Alaa Bawab, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), Middle East and Africa shares his expert insights on the Lenovo and AI journey
Artificial intelligence is the new buzzword of 2024 with every organization taking some steps or the other to integrate the benefits of AI into their everyday operations. Lenovo on the other hand has embraced AI from all aspects over the past few years, embedding it into products, solutions and services including edge, cloud and network.
The history of AI
Looking back into the history of AI is an interesting journey. While it may be strange to believe, the foundations of modern AI were set as early as the 1950s, by researchers Alan Turing and John McCartly. However, at this time AI was just rules and logic used to mimic human reasoning. While the 80s saw a relatively quiet period for AI, in the 90’s AI resurged with the advent of machine learning techniques and neural networks. Since then, AI has rapidly evolved to become one that we know today, making huge breakthroughs in natural language processing, computer vision, robotics and many more.
Today AI holds a very important role in the transformative potential of various industries. Through advancements in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks and more, AI systems today have achieved remarkable feats in natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous decision-making, with Chat GPT being a great example. AI today has been integrated into various sectors, from healthcare and finance to transportation and even entertainment.
Lenovo has been actively invested in this trend changing growth taking steps to drive their edge computing and hybrid cloud services, which deliver to customers AI-enabled solutions that will accelerate their modernization goals giving them a strong competitive advantage and bringing tomorrow’s technology today.
2017 – 2019
Lenovo’s AI journey started in 2017, where the brand provided its customers the choice of end-to-end data centers in a new portfolio that supports High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. By encouraging the adoption of these technologies, Lenovo enabled their customers to harness the intelligence revolution, exploring what AI is truly capable of. In 2018, Lenovo then showcased its success of AI Solutions at Tech World in Beijing highlighting key technologies in healthcare, retail, and engineering. Furthermore, in 2019 Lenovo also partnered with the China Southeast University team to set up and establish the School of AI and Institute of AI.
2020 – 2022
2020 saw a big step up for Lenovo and AI, where the brand launched new solutions that were purpose-driven for analytics and AI workloads. This primarily included the new ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers. By 2021, Lenovo progressed in its AI journey even further, with the launch of five ready-to-deploy AI solutions across a range of applications and industry verticals, such as manufacturing, healthcare, retail and financial services.
2022 saw the launch of Lenovo’s AI Innovators Program, a partner focused ecosystem that enabled Lenovo’s customers to better deploy artificial intelligence. This included an ecosystem of software partners who collaborated with Lenovo to deliver tailored, proven and ready-to-deploy AI solutions for customers for their operations including computer vision, audio recognition, prediction, security and virtual assistants. The program, spread across multiple industries, now has over 45 partners with more than 100 AI solutions and represents more than $1 billion in venture capitalist investment. Additionally, this also included global partnerships with Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and other large technology players.
2023 – Future
2023 saw the unveiling of new two ThinkSystem solutions as a part of new data management solutions to enable AI workloads. The year also saw Lenovo growing AI infrastructure to over $2 billion as well having the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio. 2023 was also a big year for Lenovo’s future planning, with the company investing $1 billion over the course of three years to accelerate AI deployment while also committing $100 million towards further development of the AI Innovators program.
With a strong focus on preparing for the future, Lenovo is has strongly cemented its position at the forefront of the AI revolution, driving innovation and shaping the next era of technology. However, at the same time, Lenovo ensures that this evolutionary change that we are going through also fosters the need for responsible AI development, equal access and proper ethics, all of which together will contribute towards the betterment of the society.
