In short
Episode Notes: #305 Rakshit Ghura - How Lenovo Is Turning AI Agents Into Digital Coworkers
Podcast Overview
- Title: Eye On A.I.
- Host: Craig S. Smith
- Episode Focus: Discussing Lenovo's approach to integrating AI agents into the workplace to enhance productivity and support.
Key Guests
- Rakshit Ghura: Vice President & General Manager of Digital Workplace Solutions at Lenovo.
Episode Summary In this episode, Craig Smith interviews Rakshit Ghura about Lenovo's innovative use of AI in the workplace. The discussion revolves around how Lenovo is transforming from a hardware-centric company to a solutions provider, using AI agents to improve employee productivity and workplace efficiency.
Key Concepts and Discussions
- AI and Workplace Transformation
- Agentic AI: Lenovo's strategy revolves around using AI agents to assist employees in their daily tasks, enhancing productivity.
- Omnichannel AI Architecture: Introduction of a cohesive AI system that interacts with employees across various communication channels, thereby simplifying user interactions.
- Lenovo's Evolution
- Lenovo has shifted from being primarily known for hardware to being a comprehensive solutions provider over the last four years.
- The introduction of the Care of One platform exemplifies this change, focusing on employee experience and operational efficiency.
- AI Readiness vs. Enthusiasm
- Despite a high interest in AI (97% of IT leaders surveyed), 60% have not initiated their AI journey.
- Organizations face challenges in understanding how to implement AI effectively, often due to issues in change management and employee trust.
- Designing for Employee Experience
- Persona-Based Design: Lenovo categorizes employees into personas to tailor solutions that meet their specific needs and improve user experience.
- Focus on improving employee life at work by delivering engaging and effective technology.
- Examples of AI Application
- Use Cases: Real-world examples include AI applications in retail, manufacturing, and field operations, improving uptime and automating processes.
- Examples include monitoring equipment health and proactive issue resolution through AI agents.
- Metrics for Success
- Metrics for evaluating the success of AI solutions include uptime, productivity improvement, and employee satisfaction.
- Importance of involving employees early in the adoption cycle to mitigate resistance and improve outcomes.
- Responsible AI Practices
- Lenovo emphasizes security and governance when deploying AI solutions.
- A responsible AI committee ensures that new technologies adhere to ethical standards and employee safety.
- Cybersecurity Challenges
- The episode highlights concerns regarding cybersecurity risks associated with AI adoption.
- A significant percentage of CISOs feel unprepared to handle AI-related cybersecurity threats.
- Measuring ROI and Impact
- ROI is assessed differently based on the use case, focusing on employee productivity and process efficiency.
- Lenovo supports organizations in measuring and identifying key performance indicators relevant to their AI implementations.
Conclusion The episode emphasizes Lenovo's commitment to integrating AI in a responsible manner that enhances the workplace experience. By focusing on employee needs and offering tailored solutions, Lenovo is positioning itself as a leader in the digital workplace transformation driven by AI technology.
Key Takeaways
- There is a significant gap between AI interest and readiness in organizations.
- Omnichannel AI support can streamline employee interactions.
- A focus on responsible AI practices and employee involvement is essential for successful implementation.
- Measuring success through targeted metrics can demonstrate the real impact of AI solutions in the workplace.
Additional Resources
- Follow Craig Smith on X: [Craig S. Smith](https://x.com/craigss)
- Follow Eye On A.I. on X: [Eye On A.I.](https://x.com/EyeOn_AI)
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Explore [OCI](http://oracle.com/eyeonai) for cloud solutions tailored for AI projects.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You should think of Lenovo as a global technology powerhouse. We work on a concept of BLP, which is build, leverage and partner. We are seeing that data is the new oil of the 21st century. So obviously, you know, the success of this kind of a solution will depend upon how well the data is categorized for everyone within the organization. We saw that there is a huge gap between the AI enthusiasm and the AI readiness within the organization. You know, 97 % plus of all the IT leaders whom we surveyed, they showed huge interest in AI platforms. 60 % of them have not even started on the AI journey.
