Exploring Lenovo’s Globalization and AI Strategies – The View From Davos

Could CEO’s role in AI success be counterintuitive? Hear from Lenovo‘s Global Solutions Group President, Ken Wong, as he chatted with Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead last week at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland. They discuss that strong leadership is essential in AI implementation but hands-on involvement may hinder progress.

Catch this segment of The View From Davos as they cover👇

  • Lenovo’s role in addressing global challenges and its journey in AI adoption
  • The transition from experimenting with Gen AI to implementing and scaling these solutions for Lenovo’s customers
  • How Lenovo is using its own AI solutions to streamline processes, like contract negotiations, and sharing those learnings with customers
  • The challenges and imperatives that CEOs and CIOs are currently facing
  • Ken’s takeaways & highlights from Davos

Learn more at Lenovo.

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Transcript

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five On the Road a View from Davos. It’s been a great week so far here at WEF, and what was really a unique event opportunity, it really melds business with tech, regulation, government officials, and I would say first and foremost, Dan, the conversation is about AI. How do we increase economic opportunities? A lot of discussion about regulation. It’s been a good show so far.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. We are at that moment, that inflection where we’re trying to extrapolate the value, right? We’ve seen a lot of investment go in. We’re hearing about more investment going in, hundreds of billions of dollars to build out more data centers. We know that the data center revolution is going on. We’re getting, kind of moving from what I call it the CPU era to the GPU era. But now people are kind of saying, okay, we’ve put all this money and invested all these dollars to build out infrastructure, how does our business, how does our organization, how do we as a country derive value from this?

Patrick Moorhead: That’s right, and what makes up countries are businesses, consumers and enterprises, and they need help, right-

Daniel Newman: They do.

Patrick Moorhead: … deriving ROI from all this investment that they’re making. A lot of times, they have to look to services company, and I’d like to just, it’s a great entree to introduce Ken who runs the services division for Lenovo. Ken, great to see you.

Ken Wong: Happy to see both of you, my friend here. By the way, thank you. I think you give a very good cookbook for how the kid fit in Davos, right? I see a lot of followers and when I bump into some of my friends, they read your post, right, and how to make sure we don’t get drunk at night, how to walk in the morning and the dark, find a nice gym in Davos. Thank you.

Patrick Moorhead: Well, this is the no fun Pat. But, no. Anyways, so this is my first trip here and I’d like to maybe start it off by, we’re halfway into the event and you had a certain set of objectives coming in. There’s reasons that you come in. Are you achieving what you wanted to here?

Ken Wong: Oh, wow. Definitely. I think a couple of things to learn and to interact and to collaborate. I think, I cannot find a better platform like this one and this week to see friends, to meet with old friends and build network, right? So, I think, I would say overachieve what I expected.

Patrick Moorhead: Excellent.

Ken Wong: And I have a good run over with Gannon St. Maurice, right?

Patrick Moorhead: There we go.

Ken Wong: Yeah, that was a last minute thing by the way,

Patrick Moorhead: Right. I love it.

Daniel Newman: Well, yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about infrastructure, Ken, and your remit is driving a very large business for Lenovo, but also it is a growth area for Lenovo, right? Many of us every day open our laptops, including me and we’re using Lenovo, but some people don’t fully, I think, appreciate the entire span and portfolio and your role to make that happen. Talk a little bit about how you’re kind of seeing that AI transition and the opportunity that all this infrastructure investment is creating for services and solutions.

Ken Wong: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. So, I’ve been with the company, as you know, for more than 30 years, right? So, when I first joined the company-

Patrick Moorhead: You look so young.

Ken Wong: … Oh, really? Thank you.

Patrick Moorhead: I mean, what are you doing? Maybe you

Daniel Newman: Guys, do we need to do a different pod? You two can just tell each other how great you are.

Ken Wong: Exactly. We need another episode to talk about it.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I’m going to stand over here.

Ken Wong: But I’ve been at the company for 30 years. I still remember when I first joined the company, it was a single product company, $4 billion revenue. But now, today, we look at our business, so we have a very broad hardware portfolio from pocket to the edge to cloud, and we have business in more than 183 markets, right? Our annual revenue is more than $60 billion. And the most important thing is as we interact with our customer, I think there’s a lot of ask, asking, “Hey Lenovo, you guys have been providing all the hardware that we need, but we need more. We need more outcomes.” Right? So, a logical, you can call it adjacency or a logical extension of our business is look at how can we put together all the hardware, software, and services and solution that we have and to create outcome for our customer? And this is why about more than four years ago, we set up the solution and services group, and I have the honor to lead that. And the main objective is to better serve our customer across everything, especially around AI.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. One of the biggest things that I noticed was the aggressiveness that you went after it. And I’m an ex-product guy, I’ve done a little marketing in my time. But even the way that, for instance in earnings where services was talked about first, right, and putting the CIO office inside of service, that was a relatively new concept and now everybody’s doing it. Okay, it seems to be the thing to do. We talked a little bit about this AI journey and there seems to be, first of all, I’m a tech optimist and I know you are too, the opportunity for AI is immense. It’s also quite, and a lot of enterprises and governments have done science experiments, POCs, and I think Dan mentioned, we’re really entering this age of 2025 where we start to see some real ROI. What are you putting in place to help customers derive better or meaningful ROI from their AI investments?

Ken Wong: Well, oh, wow. I think this is, well, we, every year, we do a, we spend a lot of time to look at what our customer wants and how can we adjust our strategy or offering our execution to fulfill that, right? So, a bit of preview, we just got the latest input for this year. A few things, right, which is good news, I think. On an aggregate basis, our customers saying that they’re going to spend three times more around AI, right? So, that is a good news, right? But when we look at what are some of the obstacles or the challenges for them to continue to get more return from AI are basically a few things, right? Number one is they do not have the enough expertise, right, because AI is not just about technology. It’s about people, about process, about data, about security, right?So, that’s about the expertise question.

The second, as you mentioned Patrick, is the speed to ROI, right? So, there’s a lot of experimental thing that we see here and that happened in the past few years, but how to do that so that we can maximize the return on investment, right? So, those are the other feedback that we have got from our customer. And as a result, I think last year, I think around November time in our tech world in Seattle, we announced together with NVIDIA a new framework which is called the Lenovo AI Hybrid Advantage, as a framework of solution with an aim to help our customer to land AI use cases fast and with ease, and can leverage a lot of the expertise that we have. So, this is the approach that we are working on and available to our customer to help our customer to land in our use cases.

Patrick Moorhead: So, I was at your event, I want to make sure, right, you had sort of an HR capability. I think you had a finance, I don’t know if you call it a finance agent. You had a marketing capability on top, and those are the types that then integrated all the way down to the stack, down to the bare metal infrastructure. Is that right?

Ken Wong: Yes, yes. There’s a lot of things that we have built, right? So, one is, from a hardware perspective, we make sure the reference architecture with NVIDIA are to maximize the performance of any AI workload, right? So, this is on the infrastructure level. And at the same time, from a building agent perspective, right, we work with NVIDIA to look at how can we integrate NIM in our reference architecture, right? So, those are technology.

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Ken Wong: The second learning that we have, right, as you mentioned, IT is part of my organization. So, my biggest customer is indeed Lenovo. So, there’s a lot of internal use cases that we have POC and eventually able to scale for Lenovo. And I think there are a few learnings. One is, you got to make sure the basics are there, right? So, the data is there. And most importantly is beyond technology, the change management, the people, the guardrails that we have to put around. And the second one is, be specific, right? Don’t greedy, try to boil the ocean, right, achieve the impossible. So, we pick a couple of really meaningful use cases from our operation. One of them is work with our lawyer because one of the pain point has been, how can we add faster to our contract negotiation with our customer? We used to, one of the specific use case that we pick is, we used to have two months for that turnaround in terms of contract negotiation. With the AI agent that we built in for our operation, we reduced it from two months to two weeks. Very, very specific. A lot of domain expertise that we brought in the lawyer to help us, and very usable, right? So, those are some of the learnings that we have with Lenovo as a test bed, and now we’re making it available to our customer globally.

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Daniel Newman: So Ken, you spent some time with us yesterday. I appreciate you sitting on the panel-

Ken Wong: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Newman: … at the launch of some of this really, I think prolific CEO research, talked to over 210 of your peers and CEOs, presidents of companies over a billion of turnover. And you started mentioning this, and actually you set me up quite nicely. You talked about AI not just being about tech. You talked a lot about it being more, about culture, about transformation. In the services group, a lot of it is, to get these customers an outcome, you have to drive their behavior-

Ken Wong: Right.

Daniel Newman: … and you have to change sort of the way they think about implementation. But at the same time, to your point about the lawyers, they have to go really fast. How are you sort of, A, it sounds like you’re customer zero. So, Lenovo is customer zero. How are you sort of proving that as customer zero and then seeing that scale out to the rest of your customer base in terms of driving them to adopt?

Ken Wong: Yeah.

Daniel Newman: Because the investment’s just the very first part.

Ken Wong: Yeah. Well, so two things, right, I think. Thanks for having me there yesterday. But one data point that came out from your report, really insightful and resonated with me is that, what is the role of the CEO of the company in driving that AI adoption journey? I think you came up with very interesting data points saying that the more the hands-on of a CEO, the less chance of success, right? So, this is a very counterintuitive for a lot of people, right? So, indeed, I think my understanding is, number one, the strategy and vision has to be from the top, the CEO and the leaders, right? Because there’s a lot of things beyond technology that top-down need to be fully understood. But at the same time, there’s a lot of other thing, as I mentioned, data security process. You need to bring in the right expertise and trust the advisor, and hopefully some of them has some scars on their back to make it happen, right?

So, those are our learning. And last but not least, I think, that is why we launch our Fast Start program, which we commit within 90 days, we’re able to help our customer to come up with a POC. Now, our POC is slightly different from the POC in the market. A lot of the POC in the market is like, oh, making sure I build something that is with immediate returns that I can continue to get the budget and move on. Our POC, in addition to that, is more about figuring out what is the most important parameter so that we can continue the AI use cases, right? So, I think to your point, that one is the most important because POC just not stopped by 90 days. The effort is about how can we make the POC scalable and able to create outcome for the company?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So Ken, first of all, really good articulation of one of the standouts of the research that Daniel did, and dare I say it’s the best explanation because we’ve been having a lot of conversations about this and I think you nailed it, which was keeping your swim lane. CEO and presidents show vision and guidance, set the direction, and then put KPIs out there and let the teams execute, and then pull in a strategic advisor, a Lenovo services group potentially to make that happen. Hey, as we wrap here, I want to ask you about 2025 here. I know we’re one month in here, and I’m curious, what do you want to accomplish this year? Let’s say, we’re talking a year from now, what do you want to have accomplished for your group and with your customers?

Ken Wong: Well, I have been in front line, serving customer for the past 30 years most of the time. I think, to me, the most important thing deep in my heart is, how can I support my customer to be successful?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Ken Wong: Right?

Patrick Moorhead: So, like outcome-based.

Ken Wong: Outcome-based. I believe 2025 will be very exciting, right? There’s a lot of new dynamics. Old dynamics still exist, new dynamics coming up, right? So, I always say that the most predictable thing for 2025 is the unpredictability, right? So, I think we have to stay flexible, and at the same time, resilience, right? To understand the new dynamics. I’m a very optimistic person. I always see opportunities even, opportunities from opportunities or opportunity from risk.

Patrick Moorhead: Excellent. Great. Great answer.

Daniel Newman: Ken, I just want to thank you so much for being part of the Six Five here in Davos. I know how crazy schedules can be. Appreciate you joining the panel yesterday.

Ken Wong: Thank you.

Daniel Newman: I’m sure we’ll be talking quite a bit throughout the year. F1.

Ken Wong: Wish you all the success.

Daniel Newman: F1. And then soon enough, at FIFA.

Ken Wong: At FIFA.

Daniel Newman: I couldn’t be more excited about that. Even if I don’t get to go, I’m really excited that you made that commitment.

Ken Wong: You will.

Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for being-

Ken Wong: Thank you.

Daniel Newman:… part of the Six Five community. We are The Six Five On the Road here with a View from Davos. Subscribe to all the great content this week. We had so many conversations with great leaders, great insights here. Appreciate you being part of our community. We’ll see you all later.

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