I am at Lenovo Tech World 2024 this week, and one thing is clear: Lenovo is significantly ahead of its peers not only regarding its AI offerings but with its internal use of AI. Given we believe that AI is a massive accelerator for business, this means Lenovo should be able to move more aggressively with this opportunity and that its customers will be the beneficiaries of a massive potential advantage.
Lenovo showcased the use of AI to help with behavioral analysis and customized education for kids who are currently being badly harmed by social media. But it is Lenovo’s work with AI and sustainability that I’d like to focus on this week given the huge number of painful weather events we’re experiencing.
Applied AI: Avoiding the Big Data, Digital Transformation Problem
Companies in Lenovo’s class typically create concepts that are self-serving. Big Data was meant to sell storage but had little or nothing to do with making efficient use of the data stored. Instead of getting a solution, companies spent millions creating another problem as they ended up like hoarders with massive amounts of unstructured data running up costs with little or no business benefit to anyone but the folks that sold storage.
Digital Transformation was about moving from processes that worked and were manual to processes that used technology without necessarily making the result more efficient or more accurate. Again, the benefit flowed to those that sold technology but not necessarily to the folks that bought it because the process did not include a strong analysis function, so the result’s benefits to the buyer were not assured.
In many ways, AI has been worse with little analysis and massive numbers of failures because AI was not used to define the solution. The focus was on selling stuff, not on improving business operations.
Well, Lenovo is on a different page. Its approach is to use AI first to define a customer’s needs, to create a priority list of where AI is both needed and proficient, and then design solutions based on those priorities to assure a strong ROI.
One of the focus areas for this effort is sustainability, and that resulted in LISSA (Lenovo’s Intelligent Sustainability Solutions Advisor).
Lenovo LISSA
Done right, sustainability solutions should not be a black hole of expenses. More efficient use of materials, recycling and energy savings should also have economic as well as environmental benefits. But companies who are not in the sustainability business often lack the insight and skills necessary to do sustainability well. Lenovo uses AI to craft solutions and one of those solutions is LISSA. Backed by a variety of Lenovo services, including TruScale Device as a Service (DaaS), Asset Recovery, packaging efficiencies, lower-carbon shipping options, lifecycle extensions, and certified refurbishment, Lenovo has created a comprehensive, AI-driven solution to help itself and its customers create far stronger sustainability efforts that are also much more efficient.
The result is a simulation of choices between multiple pathways to achieve the firm’s sustainability goals with greater efficiency, cost savings and potential profitability. The result often highlights pathways to success that might have never surfaced otherwise and a level of success that might have been unachievable without AI.
Wrapping Up: The Lenovo AI Advantage
I have been saying for some time that what is needed in an AI vendor are people who understand and use the technology themselves. AI is not an end in and of itself. It is a tool that requires a set of skills to use properly, and it is not monolithic. There are a growing number of specialized tools that must be used in concert to create a solution.
Defining that solution, which is most often unique to every company, is where the heavy lifting is done, not just the sale and installation of new hardware which is too often misapplied.
Using AI to create these customized solutions is where the industry should be. Sadly, only Lenovo is there (in its class) now. That puts Lenovo in the lead and not just by a little bit.