0:33In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster. But you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohare, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
1:24Cheaper? OCI costs up to 50 % less for compute, 70 % less for storage, and 80 % less for networking. Better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is a cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash IonAI. IonAI, all run together, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I. That's oracle.com slash IonAI. My name is Rakshit. I take care of the digital workplace solutions business for Lenovo. You know, I'm part of the solutions and services organization. I have joined Lenovo almost like eight to nine months back as a vice president and general manager to grow their solutions business around digital workplace services.
2:34So when we talk about digital workplace services, we are talking about all the solutions which are relevant to business to employee value chain. So how we can make the life of an employee more productive and much more engaging, and they can deliver to the organization outcome, that is my focus area. And before joining Lenovo, I worked for 21 years with a leading GSI, Global System Integrator, and a happy-based out of UK London. So tell us about when did Lenovo get in the solutions business, first of all? So it's an interesting question, Craig. Lenovo started their solutions and services journey almost four years back.
3:14Everybody knows that Lenovo is a leading player when it comes to client computing, when it comes to creating world-class devices, world-class computing assets. but you know we wanted to see how we can be much more meaningful for our customers and how we can drive much more business outcomes for them so not just providing the right tech but also making sure that how do we deliver the end-to-end outcome for the customer basis which we started this solutions and services journey at Lenovo almost four years back and we are you know so far clogging close to around 8.5 billion dollars from a revenue perspective in the last financial year and are delivering almost 20 % growth year on year.
3:59Yeah. When you say digital workplace solutions, what does that mean, particularly in the digital transformation for organizations that we're watching? So first of all, Craig, I'm in a worldwide role and I'm responsible for the worldwide strategy and offering strategy for the digital workplace solutions. Like I said, you know, digital workplace is all about employee transformation. So every organization nowadays are struggling to, you know, figure out how can they attract and retain best of the talent. So in my conversation with the customers, I generally work with them to see how we can provide the right kind of technologies to the employer.
4:39And at the same time, how we can make them much more effective in their business role with the help of those technologies. And obviously, you know, learning and development also forms a part of that. So how do we do all of that together so that organizations can get best value out of the employees and employees can be much more effective in their business role? So that is my focus area. Can you talk about this digital revolution or digitization and how it's revolutionizing the workplace and how AI is being integrated to make employees more productive? You know, I've talked to a lot of people on the podcast about agentic workflows and how that's being integrated.
5:31Is that what we're talking about or is it broader than that? Absolutely, Craig. I think that's the topic which we are talking about. So just think from an employee perspective and just think from an organization perspective. Every organization wants to bring the best of the technologies to their employees. they want to see how they can use the power of AI to make their employees much more productive in their business role. They want to see how they can you know improve the creativity quotient of the employees how they can make them much more innovative in their business role and that's where you know Lenovo is truly transforming these kinds of conversations with the customers.
6:07So we are helping these companies to see how they can build a technology fabric which can deliver to the business outcome. At the same time, it can empower their workplace and it can empower their employees to be the productive best of themselves. Yeah, and does that mean that you're building agents or you have a suite of agents or are you pulling in third-party in your solutions, third-party agents or third-party software into a solution for a client. Can you give us a case study of not necessarily naming a customer, but how that works? So, Craig, I think the easiest way to imagine is you should think of Lenovo as a global technology powerhouse.
7:01so there is like I said you know I am part of the solutions and services organization which is more of a system integration arm so we work on a concept of BLP which is build leverage and partner so we do build our own agents for the end customers so that is one obviously we are not a LLM company so we leverage what are the you know LLMs which are available in the industry and see how we can contextualize that to the business requirement of the customers and then build the agentic ai platform for them so that is on the build part at the same time we also leverage a lot of technology you are aware that lenovo is a you know 70 pm dollar powerhouse so there is a lot of telemetry which we have from our devices we understand what are the typical bottlenecks which employee faces on a day-to-day basis so we leverage all those telemetry all those knowledges and all those ips which we have developed over a period of time uh to deliver that agentic outcome for the customer and at the third part is the p which is the partnership part so you know obviously we partner with the leading agentic ai platforms which are there which are common tech platform for our customers companies like nvidia companies like service now and we work with them very closely to bring great technology to life for our customers so it's a combination of all three dimensions and we do believe that for you know for the futuristic workplace organization need to find the right blend of all these concepts and see how they can deliver the best value for their organization and can create the right productive workforce in their environment.
