Lenovo North American President Ryan McCurdy Talks Silicon Diversity, AI’s Ramp-Up, And The Great PC Refresh

'The reality is an enormous amount of the install base is aged. And running the most modern AI experiences in a way that is optimized needs modern hardware. So our sales and marketing, go to market is more around this collection of modern hardware will allow you to experience the best version of the AI PC,' Lenovo North American President Ryan McCurdy tells CRN.

As all eyes in the PC world look to 2025 as the year of the great refresh, Lenovo North America President Ryan McCurdy said driving that demand will be enterprises realizing that to extract the highest value from AI, employees need a device that can meet operational demands of the software.

“The reality is an enormous amount of the install base is aged. And running the most modern AI experiences in a way that is optimized needs modern hardware,” he told CRN. “So our sales and marketing, go-to-market is more around this collection of modern hardware will allow you to experience the best version of the AI PC.”

The tech industry veteran joined Lenovo in August 2023 after departing Intel where he spent more than 20 years. McCurdy now leads the company’s efforts in North America including its commercial sales force which relies on the channel for about 80 percent of its revenue.

McCurdy said this is the year of the AI PC, which is arriving at a critical moment as the largest-ever installed base of 1.5 billion PCs worldwide is aging and the great PC migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is underway.

“What you can kind of expect in 2025 is for there to be some more momentum around things that can actually improve productivity in business, and that's when consumers and customers are going to pull the trigger, when they can really see how it's going to benefit them,” he said.

[RELATED: Lenovo’s Blockbuster Plan To Acquire Infinidat: 7 Things To Know]

During the most recent earnings call Lenovo said it grew PC sales 12 percent with $13.5 billion in quarterly revenue that includes tablets and smartphones. Lenovo said its PC sales last quarter got a big boost from government stimulus measures in China. There 14 percent of all notebook sales were Lenovo’s five-feature, intelligent agent AI PCs. Lenovo expects AI PCs to make up approximately 80 percent of the PC landscape by 2027.

“We have a lot of excitement, which hopefully we'll talk about around AI and the use cases. Not just AI PCs as like, a high-level messaging, but we're actually seeing the products and what you can do with them. So there's just a lot of momentum. I think, as we go into the year, this is an exciting time for the industry and innovation. But I think from a business cycle standpoint, I think the table is set, if you will.”

Lenovo also announced its intentions to buy Israeli-based enterprise storage player Infinidat on Jan. 16. The company was founded by Moshe Yanai, who is also one of the founders of Dell’s 2016 storage acquisition, EMC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and the transaction must be approved by regulators.

Here is CRN’s conversation with McCurdy, edited for length and clarity:

Lenovo has debuted some outside-the-box designs here beyond the clamshell case or 2-in-1 design with the rollable screen. Are concepts like this going to drive the PC refresh that the company sees coming this year?

Well, I’m glad you’re noticing it. I do feel like this week the press is noticing it. I'm seeing the headlines, and I think the industry watchers appreciate the innovation and some of the creativity that's coming out of our products.

The one that seems like it's getting a lot is the ThinkBook Plus with the rollable screen, seeing that everywhere. But maybe if we just back up, I think, a year ago, we were sitting here talking about the dawn of the AI PC era. Now we're a year later, it's fun to see that we're now seeing a much more broad portfolio of AI PCs.

Not only our portfolio of consumer, SMB, public sector, large accounts, corporate, but also from different silicon vendors. We have basically the full spectrum covered, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD.

From a refresh standpoint, we still see this amazing opportunity that's in front of us. Multiple potential tailwinds. You have a very, very large install base that's ready to be refreshed period full stop. Don't need anything else. But wait, there's more. And we have this Win 11 transition. We have a Win 10 end of service.

We have a lot of excitement, which hopefully we'll talk about around AI and the use cases. Not just AI PCs as like, a high-level messaging, but we're actually seeing the products and what you can do with them. So there's just a lot of momentum. I think, as we go into the year this is an exciting time for the industry and innovation. But I think from a business cycle standpoint, I think the table is set, if you will.

A number of the folks that I talk with in the channel don’t see a push from their customers to refresh with AI PCs. They say that’s likely not going happen. Do you see that worm beginning to turn? Is the AI PC becoming real for the channel?

I think there’s an evaluation period. If you track the business for many years, you could kind of argue there was this – in the initial beginning of my career you have the internet in the early 2000s to 2010 -- you had kind of this incremental improvement. You saw the build-out there. It was a decade-plus in the making. And maybe there was a lull in between there where there's some incremental improvements.

You could talk about Wi-Fi and that sort of thing, and hot spots, which is maybe analogous, but I just haven’t seen this much hype over the potential of the product. I think there’s a natural course of our industry, which is this marriage of hardware and software. The hardware must come first. You know, you have to pave the road.

It is the NPUs, sure, but it's also purpose-built, CPUs, it's GPUs, it's memory, and then the ISVs, and the software and the use cases basically optimize against that. And that's what we're seeing I would call it, in year two here.

Look, you don't want to tell someone they should go buy a PC with X or Y hardware. I think it's more compelling to tell them what you can do with it.

