Lenovo Leads The Charge In AI PCs With Smarter Technology And Partner Opportunities

AI PCs are rapidly changing the business, education and entertainment landscapes. That’s why understanding this emerging technology is imperative.

CRNtv’s Jon Alba spoke with Brent Lamm, Sr. product manager, WorldWide ThinkPad, Lenovo, to learn more about the immediate impact of AI PCs, and dig in to how Lenovo is helping change the arena with their implementation.

Jon Alba: Where exactly did the concept of AI PCs all start, and where are we in their prominence on the market?

Brent Lamm: Efficiency was really kind of the driving point, from a couple of different aspects around AI PC.

One, efficiency on the device, because that battery life is the number-one pain point from customers on their device that they use day in and day out. But then also, efficiency from an aspect of their time allotment during the day. What can be done to make them more productive and save their company overall better cost. And so, with the partnership of our silicon providers out there, the Intel's, AMD, Qualcomm's of the world, they've actually started creating chips to be on devices to help that efficiency in both ways.

Jon: How do you find that users are integrating AI PC into their workflow?

Brent: So, it’s rare to talk to somebody right now that has done widespread deployment of AI PCs across their entire organization. A lot of people are looking at specific use cases or line of business where they’re adopting AI PCs and AI applications. Whether it’s specific to device security and privacy, or research and knowledge assistance through a large language model. Content creation, that’s a huge one with Generative AI. Teams collaborations, doing Teams calls, Zoom calls that you get better audio and video quality. And even summarizing meeting notes and providing action items at the end of those calls to make sure you didn't lose anything. Or maybe you didn't hear something that you're actually supposed to be doing at the end of that call. Code generation and automating customer service and IT services to provide a better response for the end user.

Jon: How is Lenovo actually helping maximize the ceiling for this next generation of AI PC technology?

Brent: Part of it is really understanding where the customer is in their overall AI journey. They might still have use cases within their organization that they might not need in an AI PC because they're still doing cloud-based services or simple data entry. They could be at the other extreme and actually developing and training large AI models, which you would actually need a workstation or even a desktop to do things like that.

But then across that general office worker, knowledge worker, that’s where they were trying to take advantage of that efficiency that I talked about in the beginning where they want to see AI applications that can help them save time, but then offloading to this new NPU on the device, the Neural Processing Unit, they're getting better efficiency on the device and better battery life.

I talked a lot about devices, but Lenovo isn't just a device company. We're a solutions-based company. So whether it's that single use case that somebody is looking for, where it could be a large-scale issue that needs to be resolved with the help of AI, where we're going to lean into our infrastructure group or our services group in conjunction with our devices group to provide that overall solution for the end user or the customer.

Jon: How can partners best position themselves to leverage AI PC technology?

Brent: To take advantage of that reduction in latency that people using the cloud, and enhanced privacy using applications on a device and not connected to the internet, and lower overall cost, from a reduction in cloud usage, working with the partners and the customers, there's got to be conversations.

People need to understand where they are in their journey. They need to have a relationship that is open and transparent. And working with Lenovo, we can provide the solutions to help them, no matter where they are in the journey, whether they're in the infancy stage or, like I said, they were talking about large models that they are developing on their own, we have the solutions to help them end-to-end through that entire journey.

To learn more about Lenovo’s AI PC offerings, contact your channel account manager or visit its website.