8:50Can you give an example? I mean, I'm interested in how Lenovo is doing this as a solutions provider. You know, I talk a lot to the big consulting firms, and I talk a lot to platforms that are, you know, for building agents, but I haven't spoken to somebody building solutions. And how reliable is the agent workforce today? And how many agents can you have working in a workflow where they're talking to each other or handing information off between agents. So Craig, a couple of points, I think, on this particular specific questions, you know, specific area where you're looking for additional clarity.
9:57So first of all, as in Lenovo, we obviously believe that we need to simplify the life of an employer. We are clearly seeing that there is a lot of new tech which we are getting thrown at an employee and they are struggling to figure out what to do with that particular track, right? So we are seeing that a lot of there is a trust gap when it comes to enterprises, right? And employees specifically, they want to see how we can take the advantage of the technology and we can make it simplistic for them so that we can drive more meaningful business outcome for them. So from Lenovo's perspective, when we talk about the future of AI and the agentic AI, we do believe that there is a concept of omnichannel and there is a concept of simplicity which we need to deliver for the employees.
10:41When we say simplicity, we are actually talking about providing a one single front end bot to the employee, which can orchestrate through all the typical issues, all the typical work which they need to do on a day-to-day basis, they should be able to do with that particular single bot, right? So whether it's an IT issue or it's an HR issue or an admin issue, there should be one single bot which is simple to orchestrate, which is simple to consume and that should be available to all the employees. right and that bot ideally should work with all the back-end technologies so it should be kind of a super bot which should have an ability to talk to multiple uh you know back-end bots uh to figure out if they want to get something done on sap or something they want to get it done on a workday then the system should be able to get the you know best outcome for the employees so that is on the principle of simplicity the other element which we focus a lot around is omni-channel so we do believe that this single bot should be omni-channel in nature so depending upon whatever interface or whatever you know mode an employee wants to engage with any of the it right i mean example they want to pick up the phone and call the it or they want to you know chat or they want to use teams or they want to use zoom it should not matter the pod should be omnichannel and it should be available in a multimodal manner be it on voice or be it on video or be it on you know even doing a text chat with the bot we should be able to deliver the right outcome for the organization so that's how we are seeing the future of ai that is on the front end side which is on the employee side in the back end there are multiple bots so example you know if we want to do root cause management or if we want to do knowledge management or if you want to do quality management or if you want to do service just work or we want to do workplace engineering work so there are multiple bots which are there in the back end we call it a fleet of agents you know it's i cannot put a number on how many such agents we have but there There is a library of agents which are specific to the use cases, which is specific to the vertical and which are specific to the particular outcome which you want to drive to for the customer.
13:06They are available for that specific use, but they all come together and they talk to that front-end employee bot to deliver simplicity to the employees. Wow, yeah, that's a great structure. And just thinking of the conversations I've had, there's a lot of talk about bot managers who are overseeing, you know, a fleet of bots or agents and, you know, tracking their performance. But in this case, the employee has a conversational interface, I would guess, with the Omnibot. And that bot then turns around and gives instructions to a fleet of agents. And can just give me one or two examples of the more sophisticated agents in your fleet.
14:06I mean, you know, obviously one would be something that reads and summarizes or answers emails, but something a little deeper in business process. So, Craig, I'll give you an example of one of the, you know, distinguished IP, what Lenovo has developed. We call it Care of One Platform. So it's an agentic AI platform through which we can, you know, understand in an enterprise what are the unique personas which are there. all these personas which we can study within the enterprise they can be either the industry persona so depending upon what vertical the customer is in whether they are a financial services customer or a retail customer or a manufacturing customer depending upon you know what dws function they are focusing on example are they a knowledge worker versus a task worker versus a power user and at the same time we can also see you know what is the digital dexterity of the employees in the sense you know what is the tech preference of the employees what are their learning development preferences so it's a multi-dimensional agentic ai bot through which we can categorize all the organization into the unique personas and we can say that you know for that particular personas what are the typical issues which they are facing on a day-to-day basis and what should be the right workplace strategy for that particular customer so you can think of care of one as a platform through which we provide multiple agentic components to to an enterprise through which they can understand what are the pain points which are there for their unique personas in their environment and then we can provide them the right kind of outcome we can provide them the tailor-made solutions and we can provide them the right kind of uh you know output so example if they want to which are the personas which should be consuming ai pcs which are the you know personas uh where we can possibly provide them which are you know more sustainable in nature and we can provide them refurbished devices or you know which are the personas which which really need uh uh zero service just kind of a solution and which are the personas which need more uh you know uh uh white glove treatment right i So you can actually categorize and design the entire workplace stack as multiple layers.
