The Six Five team discusses Lenovo Tech World 2024
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Lenovo Tech World 2024 and they also their global industry analyst conference. Pat, this is one of those cases where, how much time do we have?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: There’s so much to talk about. Now, Lenovo is an interesting company and you could really kind of hit it from many different angles. They run their business across three different kind of major categories that they measure themselves by. They’ve got their IDG business, which is their devices group, and this is the biggest part of the business. It’s the PCs. I’m on one right now by the way. They also make smartphones. It is the infrastructure ISG group. This is the part that builds big NVIDIA servers and of course traditional x86 like we were just talking about. And, then they have the SSG group, which is kind of one of their growth engines. Well, actually both will add to their growth engines for the future, which is diversification and of course implementation, being able to provide more services. We spent the better part of a couple of days there and we heard across the board… Now, I’m going to surprise everybody out there when I talk about what they talked about at this event. So, nobody would believe me when I say that Lenovo spent a lot of Tech World this year talking about AI. We had to-
Patrick Moorhead: He’s funny. He’s joking, fans out there.
Daniel Newman: Sorry. People don’t get me. You get me? No, but a lot of it was talk about AI and so you can kind of categorize what they were focused on. First of all, very focused on being the manufacturer that has selection and choice across device platforms for AI PCs. It was the start of our event, the start of the keynote with YY. By the way, great picture with him, pat, you guys looked great together, teamwork. Was kind of marching on OEMs, marching on silicon providers, marching on all the right players, whether it was Microsoft, whether it was AMD, whether it was Intel, whether it was Cristiano Amon from… I mean, by the way, star study cast, right? Mark Zuckerberg. You and I were watching Mark up in the green room while we were getting ready to chat with Pat and Lisa but they had this star study cast of hyperscale and leading silicon providers on a set.
And, I think one of the things that I came away with is, look, Lenovo is committed to having choice for its customers right now. And, I think this goes back to why the collaboration’s going on. This also goes with Intel AMD, the impact that Qualcomm’s expected to make. I think last week you and I, on the show, talked about this potential media tech and video partnership and Lenovo is incredibly good at being able to offer diverse platforms across the PC space. So, that was something I definitely took away. Got more positive feedback from the Microsoft camp as well. And, we know how important that’s been marching out at all the different events.
Now, the second part of this for me was how the company’s attacking the NVIDIA situation. And by the way, I apologize, I don’t have it right in front of me, but they came up with their version of the NVIDIA, Lenovo AI on-prem hybrid offering that has been kind of marched out one by one across the Dell AI factory. And, I think you looked at me and you kind of said that the naming on this one is very representative of Lenovo and its Chinese heritage. It was like a very long sort of explanation of what this product is as opposed to maybe Dell coming out with AI factory. And, what it was is it was all the layers. And, of course they’re layering in traditional compute infrastructure, NVIDIA compute infrastructure, all the networking routing, and then they’re saying, “Hey, we have services and solutions here. And, again, we have use cases,” Pat. And, I think that’s the key here, is they’re basically stacking it for use case.
And, this is something, by the way, we’re going to spend a lot of time on. One of the gaps, and I’m going to kind of end here, is they have this interesting services and infrastructure business, very exciting in terms of what they’ve built. Growth has been good. Profit’s been a little lower over the last few quarters. They’re obviously trying to drive back to profitability, but everybody seems to be kind fighting this battle for enterprise relevance. And, why do I say this? Because Lenovo is really good at getting to the hyperscaler, actually has this very kind of similar ethos as AMD, has been extremely successful at getting into a number of these hyperscalers, which has grown their infrastructure business successfully. But, a lot of AI and winning the AI battle, especially if you’re in one of these OEMs, is about solutions development. And so, the service and solutions group is really trying to find, “How do we serve manufacturing, healthcare use cases, finance use cases?” So, that they can convince the end customer to be asking for Lenovo.
