Lenovo unveils ‘AI for All’ strategy 

Lenovo has unveiled a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities, and an “AI for All” strategy. 

At the company’s 9th annual global innovation event, Tech World, held in Austin, Texas, Lenovo announced AI solutions stretching from pocket to cloud, with purpose-built AI-ready devices, infrastructure, and services.

It announced a further US$1-billion investment in AI innovation, with a dynamic approach to hybrid AI. This means 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 will have the capacity to 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 personalised.

Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang was joined on stage at the event 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.

“This is… a celebration of partnerships with key leaders in the AI era,” said Yang in his keynote address. “Together, we are unleashing the power of AI to help build a smarter, more inclusive, and more sustainable world.”

He said Lenovo was working on the next generation of AI-ready and AI-optimised 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. It will 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, Yang and Huang announced an expanded partnership with new, hybrid solutions and engineering collaboration to deliver the power of generative AI to every enterprise.

As a result, 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. 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 demanding generative AI workloads.

The new Lenovo AI Professional Services Practice is offering a breadth of services, solutions and platforms, helping businesses of all sizes bring AI from concept to reality.

Lenovo demonstrated AI interactions on the keyboard and natural language from the end-user as well as a new concept feature called AI NOW, a personal AI twin (AI assistant) solution for AI PCs. The AI uses personalised and private inferencing models based on a user’s own on-device knowledge base.

Lenovo also unveiled a smartphone adaptative display concept that can be bent and shaped into different forms depending on users’ needs. It was built on 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. 

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.

Dr Yong Rui, senior vice president and chief technology officer, said: “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.”