16:26And then you can define what is the right experience which you want to give to the user. It extends one level ahead as well. So example, if a customer wants to reset the password, they can talk to our password reset agentic AI bot and they can get the password reset done. or let's say if they want to pull some kind of a knowledge base or if they want to get any kind of a meeting notes, they can actually talk to this particular platform and they can get all the notes done as well. And this is available to all levels of an organization up to the C-suite or are you focusing on sort of department by department?
17:11So Craig, this solution actually caters to everyone within the organization. So this is one of the foundational principles for this solution. We want to build a workplace which can deliver equally for all. So which means that irrespective of whatever role an employee is playing within the organization, whether they are a C-suite stakeholder or they are an HR department colleague or they are from the IT side or they are an investment banker, this solution has an ability to provide a contextual experience. rich and, you know, a bot which can understand the unique pain points of that particular persona and then deliver the right outcome and provide them all the productivity which they need.
17:52Yeah. And I would imagine it has access to all the data of the different business processes. I'm just wondering, could a CEO use this sort of to keep track of what's going on in the enterprise without having to email, you know, head of sales and ask for a report? Yeah. So this solution basically caters to everyone within the organization. So whatever is the priority, you know, first of all, we are seeing that data is the new oil of the 21st century. so obviously you know the success of this kind of a solution will depend upon how well the data is categorized for everyone within the organization and it's where the persona journey really helps in understanding what are the touch points for each of the personas what are the pain points what are the possible solutions what really is the business critical work which they are doing on day-to-day basis and then you know what are the challenges which they face around that and then provide them all the contextual support So to your example, if a CEO is interested in knowing what is the health of the security in their organization, or they want to see what is the health of the devices in their environment, they can actually get a bird's eye view on the entire organization's health and they can see what really matters to them.
19:18We can define it and we can deliver it as part of the Careofun platform. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I want to talk about this Work Reborn report, the second iteration that you just came out with. But before that, well, yeah, in that report, I mean, you interviewed, I think, 600 idealists. Yeah. And a couple of questions. I mean, I'll let you outline the findings in the report, but are you finding good penetration or are people still primarily on the sidelines kind of watching? Not necessarily of Lenovo's solution, but of agentic solutions in general. Absolutely, Craig. I think this is where our Work Reborn report really helped us in getting a lot of insights from the customers.
20:23So we saw that there is a huge gap between the AI enthusiasm and the AI readiness within the organization. So almost like, you know, 97 % plus of all the IT leaders whom we surveyed, they showed huge interest in agentic AI platforms, right? But only, you know, the other contrary part was that 60 % of them have not even started on the AI journey, right? So that was a huge surprise for all of us in terms of understanding what is going wrong, why these companies are not able to take that advantage around AI. And the other interesting insight which we got from the Work Reborn report was the challenges which employees are facing.
21:03So the report provided us insights around that 42 % of the employees, they feel that AI is going to reduce their contribution to work. So that was an interesting insight and goes without saying, one of the biggest learning for us as part of the Work Reborn report was to understand that organizations are actually not struggling with the AI as a tech or what AI can do. They are actually struggling with figuring out how they can bring people and processes together to embrace and deliver the business outcomes. So that was one of the interesting outcome from the study. Yeah, and that concern among employees, there needs to be, I mean, certainly there will be some workforce reduction with the implementation of agentic workflows, but primarily it'll be teaching employees how to work with AI and AI agents.