And so I look at the use cases that we have for our Moto, phone brands, Catch Me Up is one that I've been talking about. Let’s say we are meeting for an hour or so. We have our phones down. We're fully present. We come back to a load of notifications. Catch Me Up could summarize and call for some actions there.

There are other ones too. Smart Connect allows for an Android or an iOS device for you just to tap your phone on our ThinkPad x9 and transfer those pictures, videos, seamlessly. These are things that are more exciting than NPU-size, so to speak, right?

But, the NPU, CPU, GPU, all that stuff matters, and these use cases are being built on top of it.

I think what you can kind of expect in 2025 is for there to be some more momentum around things that can actually improve productivity in business, and that's when consumers and customers are going to pull the trigger, when they can really see how it's going to benefit them.

AI data. innovations and technology. AI text on CPU. Artificial Intelligence digital concept.

I'd love to talk about the chip race to whatever extent you can talk about it. I know Lenovo has pursued silicon diversity in its supply chain and products, but some of the chips are new to the channel.

The net effect is increased competition. And the increased competition is creating an acceleration in the innovation we're seeing. And I would say that's true on the hardware side, that’s true on the silicon side, but we're also seeing it on the LLM side, in some of the models.

You are starting to see it in different ways, Copilot+. We use Meta’s Llama in our AI Now, which is an on-device model that allows for improved security and data privacy. So your data stays on your machine. That works in concert with Copilot+, which is from Microsoft.

So what you're seeing from us is partnerships with these silicon providers, and we're getting best of breed products across that portfolio. They're competing against each other, pushing each other. That's good for the consumer. I think that's good for the end user.

And then I think on the software side, we're seeing this really cool cycle of innovation. And I think the net output is better products, and better experiences. And I think that's why it's the decade of AI. You could kind of see, we're probably going to be talking about more cool things that you can do to be more productive. And I think just in general, it's exciting. I sense it with our channel partners. We do have to simplify it. I will say that's the other side of it is we got to make sure it's not overly complicated. Because that can limit our ability to grow.

Driving in the Digital Network concept What are the speeds and feeds that are kind of making it real for them? Is it? Is it like when you say 45 versus 70 TOPs? I mean, is that exciting people, or what is it driving this?

On the speeds and feed side, if you forced us to answer the question, it would be more around the installed base needing to be modernized. I don't think we should spend our time quibbling about if there's another TOP or two or a slight change in the spec.

The reality is an enormous amount of the install base is aged. And running the most modern AI experiences in a way that is optimized needs modern hardware. So our sales and marketing, go to market is more around this collection of modern hardware will allow you to experience the best version of the AI PC.

The other side of it is, what can you do with it? What are the experiences? And how are they going to save you time and money? How are they going to make your sales force more productive? How are they going to optimize your business? And I think that that's the secret sauce.

We're seeing more of that this year than we did last year, with specific use cases and having a great time showing partners through and customers through our newest products.

I'll go to that hybrid AI as a differentiator for Lenovo, really looking at a significant part of our value prop in the AI Now, being on the device.

And I think in the speeds and feeds answer, there's a larger umbrella of things that will matter. What can you do with it? What are the use cases and then also the security and privacy is a big element that we're hearing from customers and partners.

With a lot of the new PC features that have been on display at CES and at your show in November, whether the rollable display or the 3D monitor, on-device LLM inferencing, Lenovo seems focused on delivering a better user experience?

As you see we get a lot of credit for the out-of-the-box kind of innovation that we bring to this show. Every couple years you’ll see something that becomes commercialized and something that doesn't.

What doesn't get seen is the list of features that waterfall through our full portfolio. And I think that's kind of pushing the boundaries of innovation. Some of these things may be a full demo concept case, but then a year later, it's just helping with eye tracking, and it's helping with the camera.

Our Yoga Slim 9i has a 98 percent screen-to-body ratio, if you will, so there's essentially no bezel. The camera is hidden. We're using an AI technology to allow that camera to be exposed when needed, and it just provides a better experience.

So a lot of this innovation gets shown in concepts, which I think is good at CES. There's a lot of awards and accolades for kind of pushing the boundaries. But it's not just for that. It's so that that technology could flow through to the to the products in years to come. And we've seen that on an ongoing, steady basis.

The large language models and things that get a lot of publicity, but there's a lot of little things too. We have a Lenovo NPU optimization in our products that basically just make sure that the system's running optimized. It's looking at all your resources and checking battery life, checking the screen size, screen brightness, and all these things. There's a lot of little things that are kind of behind the scenes, that help the health of the PC.

These things are incremental improvements that are a little bit less overt, but are being built into every successive generation.

What's the thing you’d like to see driven home to partners?

The AI PC going mainstream. I think if you look at the Lenovo hybrid approach. I think we have a differentiated approach. You're starting to see real use cases that are going to provide value to consumers and in our partner community and the commercial business community.

This year is not the launch, it's the ramp, in my opinion. Now coupling that with this big, great refresh that's upon us. I think it's an exciting time. The decade of AI. We're in year two, and we're very bullish.