Embracing The AI Shift: How Lenovo Is Helping Partners Stay Ahead

Lenovo is no newcomer to the AI space. The company launched its AI business in 2017 with a $1.2 billion investment and, in late 2023, committed an additional $1 billion to drive future advancements. But in an ever-evolving space, innovation is critical, and the organization is aiming to stay ahead with its Lenovo Hybrid AI solutions.

CRNtv’s Jon Alba spoke with Robert Daigle, Director of Global AI Business for Lenovo, to explore the AI landscape and dive into how Lenovo AI is giving partners an opportunity to outpace the industry.

Jon Alba: What AI trends does Lenovo see in the market right now?

Robert Daigle: Generative AI is still sucking up a lot of oxygen in the room. And that's still, I would say, the primary driver, and for good reason too.

A lot of the value that's being driven by Generative AI, I mean, we're seeing use cases that are providing up to 40, fifty percent productivity gains in some of these Generative AI workflows, and intrinsic AI workflows, which is really, really exciting.

That's why for our recent CIO survey, we recently released the 2025 survey, we interviewed over 3000 CIOs and asked them what some of their biggest challenges are. What are some of the things that they're facing? What are their biggest priorities? And generative AI for AI investment is No. 1 on the priority list. No surprise there, it's been for the past two years, and our CIO survey and Generative AI is going to be nearly fifty percent of the investment for organizations as they're investing in their AI strategy.

Jon: Now, a majority of organizations in today's climate are actually using on-prem or hybrid infrastructure models to support all their AI efforts. With that said, what is Lenovo's hybrid AI strategy?

Robert: We've been out here promoting this idea of hybrid AI for the past two years. If you think about it, really, this idea of data gravity is going to take effect.

And that means that we need to bring the compute and the AI technology and the solutions closer to where the data is being generated, closer to where it's being stored, and where it resides. And sometimes that makes perfect sense to run your AI capabilities and your solutions that you're deploying in the public cloud. If you already have your data in the cloud, then that's a perfect place to deploy some of your AI capabilities.

Lenovo supports eight of the Top 10 public CSPs, cloud service providers. So that's a great place to get started. But if you're working with sensitive data or you already have your data stored on-prem, or maybe your data is being generated at the edge on a personal device, like a laptop or mobile device, or maybe an industrial IoT device, we're seeing a lot of data being generated.

Why not bring the AI closer to those, to your data, where you get lower latency, lower cost to transfer that data, and typically a more secure environment?

Jon: You've talked a lot about infrastructure so far, but what can you actually share about Lenovo's AI solutions?

Robert: You can't just think about the infrastructure or the hardware. It's great that we have some really unique things in our hardware portfolio. It's really about bringing together a comprehensive solution. And that's really a big part of our hybrid AI strategy, is, not just thinking about the infrastructure, but what software we're adding on top of that.

Whether it's from our leading infrastructure partners and software providers that we work with today, or we have a program called Lenovo AI Innovators, which has over 60 AI independent software vendors and startups that are specializing in very specific use cases, or even software developing or so.

But then we wrap that up with our services, because we have to deliver this as a comprehensive solution. For most enterprises and organizations, they're not thinking about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure or features of the software. They're thinking about how you can solve a business outcome for them, or how you can apply AI to some of their biggest pain points.

And that's really what we have to do. That is what we're trying to enable, through our Lenovo Hybrid AI, is an edge strategy.

Jon: What should partners be doing now and in the future to take advantage of AI opportunities?

You know, last year was the year of exploration and experimentation. People were investing in POCs, testing things out. They were exploring, and sometimes without really having a clear objective of what they were trying to accomplish.

This year is the year that they moved from exploration, to, they actually have budgets. They have budgets within their organization associated with artificial intelligence projects and initiatives that they committed to. But that has to be connected with a return on investment.

So, the biggest challenges that CIOs mentioned that they raised in that survey is, we have to have a clear path or return on investment. We have to be able to prove a business case and how this is going to help provide some efficiency or some value for our organization.

The other thing is, there are still gaps and skills. Having the right skills to be able to take advantage of these technologies. So, business partners, channel partners really need to be thinking about how they can augment that skills gap with their customers.

To learn more about the Lenovo Partner Program, you can contact your channel account manager or learn more here.