22:11Do you talk about the need for identifying who in the workforce has the right aptitude to work with agents and how to train others to develop that aptitude? So, Craig, we have a comprehensive set of solutions which we take to the customer around their agentic AI adoption. so it starts with our care of one platform which i spoke about earlier it really helps in understanding the unique unit users need and figuring out what do they need to do to improve their digital confidence when it comes to ai services and how you know we should be going about targeting and identifying the you know top use cases which are you know kind of low hanging fruits and which we can deliver to them as part of the phase one and then obviously you know scaling becomes much easier after that so we have a complete plethora of solutions uh starting from our lenovo hybrid ai advantage through which we can provide all the infrastructure data models and we can deliver it in an industry-led approach to deliver meaningful outcomes for the customers so we do these kind of work for our customers very often helping them to transform helping them to embrace AI in a responsible and in a responsible manner and improving the digital confidence of the employees, right?
23:46So our AI advisory services, our AI assessment services really helps in identifying what are the top use cases of which an organization should go about and then, you know, how do we go about measuring the ROI around those use cases and then how we can scale AI all through the organization. What are some of the mistakes that you see companies making when they jump into this too quickly? I mean, maybe it's a good thing that 60 % haven't started yet. Yeah, so there are, you know, I'll not say mistakes, but yeah, I mean, you know, first thing is every company is interested in AI, right? So that's given.
24:35Everybody is interested in AI. So the intent is all great. I think many a time where organizations are possibly failing is because they are not able to create that one big picture plan. They are not able to draw what is their personalized vision for AI. And that's something which is very, very important when it comes to embracing AI within the workplace. right so figuring out what are the top business challenges which they want to address is it the improve increasing the creativity of the workforce is it around automation it's around you know faster time to market uh designing their large picture vision in terms of what do what they want ai to deliver for their employees is very very important and that's where uh lenovo brings in lot of experience in terms of working with these customers to understand and help them define the clear vision right around these services and this is another challenge which companies are doing you know they are actually not taking the voice of the employees into the account so from our experience when we get into any kind of a conversation with the customers we do suggest doing a lot of user surveys and figuring out you know how we can make employees is a co-owner in the entire agentic AI journey and include them as part of the success plan, take their voice into account, help an organization to build a clear picture, help build a digital dexterity for them, and then provide a complete tailor-made solution is what is our focus area.
26:12And you find, you've been implementing these solutions. do you find employees remain resistant or or do you overcome that pretty quickly particularly with with this uh omnibot that that makes our lives easier yeah well i think you know when when we engage the employees you know early into the life cycle of planning and we can you know educate them that the use case which we are targeting is not about it's about you know making employees a better version of themselves right i mean it's it's very important that you communicate the large vision to the employees help them understand it's not about the job displacement it is about increasing the competitiveness in the market and helping each and every one of them to be much more effective and better in their business role once you do that it's very easy to then convince the employees and provide them the right kind of training because at the end of the day it's about building trust with the employees and have building the right kind of a digital confidence with them so that's where Lenovo plays a very critical role in terms of helping the organization to define their vision and then figuring out how do we communicate that particular vision and how do we make employees as a you know stakeholder in this entire transformation journey so that we can deliver the best outcome for them obviously we do provide robust comprehensive trainings to the employees so depending upon their tech savviness depending upon their business role depending upon their learning and development preferences we do offer the personalized change management and advisory services around how do we make ai much more effective within the organization for the for each and every personas yeah can you talk a little bit about the security or ethical risks that ai brings to the workplace and particularly on security in the report you kind of drill down on the threat of cybercrime that in some ways has expanded with the advent of generative AI.
28:40So yeah, Craig, I think this is also an interesting part of the Work Rebound report. So there is a third report which has come, which is around the AI security part, right? and the interesting thing which came out of that particular report was that 65 percent of the CISO stakeholders feel that they are not ready their current you know security landscape is not ready to identify and address the cyber security risk much more effectively in the age of AI so yes we are seeing a lot of customers which are getting where they are facing challenges around cyber security and that's where lenovo is bringing a lot of best practices we do believe we need to fight ai related threats with ai and we have a comprehensive set of solutions through which we can actually identify you know what are the typical challenges and threats which an organization can face around cyber security and then how we use our ai capability to detect and then take corrective actions on those particular threats in much more faster manner so we have a comprehensive set of solutions around that on the trust and security part we also have a responsible ai committee within our company which comprises of all the stakeholders which are coming from different walk of life uh uh you know people who are uh there is we are taking into account dei we are taking into account uh the people from different sect of life and from different business roles and then also people who have different needs right i mean in terms of the if if there is a workforce which has need around the uh cyber security side they are also included as part of our responsible AI committee.
