We have talked about Lenovo’s “AI for All” strategy (see here) and how strongly the company has positioned itself across verticals, from AI to hardware. In fact, it is the only vendor to achieve this level of diversity. Extending this deep dive into Lenovo’s business, we spoke with its VP of AI Solutions and Services Linda Yao at the annual Lenovo Tech Conference 2024 in Seattle. Linda heads Lenovo’s AI initiatives from the strategy and operations perspective at one of its newest but fast-growing business units – Solutions and Service Group (SSG).

We discussed with Linda the role of SSG and how it complements the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and Intelligent Devices Group (IDG), building a portfolio of solutions and services to solve customer pain points and striking key partnerships in the burgeoning AI landscape.

The Interview

Lenovo’s SSG catalyzing AI innovation with ecosystem play

• SSG brings together all the IT, data and AI-based smart solutions across verticals with digital workplace, hybrid cloud or sustainability solutions.

• Lenovo is taking a consultative outcome-based services approach for its customers to help them choose the right AI solutions and services. This includes expert guidance and a process to develop and deploy a scalable AI system.

• This approach adopts five stages of AI engagement – AI Discover, AI Advisory, AI Fast Start, AI Deploy and Scale, and AI Management.

• On top of this is Lenovo’s TruScale service based on a flexible consumption model for consumer solutions such as peer usage and subscription.

• These SSG’s approaches have helped Lenovo scale its engagement with clients to build AI and IT-based solutions and services on top of the devices and infrastructure into almost $2-billion-per-quarter revenue run-rate at a healthy 20% operating margins.

• Another important success metric for Lenovo has been striking key partnerships and synergies across the AI stack with different ecosystem players from silicon to software, like NVIDIA, AMD, NetApp, RedHat, VMware, NScale, SAP, Veeam and Microsoft.

• With its “Hybrid AI Advantage”, “AI Innovator” and “AI Library” approaches, Lenovo has been successfully able to develop differentiated offerings from AI reference accelerators to ready-to-customize AI solutions to AI agents leveraging enterprise data across platforms.

• Lenovo has seen good traction for these ecosystem initiatives, working with over 60 AI solution providers building more than 165 enterprise AI solutions across 180 countries through more than 30,000 delivery partners.

• Some of the success cases include Lotus Cars, F1Racing, Bridge A.I and Huzhou Central Hospital.

• Many of these solutions come out of and are tested by Lenovo’s largest customer, which is “Lenovo” itself – “Lenovo Powers Lenovo”. Examples here include Lenovo’s Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) tech, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) tech, Lenovo’s ESG navigator and Lenovo Studio AI.

• Apart from this, security and sustainability are key areas where Lenovo is helping its customers through the SSG, as AI is now impacting everything from security to sustainability-led design of solutions.

Analyst takeaways

• AI has become the number one focus area for every stakeholder in the industry, whether it is the CEO (profitable execution), CIO (automate digital transformation) or the CSO (intelligently secure).

• The urgency to adopt and deploy AI at scale is the million-dollar question and it is great to see that Lenovo with its SSG has built a well-planned and well-oiled practice on top of its devices and infrastructure hardware solutions to help enterprises accelerate their AI journeys.

• The end-to-end AI offering with key ecosystem partnerships and the right approaches is helping Lenovo win in the AI era from pocket to cloud.

• Lenovo also has another advantage with equal traction in Western and Asian markets and in China. This gives it instant scale and experience in addition to its inherent strengths.