This past week, Lenovo announced its Lenovo AI for all initiative with an increased investment of $1B over three years as the company fleshes out the solution. This solution will include AI devices, AI-ready solutions, and AI-optimized computing infrastructure. Over the last year as generative AI has gone vertical, Lenovo has been uniquely preferred because of the completeness of its solutions and the high success rate of the projects in which it was involved.
Let’s talk about what makes Lenovo unique and why the company, suddenly, has become somewhat of a unique AI solution powerhouse.
The Problem with AI
The biggest problem with AI is that in these early stages (and with few exceptions (of which Lenovo is one), it is a case of the blind leading the blind. Both IT and most of the companies that serve enterprises, with some notable exceptions that include IBM thanks to watsonx, are all new to AI. Some companies like Dell are throwing lots of hardware at the problem but providing little in the way of relevant knowledge or understanding because they are as new to AI as their customers are.
As IBM discovered when it first brought Watson to market several decades ago, the cost in AI isn’t the hardware or software, it is in developing the training set which currently costs an estimated $100M for an LLM, easily eclipsing the cost of the rest of the deployment.
This means that, right now, what companies most need is experience, not technology, and particularly not AI technology from a company that has yet to understand it.
Lenovo’s Trump Cards
Lenovo has been a heavy AI user for decades, mostly in manufacturing. It has had some of the most aggressively automated factories and warehouses currently in the market and this is what has given it a leg up with the current AI wave.
Early on, Lenovo understood the advantages of deep partnership with NVIDIA (currently the leader in AI technology) and recognized both the opportunities and threats this technology represents. As a result, it has already released over 165 turnkey Hybrid, Cloud and Edge AI solutions with over 50 unique partners that are each expert in some part of the resulting solutions.
Lenovo also uniquely understood the advantage of partnering with Qualcomm early on as that company ramped up what has become the leading desktop PC AI solution in the market tied to Microsoft’s Copilot+ effort.
Several other Lenovo advantages have recently come to light. They include a vastly expanded services portfolio designed to take customers from well-thought-through concept to full production in 12 months using a service branded “Lenovo AI Discover.” At the heart of these services is Lenovo’s “AI Fast Start” offering that target enterprise customers, NIMs and AI innovators mostly tied to NVIDIA-based solutions. And Lenovo also has a strong AI partner offering curated solutions properly sized for the company and project they are designed to address.
Finally, AI requires a ton of processing power and develops a lot of heat, which is problematic for existing data centers. Here, too, Lenovo stands out with its “Neptune” warm water liquid cooling solutions that evolved from the technology it acquired from IBM and better allows these solutions to drop into existing data centers without requiring massive structural changes or traditional cooling increases.
Wrapping Up:
Companies are rolling out AI en masse, but I’m still seeing reports that most of these efforts continue to fail because both the company buying them and the companies selling them are still learning by doing. One of the companies that stands out as different in this regard is Lenovo due to its own decades-long and aggressive use of AI which allowed it to hit this technology wave running and helped it develop solutions that meet or exceed expectations rather than failing as most still appear to do.
AI will be the big differentiator, but to get a positive result, the AI deployment has to work, and the “learning on the job” method isn’t working at the moment. Lenovo isn’t learning on the job which is why it’s currently favored ahead of its peers during this massive AI wave.