30:36And we are constantly testing any new capability which we are taking to the market around principles of responsible AI to see how we can make these solutions much more effective and ethical for our customer to consume on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. And you find that this security aspect is one of the main
31:04reasons that people are hesitating, but is that one of Lenovo's main advantages that you bring with your solutions? Yeah, security. See, I think from an employee perspective, there are a couple of things. One is they believe that it is going to reduce the you know the competitiveness of of them being an enterprise right i mean so in the sense it may take away their job right so this is where first thing what we do for an enterprise is to provide them all the right trainings and figure out how do we make you know ai as a solution which can multiply human potential right rather than replacing them so that is the first thing which we are addressing second is the concerns around the ethical and how do we build the trust when the workplace in terms of employees understanding that these solutions are not going to you know impact the you know the security and they are safe to use that's where our responsible ai committee comes into the picture we make sure that every solution which we are rolling out for an organization meets all the minimal card rail around the responsible ai and third is definitely around the AI-led cybersecurity threats.
32:25So introducing AI within the workplace, obviously organization employees can use different LLM models. So how do we consume and deliver those services in a secured manner? That is where Lenovo is very unique. We can help in implementing the right cybersecurity construct for the customer, providing them 24 by 7 coverage around any kind of threat landscape and making sure that, you know, their cybersecurity standards and compliances are not getting compromised. So these are the kind of solutions and differentiation which we are taking to the market. Yeah. And in Lenovo's work, do you see the attitude toward integrating agents and AI into business processes?
33:18processes, do you see those attitudes changing or is it a pretty tough nut to crack to get people to accept some of this stuff? So Craig, we are seeing it very often now, right? I mean, so many of the use cases which I've spoken so far about is more pertaining to the employee productivity, creativity, and innovation. But at the same time, we are taking these capabilities into the business processes as well. So example, there are so many customers you know retail customers of ours manufacturing customers of ours right who want to use computer vision to identify what are the new threats which are there in the you know workplace maybe you identifying image detection to identify any threat landscape so there are a lot of business processes which we have transformed especially around retail and manufacturing because those are two very strong vertical for lenovo's where we are utilized we have created a you know a library of agents as well as library of use cases which any of these customers can consume around any of their operations so they are nothing to do with the employee side of the journey they are more focused on driving the business outcomes and improving the value for our customers i'll take example of a you know retail chain where you know actually have implemented our ai care of one platform into the business processes through which we are you know kind of proactively monitoring their it and ot landscape when i say it landscape i am referring to the point of sales devices the you know digital signage system and when i am talking about the OT landscape I'm talking about the kitchen appliances and other stuff you know the OT management of that through which we are able to identify whether those particular processes you know what they have defined as a gold standard they are getting implemented or not right I mean an example if the fryer temperature is above a particular threshold then we need to you know tell the you know the store manager or the cook in that particular store that they need to take some kind of a corrective action or if something is not working on the point of sales device then we need to send any you know field technician to repair that particular thing so there are a lot of interesting use cases so for example for this customer we are measuring store experience index We are able to reduce their store downtime by 30 % by bringing our proactive, you know, business-oriented care of fund platform for them.
36:05Yeah, and actually that was my next question. How do you measure the impact of your solutions? Is there a, yeah, how do you do that? I mean, you talked a little bit about ROI earlier, but how do you measure that? to the bottom line of companies, P &L, for example. So, Craig, I think it will really differ from customer to customer and from vertical to worst case and use case to use case. So if it is around the employee-related technologies, then the ROI is measured with the help of how much downtime we are able to reduce for the employees on an ongoing basis, how much you know productivity we are able to improve for them so that is from an employee perspective and if it is you know if i take the example of the store experience index and our retail customer then it was more around how do we you know can we reduce the store downtime by 30 percent can we improve the new store opening time by 50 percent and can we you know proactively automate you know 40 to 50 percent of the tickets which are the reactive tickets which are which they are facing on a day-to-day basis and can be able to are we able to automate that so it really depends on use case to use case perspective example you know leno has a very matured service which we offer to our customer around the roi generation by identifying the top use cases which an enterprise is facing, and then identifying the parameters you should be measuring around that.