I think about that little Lenovo jingle, Lenovo, Lenovo. When you come into the room, are you asking for Lenovo? Because the real risk of all these OEMs and all these cloud providers now is that there’s so much choice. I spent time with IBM this week. They’re saying, “Go with Watson.” Amazon says, “You can do everything in Bedrock.” Dell says, “Use our AI factory with Nvidia,” HPE and Lenovo now have similar offerings. Choice is the key. Use case development and implementation support is going to be the big X factor. That was one of my big takeaways, by the way, from IBM M and that’s not a topic today, but is that they’re consulting business is so important right now because the technology is horizontally so competitive.
So, this is probably the biggest thing I think as an opportunity for Lenovo is how do they build the right use cases, create the right solutions for customers, and then leverage their ability to deliver product hardware at scale and be very price effective and efficient. And, I think that’s something that we will see in the coming months from Lenovo. So, a lot more. Cool partnership with FIFA. I had to mention it because you don’t care, but I’m a soccer guy so I was super jazzed about that. I’m going to the race with them today. So, I’ll pause there. Pat, like I said, I could probably talk for a long time. I realize I only covered this much of all the stuff that they announced.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So, this was the most sophisticated Lenovo I’ve seen ever. What you would normally expect is for Lenovo to come out and pretty much talk about hardware and maybe what they’re doing with a few partners. But what’s very differentiated here with Lenovo is the software it is creating. So, at the very top level for AI, they introduced this thing called the Lenovo AI library, and that’s meshed with NVIDIA NIM blueprints. And, what I mean by horizontal example, legal review. They talked about essentially translation, negotiation, AI review, throwing out, again, kudos to them for bringing out hard numbers. We have not validated those numbers, but it was good to see. 45% increase in accuracy, 80% improved data reuse on this AI legal assistant. They had an AI marketing assistant as well. So, what that is doing is wading into the enterprise SaaS area. Super cool, super unexpected. And then, on the consumer side, it’s this product called Lenovo AI Now where you can do metasearch, you can do rag implementations, and they had this really cool… I think for education. Lenovo is really big in education where you could go in there and, you record a classroom, you throw in presentations and notes and it’ll spit out prompts.
Daniel Newman: That was really cool. Really cool.
Patrick Moorhead: No. I know. And this is created by Lenovo. This is Lenovo branded, not co-branded, not… So, super impressive. Biggest challenge for Lenovo is getting it… They’re super strong in small and medium business on infrastructure. They are big in PCs in the enterprise, but when it comes from infrastructure, they need to be doing a lot more for enterprise. They need the sales, they need the content, they need the proof points and a lot more interaction with CIOs.
So, anyways, I left, super impressed. And what’s so funny, although I was questioning… This is the longest I’ve stayed at any event, Daniel, the entire year. Came in on a Monday and left on a Thursday and that’s a huge time investment for… I run a company, I have 10 analysts but always, the culture is so strong and so good. At dinner, executives aren’t hiding. You’re bumping into them at breakfast, they’re sitting down with you, you’re having hallway conversations. YY is walking around and his L-zeros are walking around the environment at dinner. At dinner, YY personally comes to every table to come and take pictures and shake hands. And, I was super surprising and I hadn’t seen YY in a year. Last time was at F1. He remembered my name. Funny, first thing he talked about was The Six Five. I’m not kidding. And I’m just like, “Wait. He’s never been on The Six Five. How does he know The Six Five? And, there was nobody whispering-
Daniel Newman: Let’s fix that. Let’s fix that.
Patrick Moorhead: There was nobody whispering in his ear at all. And I’m sitting at the table. They sat me right next to Luca who runs the entire devices business. So, anyways, just the Lenovo experience is really good and it’s just kind of an affirmation of how their culture spills over into pretty much everything they do.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. I like that, Pat. I do really appreciate the access. They really don’t hide. They do. And, I think they’re going to have a lot of competition in some of these sort of root-level softwares that sits in there. I mean, libraries and devices. Are you going to build your own? Are you going to use a NIM? Are you going to use a Red Hat, OpenShift with… But, the point is they’re there. They’re in the game and that’s been impressive. I don’t know if everyone expected that.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
