated systems that bring AI-powered computing to everywhere data is created, from the edge to the cloud, helping businesses easily deploy custom generative AI applications that drive innovation and transformation across any industry. Through the collaboration, Lenovo and NVIDIA will create next-generation systems based on NVIDIA’s flexible MGX modular reference design to deliver a wide range of robust and secure solutions for the most demanding generative AI workloads, helping businesses implement cognitive decisions at scale with NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

Together, the companies are also empowering businesses to easily deploy AI with confidence and begin their AI-driven transformations with the new Lenovo AI Professional Services Practice. Offering a breadth of services, solutions and platforms, the practice helps businesses of all sizes navigate the AI landscape, find the right solutions, and put AI to work for their organizations quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale, bringing AI from concept to reality.

Lenovo demonstrated the future of AI-ready devices and AI-powered features, including a vision of the future AI PC that will boost productivity, streamline workflow, and safeguard data, and a demo of Personal AI Twin. This is accomplished with AI interactions on the keyboard and natural language from the end-user as well as a new concept feature called AI NOW, which is a personal AI twin (AI assistant) solution for AI PCs. The AI uses personalized and private inferencing models based on a user’s own on-device knowledge base and fine-tuned models and protects the end user with data security and privacy protection.

Alongside the AI device demonstrations Lenovo also unveiled a smartphone adaptative display concept that can be bent and shaped into different forms depending on users’ needs and was built upon the display and mechanical innovations from Lenovo foldable devices and rollable concepts, as well as updates to the company’s total solution for AI-powered motion capture, Project Chronos. Lenovo also shared its work in the wider tech ecosystem with partners such as NVIDIA, where Lenovo’s central compute unit will be running on NVIDIA’s DRIVE Thor platform, the world’s most powerful in-vehicle computer.

As part of its focus on smart solutions, Lenovo announced its vision of Enterprise AI Twin – AI applications that have in-depth knowledge about an enterprise and keep that knowledge private and secure. It finds and extracts relevant information within your enterprise, from devices, edge and private cloud, synthesizes them into assessments and conclusions, and proposes solutions. The AI Twin can be used for a wide variety of scenarios – from helping employees book travel plans that comply with company policies and fit individual preferences, to supply chain teams mitigating risks based on public AI information such as weather patterns, together with enterprise AI that looks at customer orders and the impact of weather on shipments, parts arriving, transportation disruptions, etc.

Alongside CEO Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo CTO and business group leaders shared their view of AI for All:

Dr Yong Rui, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, commented; “In summary, we believe the future AI will involve a hybrid of public, private, and personal foundation models (FM) working together. Our hybrid AI service will leverage the three types of FM, empower AI applications across cloud, edge, and devices with personal twin and enterprise twin. Lenovo would like to build this Hybrid AI ecosystem along with partners, to unleash the potential of foundation models and benefit both our industry and daily life.”

Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, shared Lenovo’s vision for the next generation of AI solutions. Through accelerating the new era of IT with purpose-built AI-ready infrastructure that goes beyond the data center to the edge, Lenovo is helping businesses unlock the power of their data. With the help of partners like Dr. Jonas Juselius, CTO at Oceanbox and Dr. Bernd Geiger, CEO and CTO at semafora systems, Skaugen shared the impact of powerful AI solutions on business outcomes.

“Regardless of where you do your AI, regardless of whether you want general purpose or highly customized compute Lenovo is offering turnkey solutions – enabling AI everywhere for all,” Skaugen said. “Through our own cutting-edge AI technology innovation and together with a vast network of best-in-class partners, new Lenovo Hybrid AI solutions are creating a faster and more flexible path to generative AI by bringing data-center level AI to the source of business data anywhere.”

Ken Wong, Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group, discussed the evolving tech landscape and announced Lenovo’s newest, AI-powered offerings that are helping companies harness AI to enhance business operations and improve digital experiences. The offerings included:

• AI Professional Services Practice, in collaboration with NVIDIA, helps customers fast track AI implementation from concept to results.

• Care of One Platform is a first of its kind AI-powered solution that provides insights and support to help companies create the optimal work environment and enhance employee experience and productivity.

• Sustainability AI Engine helps companies visualize the influence of business choices that could impact their sustainability objectives and choose the best sustainability options to achieve their desired outcome.

"AI brings exciting possibilities but also increased urgency and complexity for today's CIOs. Lenovo has the experience, the expertise, and the end-to-end solutions to put AI to work in all the right ways—fast," Wong said.

Luca Rossi, Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, reinforced the significance of AI-powered devices. During live demonstrations of both Project Chronos and the Motorola adaptative display concept with a generative AI-themed demo, Lenovo showcased the power of AI solutions and its position as a leader in innovation. With participation from Formula 1 Director of Strategic Technical Ventures, Pete Samara, Rossi highlighted how Lenovo’s smarter technology and solutions fuel the world’s most technologically advanced sport and enhance the fan experience, such as with virtual reality. Rossi also spoke with Joseph Artuso, Chief Commercial Officer of OpenBCI, about how Lenovo’s ThinkStation workstation line-up gives every business on-premise, scalable AI solutions used to develop and operate foundation models that drive the future of AI-powered computing. Through these innovations and partnerships, Lenovo can deliver powerful on-device capabilities.

“Lenovo is poised to win in the AI device space with knowledge and experiences tailored to you. Our future AI devices will never stop learning and will host a personal foundational model that makes them unique to you while protecting your privacy. And true to Lenovo’s unwavering commitment to innovation, we’re providing future AI devices with even more natural and intuitive interaction capabilities for a better overall experience,” said Luca Rossi, President of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group. “Lenovo aims to have the most comprehensive and connected AI-enabled portfolio across consumer and business needs. To do that, we’ll continue to work closely with partners to lead this transformational shift in our industry.”