37:52And then, you know, what are the best practices around measuring the ROI, right? So defining the focus group versus non-focus group or, you know, figuring out before and after for those particular personas and then developing a complete business case around it. When someone comes to work with Lenovo with the solutions group, do you do you send out a team is it a a self-service platform that people put together solutions themselves or do you send a team of people out to audit the company's business processes and and build a bespoke solution so krig i think that's the beauty of the lenovo right i we have customers who are the large global enterprises and then we have customers who are the mid-market customers as well and the SMB customers as well.
38:48So for the large customers, generally what we have seen is wherever they are in their digital transformation journey, they expect companies like Lenovo to come and meet them in their current plan. So that's where we provide them, I'll say, more customized solution taking into account what they are doing currently and at what level of maturity they are and then evolving them from that point to the uh you know future state of maturity and for the other set of customers which are mostly the smb customers and then the mid-market customer they generally don't have any uh existing steps uh which they would have taken around the genii journey uh that's where we provide them tailor-made solution through our care of one platform Care of One can actually meet both the customer solution as well as we can provide a tailor-made solution to the end customer as well.
39:43That's where they generally prefer a standardized solution from Lenovo, which then they can quickly adapt to it and unlock the business value. So we are actually getting into both the unique segments of the market. And is the market sort of endless? and who were the big competitors? I mean, as I said at the beginning, this is kind of the journey that IBM took and Lenovo bought their consumer hardware business. And now Lenovo's going on this journey. Are you competing with IBM or is it you're in a very different part of the market? okay so craig i'll give you an answer right i'll tell you you know how it's moving in the market right and so lenovo as such is a very channel focused company so we firmly believe in building the capability through which we can deliver the business outcome for the customer but at the same time we can complement and augment you know complement and supplement the capability of the existing channel partners and deliver much more meaningful value to the customer so that is the approach which is there having said that there are large customers who prefer lenovo to provide end-to-end truly transformative solution in a true scale model which is a combination of hardware software and the support services and they want to consume it in a pay-as-you-co kind of a model so for those set of customers if the customer preference is to engage directly with Lenovo in a truly strategic manner and then expect to consume and get the quick ROI on the business value.
41:33That's where we are engaging with them. At the same time, we are also very channel friendly and working with the channel partners to see how we can complement and supplement their existing capability because we have more than 2000 and trust channel partners all across the globe. So how do we help them deliver much more meaningful outcomes for their customer is the focus area for that particular market aspect. And you said you're growing 20 % a year. I mean, four years in, I suppose you're still coming off a fairly small base, but that's pretty dramatic growth. How long do you think that growth will continue?
42:23So, Craig, I'll say, you know, this is 17th quarter of Lenovo's solution and services business results, which we have announced to the market since inception. And every quarter we have delivered almost, you know, double digit growth for last 17 quarters and we are pretty confident that we'll be able to sustain this kind of a growth for you know at least next couple of years right the reason i am confidently able to say that is we are seeing that our customers are looking for a truly differentiated value proposition many of these customers they don't want to consume the services in a legacy manner so the first key trend which we are seeing in the market is around organization preferring an agentic ai tech-led labor light model which is the strength of Lenovo.
43:16We are a tech company. We can deliver the business outcome for the customer by reducing the traditional operating model which is there in the industry for long. So that is one big huge boost to why I believe this double digit growth we'll be able to sustain for next couple of years. And the second thing is the customer demands are changing right now customers are looking for outcomes which are not just you know uh they are looking for you know services only or they are looking for hardware only they are looking for software only they want to you know they want the outcome as a subscription right to consume experience as a subscription and they don't care whether it includes a element of hardware it includes an element of element of software and it includes an element of services so they want to subscribe to the experience and that's what they want to consume and they want a single provider to provide all the support services all the hardware and all the softwares to deliver that outcome and that's again something which is very unique for Lenovo I don't think there are any credible players in the industry who can deliver this kind of an outcome for the customer.
