CES 2026: Lenovo bends the screen

The Sphere in Las Vegas overwhelms the senses by design. When Lenovo opened its Tech World keynote inside the 15,000-square-metre dome at CES 2026, the venue amplified every idea on display. Images curved overhead and spilled into peripheral vision, surrounding the audience with a presentation that moved rapidly between personal devices, enterprise systems and global partnerships.

On stage, the focus rested firmly on software and scale. Lenovo and Motorola Qira were introduced as a personal AI designed to operate across PCs, smartphones, tablets and wearables. Hybrid AI architecture followed, with processing distributed between device, private infrastructure and cloud. Inferencing servers, AI services and large deployments for sport and entertainment completed the picture.

“For each of us, AI will boost our creativity, sharpen our intuition, and inspire our imagination, because it now draws from our unique language, habits, experiences, and memories,” said Lenovo chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang.

Beneath that message sits an architecture Lenovo describes as Hybrid AI. Processing shifts according to workload and sensitivity. Local execution reduces reliance on constant connectivity. Private systems support data governance. Public platforms provide scale. The structure reflects a model designed to operate across varied environments rather than idealised conditions.

“This is what we call intelligent model orchestration and is the foundation of any AI super agent,” said Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu. “It enables an AI agent to access a pool of specialised models, identify the best one for the user’s need of the moment, and optimise performance.”

That architecture carries through into Lenovo’s expanded AI PC portfolio developed with Intel. Aura Edition devices, powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, adjust performance as workloads shift. Video calls, creative work and data analysis follow different optimisation paths handled on the device itself, with the emphasis placed on responsiveness during everyday use.

Said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan: “When we began working together on Aura Edition, it was a shared vision to create an incredibly intelligent PC experience for customers, blending Lenovo’s design leadership with Intel’s AI performance at every level.”

Earlier in the week, ahead of the keynote, Lenovo had already shown Gadget how some of this thinking could surface in hardware. In private demonstrations, the company previewed rollable and shape-shifting device concepts that explore how screens might adapt as work expands and contracts.

Those demonstrations read as physical expressions of the same ideas presented on stage Intelligence distributed across systems, and devices adjusting to context.

The ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept extends its screen vertically, turning a conventional laptop into a tall workspace suited to layered tasks. Documents stack naturally. Video calls sit above active work. The display retracts once the additional space no longer serves the task.

The Legion Pro Rollable Concept applies the same logic horizontally. Its screen unfurls from both sides to reach the width of a competition-grade gaming monitor, while retaining the footprint of a portable machine. The mechanism focuses on adapting the display to the activity rather than fixing the user to a single format.

These concepts were previewed before Tech World, yet they align closely with the strategy presented on stage. They place AI inside the behaviour of the device itself, expressed through movement and form rather than menus and prompts.

In the keynote, Lenovo illustrated how that intelligence scales beyond personal devices. As official technology partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026 and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027, the company unveiled Football AI Pro, built on its AI Factory. The system analyses millions of data points across more than 2,000 metrics, translating match footage and statistics into simulations for analysts, coaches and players.

The partnership extends into fan-facing experiences scheduled for later this year, particularly around the World Cup finals in the United States. Personalised highlights, AI-assisted stadium navigation and enhanced broadcast perspectives place AI closer to spectators.

Formula 1 provided another example of AI at scale. Lenovo’s deployment of Neptune liquid cooling supports high-performance computing for global broadcasts reaching more than 820-million fans, with efficiency taking priority as computing demand rises.

Lenovo also used CES to demonstrate its own internal applications of AI. The iChain supply chain platform coordinates thousands of components across more than 180 markets, predicting disruptions and optimising logistics through multi-agent systems. Alongside it, a six-legged inspection robot deployed by an energy provider showed how AI operates in hazardous environments while maintaining high detection accuracy.

Enterprise infrastructure tied these threads together. Lenovo announced a portfolio of inferencing-optimised servers designed to place AI processing closer to where data originates. Compact edge systems serve retail, telecoms and industrial settings. High-density data centre servers support large language models. Lenovo Agentic AI Services wrap those systems with lifecycle support and governance.

A collaboration with Nvidia AI Cloud Gigafactory reinforces that direction, combining infrastructure, accelerated computing and services for cloud providers running large AI workloads.

Across keynote and briefings alike, the message stayed consistent. AI appeared positioned as something distributed across devices, infrastructure and environments, with hardware and software adapting together.

“For a business, the transformation is even more profound,” said Yang. “AI is going beyond process management and workflow optimisation. It empowers organisations to use proprietary data generated from their own operations and apply their own decision logic to become a self-learning, self-reinventing entity.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge.