Author: Zhou Yuan/Wall Street News

With AI technology, the Lenovo phone “killed” back.

Liu Jun, executive vice president of Lenovo Group and president of China, said on June 26, “The time has come for Lenovo to embark on a mobile revival journey in the Chinese market.”

On the same day, at the 2024 Mobile World Congress Shanghai (MWCS 2024), Lenovo Group fully demonstrated its “full-stack AI” strategy for the first time.

Liu Jun revealed to Wall Street News that April 1, 2024 — is Lenovo's 2024/25 new fiscal year. At the same time, the Lenovo Group entered its fifth 10-year term, and Lenovo officially proposed a “full-stack AI” strategic layout.

“Full-stack AI” will accelerate Lenovo's 3S transformation in China. 3S, namely smart terminals (SD), intelligent infrastructure (SI), and solutions and services (SS), belong to Lenovo's IDG, ISG, and SSG business segments, respectively.

“Full-stack AI” consists of three parts: an “all-in-one multi-terminal” AI terminal, “one horizontal, five vertical” AI infrastructure, and an AI solution and service of “one engine and three arrows”. It has built Tianxi ecosystem for the AI terminal industry, Wanquan ecosystem for the intelligent infrastructure industry, and DynaSky ecosystem for AI solutions and service industries, respectively.

With a strategy that can be implemented, and a rich and comprehensive ecosystem, this forms the overall framework for Lenovo Group's “software and hardware integration” technology and business.

Mobile phones: the time has come to revive the Chinese market

On June 25, Lenovo held the “Fill the World with AI” in Hangzhou — Lenovo AI Terminal's “All-in-one Multi-Terminal” Strategy and New Consumer Product Summer Conference. It unveiled the “all-in-one multi-terminal” strategy for the AI era, the new capabilities of the Tianxi Intelligent System (Tianxi AS), the “Super Connected” application module, and many new AI terminal products.

These novelties include AI phones and AI PCs. Among them, AI phones include Lenovo Moto Razr 50 Ultra AI Yuanqi, Lenovo Moto Razr 50, and Lenovo Moto S50 Neo; AI PCs are Lenovo YOGA Air 14s, YOGA Air 14c, and Savior Y9000P.

Liu Jun said that in addition to Lenovo AI PCs already equipped with Tianxi AS (Agent System), Lenovo's “all-in-one multi-terminal” strategy is implanting the “AI brain” of the Tianxi Smart System into AI phones, AI tablets, and diverse AIoT devices, so that users can enjoy applications and services that are seamlessly connected in all scenarios, and obtain a new experience of “personal AI assistant.”

On June 26, at MWCS 2024, Lenovo Group fully demonstrated all technical and business sub-strategy modules of Lenovo's “full-stack AI” strategy, including Lenovo's “all-in-one multi-terminal” strategy for AI (intelligent) terminals.

“We proposed our vision of promoting intelligent transformation 7 years ago, and we want to promote the intelligent transformation of Chinese enterprises and individuals. We've been making technical reserves for this for the past 7 years.” Liu Jun told Wall Street News, “In 2024, when we felt that we had the necessary capabilities in terms of technical reserves and product reserves, we officially proposed an AI strategy for this reason.”

The “all-in-one multi-terminal” of Lenovo AI terminals is an executable method determined at the terminal level.

The so-called “integration” is the “Tianxi Smart System” - Tianxi AS. It consists of Lenovo's “Xiaotian” personal intelligence and five parts: personal knowledge base, AI application platform, super interconnection, data security and privacy protection mechanism. It is independently developed by Lenovo to form the “AI brain” of AI terminals.

Now and in the future, all Lenovo smart terminals, such as mobile phones, PCs, and tablets, will be equipped with Tianxi AS. Abulimiti (Amu), vice president of Lenovo Group and vice president of strategy and business development in China, told Wall Street News, “This is a key control point for AI terminals.”

The recently released Lenovo Moto Razr 50 Ultra AI Yuanqi, Lenovo Moto Razr 50, and Lenovo Moto S50 Neo all have built-in Lenovo “Xiaotian” personal intelligence in Tianxi AS.

Liu Jun believes that an AI terminal with a built-in “Tianxi Smart System” will be a “personal AI assistant,” which has “revolutionary” characteristics for PCs. In addition to increasing the market share of Lenovo PCs, “it will also drive our growth in non-AI PCs, especially AI phones.” Liu Jun said.

According to official data from Lenovo, Lenovo phones have performed well globally: “We are leaders in North America and South America: we are third in North America, behind Apple and Samsung; South America is second, after Samsung.”

In the Chinese market, “Over the past few years, Lenovo phones have not stopped working, but they have indeed not invested much promotion resources; instead, they have invested in the development of new technologies such as AI.” Liu Jun said, “Now, the time has come. AI is a revolutionary technology. Relying on our 'all-in-one multi-terminal' strategy and AI innovation in mobile phones, the time has come for Lenovo to embark on a mobile phone revival journey in the Chinese market. Empowered by 'Xiaotian', I believe it will give users more valuable choices.”

B business: one horizontal, five vertical, one engine, three arrows

At the 2022 Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference, Lenovo Group put forward the “Puhui Computing Power” proposition for the first time. The Lenovo Group emphasized the need to turn ubiquitous computing power into products and services, bring users a real sense of gain, and set the mid-term goal of becoming “the world's largest provider of end-to-end infrastructure solutions.”

The “full-stack AI” strategy presented this time also includes the “one horizontal and five vertical” intelligent infrastructure (SI).

Among them, “One Horizontal” refers to the “Wanquan Heterogeneous Intelligent Computing Platform”, which was launched at the Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference on April 18 this year. From a technology application perspective, this is similar to an “intelligent computing center operating system.”

The current intelligent computing center is very complex, covering not only different computing power such as intelligent computing, scientific computing, and general computing, but also different computing architectures, such as x86 and ARM, so there are different manufacturers, such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Many domestic entrepreneurial technology companies are also joining this circuit.

How to unify the management of these different architectures and different computing power systems? To this end, Lenovo launched the “Wanquan Heterogeneous Intelligent Computing Platform” to help B-side users efficiently utilize computing power and maximize overall efficiency.

Amu told Wall Street News, “Wanquan's heterogeneous intelligent computing platform mainly solves two technical problems: one is intelligent scheduling and matching of general computing, scientific computing, and intelligent calculation of heterogeneous computing power; the other is extensive model training, reasoning, and fine-tuning to optimize computing power requests.”

The “Five Vertical” includes five product lines supporting intelligent infrastructure: servers, storage, software and hyperconvergence, data networks, and edge.

Smart Services (SS) and Intelligent Infrastructure Services (SI) together form Lenovo's “second growth curve.” The “One Engine, Three Arrows” strategy is an executable strategic guide for solutions and service businesses.

“One Engine” refers to the DynaSky engine.

Liu Jun said, “DynaSky was the original code name for Lenovo's IT business system. The purpose was to solve the defects of the original IT system — the problem of not responding quickly enough. We need to achieve 'direct customer delivery'. On top of the previous extremely stable IT system, add a sensitive IT system to detect enterprise needs in a timely manner and make dynamic adjustments, thereby saving at least 18 months and tens of millions of dollars in time and capital costs.”

In order to discover and address customer needs in a timely manner, Liu Jun launched DynaSky 1.0 when he took over Lenovo's business in China in 2017. This is a cloud-native centralized system. The system can be quickly and modularly configured. It can be iterated every two weeks to improve everything we want to improve. Lenovo's IT business system has become very agile.

Liu Jun recalled, “Based on this, we discovered that we also needed help from robots. Because we really want to directly reach customers and directly manage China's tens of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises and hundreds of millions of consumers. We can't rely on systems alone; the data is too massive; we have to rely on AI.”

Therefore, in 2019, the DynaSky engine, which was iterated to 2.0, included AI, and involved the key aspects of the enterprise's “R&D, production, sales, and service”, all supported by AI; now, DynaSky Engine has been upgraded to 3.0, which is characterized by “being driven by an enterprise knowledge base, enterprise model, and enterprise intelligence.”

“We first used 'One Engine' to serve Lenovo's transformation. At a later stage, many customers asked us to share these IT modules with them. As a result, it has driven the rapid growth of our entire third-block business solutions and services business.” Liu Jun said, “In 2023, Lenovo will become the second-largest IT service company in China (excluding operators).”

So what are the “three arrows”? This includes solutions and services for government and enterprise customer groups, SMB (small and medium-sized enterprise) customer groups, and consumer users, which can be understood as big B, small B, and C.

New developments in Tianxi, Wanquan, and DynaSky Ecology

Wall Street News has noticed that the reason why TSMC, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, including Microsoft and AMD, have strong market dominance is partly due to the technical advantages of these giants, and on the other hand, it is also related to the rich ecosystem they have built.

Amu told Wall Street News, “Relying on full-stack AI, Lenovo is working hard to develop the Tianxi, Wanquan, and DynaSky ecosystems.”

The role of Tianxi Ecosystem is to provide rich AI applications. In addition to the killer apps developed by Lenovo itself, these apps also come from third-party ecosystem partners.

When retrieving these applications, C-side users do not need to select them separately; they only need to “invoke” “Xiaotian”, and “Xiaotian” can distribute fully understood user intentions to corresponding applications and feed back application results to “Xiaotian” to meet the corresponding needs of users.

This is equivalent to users being able to directly interact with a purpose, and can solve their needs through “Xiaotian” without looking for different applications.

In order to be retrieved by “Xiaotian”, Lenovo has built a small program platform. The app on this platform requires no installation and is very lightweight. Therefore, unlike the previous app, the frequency of application may not be high, but it takes up a lot of valuable end-side space.

Currently, the Lenovo applet platform has hundreds of AI-native apps, and the Lenovo AI App Store has more than 900. These include Kimi, Wenxin's words, the first question of understanding, NetEase Youdao, iFLYTEK, and a large number of generic or dedicated native AI applications for medical, legal, educational, and engineering design.

The counterpart to Wanquan's heterogeneous intelligent computing platform is Wanquan Ecology. According to Amu, Wanquan Ecosystem mainly involves three types of partners: GPU vendors, algorithm optimization manufacturers, and large model manufacturers. “We have completed the connection with these three mainstream manufacturers, and we will continue to expand the scope of connectivity in the future.”

Naturally, the core of “DynaSky Ecology” revolves around the “DynaSky Engine,” or “One Engine” in “One Engine, Three Arrows.” Amu said, “DynaSky Engine can provide enterprises with a variety of intelligent solutions from general to industry. Naturally, it is inseparable from close cooperation with two types of ecological partners — ISV (Independent Software Developers: Independent Software Developers) partners and general model providers that are deep in the industry.”

Currently, Lenovo has cooperated with many ISVs in the fields of education, medical care, industrial manufacturing, etc. to launch various solutions; in addition, Lenovo has also joined forces with many large model manufacturers to provide dedicated intelligent implementation services for enterprises.

The “three arrows” of the “one engine, three arrows” strategy is the B-side of the service. This is also the core business service target of Lenovo's 3S strategic transformation.

Among them, due to the huge number of SMBs, Lenovo has designed a service platform called “Baiying Smart” to meet the various needs of SMBs. A “Baiying Smart Device” is a type of “enterprise intelligence” enabled by DynaSky 3.0.

Liu Jun said, “Baiying Intelligence's position is to provide a full range of IT services for small and medium-sized enterprises in China. We hope it can be used to help SMEs solve all IT-related matters, such as business processes, etc. with Baiying Intelligence.”

Wang Liping, vice president of Lenovo Group and general manager of the China Government and Enterprise Affairs Group, explained, “Many SMB companies don't know how to build IT business systems, so we have created this enterprise intelligence solution, provided enterprises with intelligent deployment, and can also complete intelligent infrastructure construction. Enterprises can purchase corresponding enterprise agents according to their own business needs.”

Lenovo divides IT requirements for enterprise services into two categories: general enterprise product services, including R&D, supply and marketing services, etc., with corresponding modules such as “supply chain intelligence, sales intelligence, marketing intelligence, service intelligence, and R&D intelligence”. These different types of intelligence, along with the enterprise model and enterprise knowledge base, can enhance the ability of enterprises to operate in related areas.

The second category is for specific needs, and Lenovo has customized a full set of enterprise agents. Compared with general requirements, one part is responsible for solving standardized requirements, while the other part satisfies individual needs based on standard requirements.

Seemingly, in the first year of the Lenovo Group entering its fifth 10-year term, starting in 2024, the business performance supported by AI technology and guided by Lenovo's full-stack AI strategy will refresh market perception.