44:31So keeping in mind these two reasons, one, the customer demand, and second, the industry on the inflection point, I do feel that I'm very confident that we'll be able to sustain this kind of a double digit growth for the next couple of years as well. Yeah. Is it possible that Lenovo will become primarily a solutions systems, I mean, solution services provider and the hardware side of the business will disappear as it largely has with IBM? No, Craig, I don't think so. See, I mean, we are very proud of our hardware heritage. If you ask me, you know, we are the number one device manufacturer as was the number one device company in the world.
45:19So it's a very powerful positioning which we already enjoy, right? same way we are one of the leading players when it comes to the uh you know servers and storage side of the industry as well uh so we are very proud of our hardware uh you know legacy uh we do feel that we have a huge opportunity on the solutions and services side and that is where we are capitalizing and you know like i said the demand from the industry is like that where customer wants to subscribe to the business outcome so with that logic uh i will i see in the distant future that Lenovo would continue to be a global technology powerhouse, providing both the business outcomes to the customer through our solutions and services group, as well as providing the best-in-class devices and assets, which we manufacture as part of our IDC and ISG portfolio.
46:11Yeah. And this second iteration of the Work Reborn report is focused on cybersecurity. But what is the overall, what are the biggest challenges? I mean, is it cybersecurity? Is it, you know, trust in the reliability of agents? I mean, what do you see as the biggest challenge? So from our perspective, I think when we started this work reborn study with the end customers, right? I mean, we also wanted to understand what is the biggest challenge which they are facing on a day-to-day basis. If they see that tech is so promising, why are they not adopting it, right? I think one of the biggest challenges which emerged was that there is still a trust gap when it comes to agentic AI platforms.
Read the full transcript
47:06and that is what we need to address in the short to midterm to see how we can drive the world class adoption of these kind of solutions and the new operating model which customers are looking for. So that is one. Second is we do believe that AI is outpacing the organizational design. So, you know, we have seen in the past that, you know, any new technology which comes over a period of time, organizations used to just bolt it on on top of their existing workplace fabric. But we do believe that this AI wave is very different. We need to reimagine the complete organizational construct, organizational design, the IT and the business operation from the scratch with the help of AI to get the best outcome out of it.
47:56In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohare, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
48:46Cheaper? OCI costs up to 50 % less for compute, 70 % less for storage, and 80 % less for networking. Better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is a cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash IonAI. IonAI, all run together, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I. That's oracle.com slash IonAI.
From the publisher
Try OCI for free at http://oracle.com/eyeonai
This episode is sponsored by Oracle. OCI is the next-generation cloud designed for every workload – where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Join Modal, Skydance Animation, and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI…and saved.
Why are enterprises struggling to turn AI hype into real workplace transformation, and how is Lenovo using agentic AI to actually close that gap? In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith talks with Rakshit Ghura about how his team is reinventing the modern workplace with an omnichannel AI architecture powered by a fleet of specialized agents.
We explore how Lenovo has evolved from a hardware company into a global solutions provider, and how its Care of One platform uses persona based design to improve employee experience, reduce downtime, and personalize support across IT, HR, and operations. You will learn what enterprises get wrong about AI readiness, why trust and change management matter more than technology, and how organizations can design workplace stacks that meet employees where they are.
We also cover how Lenovo approaches responsible AI, how enterprises should think about security and governance when deploying agents, and why so many organizations are enthusiastic about AI but still not ready to adopt it. Rakshit shares real examples from retail, manufacturing, and field operations, including how AI can improve uptime, automate ticket resolution, monitor equipment, and provide proactive insights that drive measurable business impact.
You will also learn how to evaluate ROI for digital workplace solutions, how to involve employees early in the adoption cycle, and which metrics matter most when scaling agentic AI, including uptime, productivity improvements, and employee satisfaction.
Stay Updated:
Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss
Eye on A.I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI




