Track Hyper | Lenovo's "Full-Stack AI" Strategy Emerges

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

With the help of AI technology, Lenovo's mobile phones are making a comeback.

Lenovo Group's Executive Vice President and President of China, Liu Jun, stated on June 26th that "the time has come for Lenovo to embark on the journey of mobile phone revival in the Chinese market."

On the same day, at the 2024 Mobile World Congress Shanghai (MWCS 2024), Lenovo Group comprehensively showcased its "Full-Stack AI" strategy for the first time.

Liu Jun revealed to Wall Street News that on April 1, 2024 - the start of Lenovo's 2024/25 fiscal year and the beginning of Lenovo Group's fifth decade, Lenovo officially proposed the "Full-Stack AI" strategic layout.

"Full-Stack AI" will accelerate the transformation of Lenovo's 3S in China. 3S refers to Smart Devices (SD), Smart Infrastructure (SI), and Solutions and Services (SS), which belong to Lenovo's IDG, ISG, and SSG business segments, respectively.

"Full-Stack AI" consists of three parts: AI terminals with "One Body, Multiple Ends," AI infrastructure with "One Horizontal, Five Verticals," and AI solutions and services with "One Engine, Three Arrows." It has respectively built the Tianxi ecosystem for the AI terminal industry, the Wanquan ecosystem for the intelligent infrastructure industry, and the Qingtian ecosystem for the AI solutions and services industry.

With an executable strategy and a rich and comprehensive ecosystem, this forms the overall framework of Lenovo Group's "hardware and software integration" technology and business.

Mobile Phones: The Time for Revival in the Chinese Market Has Come

On June 25th, Lenovo held the "Make the World Full of AI" - Lenovo AI Terminal "One Body, Multiple Ends" Strategy and Consumer New Product Summer Launch Event in Hangzhou, unveiling the "One Body, Multiple Ends" strategy for the AI era, the new capabilities of the Tianxi Intelligent Body System (Tianxi AS), the "Super Interconnect" application module, and many new AI terminal products.

These new products include AI phones and AI PCs. Among them, AI phones include Lenovo moto razr 50 Ultra AI Genesis, Lenovo moto razr 50, and Lenovo moto S50 Neo; AI PCs include Lenovo YOGA Air 14s, YOGA Air 14c, and Legion Y9000P.

Liu Jun stated that in addition to Lenovo's AI PCs already equipped with Tianxi AS (Agent System), Lenovo's "One Body, Multiple Ends" strategy is integrating the Tianxi Intelligent Body System, the "AI brain," into AI phones, AI tablets, and a variety of AIoT devices, allowing users to enjoy seamless application and services across all scenarios and to experience a new "personal AI assistant."

On June 26th, at MWCS 2024, Lenovo Group comprehensively showcased all the technical and business sub-strategic modules of the Lenovo "Full-Stack AI" strategy, including Lenovo AI (Intelligent) terminals and the "One Body, Multiple Ends" strategy "We proposed the vision of promoting intelligent transformation 7 years ago. Lenovo aims to drive the intelligent transformation of Chinese enterprises and individuals. Over the past 7 years, we have been accumulating technological reserves for this purpose," Liu Jun told Wall Street News. "In 2024, when we believe that we have the necessary capabilities in terms of technological reserves, product reserves, etc., we will formally put forward our AI strategy."

The "One Body, Multiple Ends" of Lenovo's AI terminals is a defined executable method at the terminal level.

The so-called "One Body" is the "Tianxi Intelligent Body System" - Tianxi AS, composed of Lenovo's "XiaoTian" personal intelligent body, as well as personal knowledge base, AI application platform, super interconnection, data security, and privacy protection mechanism, independently developed by Lenovo, forming the "AI Brain" of Lenovo's AI terminals.

Now and in the future, all of Lenovo's intelligent terminals, such as smartphones, PCs, and tablets, AIoT devices, are equipped with Tianxi AS. Ablik Mu Ablikmeti (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 come with Lenovo's "XiaoTian" personal intelligent body embedded in Tianxi AS.

Liu Jun believes that AI terminals with the "Tianxi Intelligent Body System" will serve as "personal AI assistants," which he considers to be "revolutionary" for PCs. In addition to boosting Lenovo's market share in PCs, "it will also drive our growth in non-AI PCs, especially AI smartphones," Liu Jun said.

According to official Lenovo data, Lenovo smartphones have performed well globally: "We are leaders in North America and South America: we are third in North America, behind only Apple and Samsung; and second in South America, behind only Samsung."

In the Chinese market, "In the past few years, Lenovo smartphones have not stopped working, but indeed have not invested too much in promotional resources, focusing instead on the research and development of new technologies such as AI," Liu Jun said. "Now, the time has come. AI is a revolutionary technology, and with our 'One Body, Multiple Ends' strategy and AI innovation on smartphones, the time has come for Lenovo to embark on a journey of smartphone revival in the Chinese market. With the empowerment of 'XiaoTian,' I believe it will provide users with more valuable choices."

Business B: One Horizontal, Five Verticals + One Engine, Three Arrows

At the 2022 Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference, Lenovo Group first proposed the concept of "Universal Computing Power." Lenovo Group emphasizes turning ubiquitous computing power into products and services to bring real benefits to users, and sets the mid-term goal of becoming the "world's largest end-to-end infrastructure solution provider."

The showcased "Full-stack AI" strategy also includes the "One Horizontal, Five Verticals" of intelligent infrastructure (SI) Among them, "Yi Heng" refers to the "Wanquan Heterogeneous Intelligent Computing Platform", which was launched at the Lenovo Innovation Technology Conference on April 18 this year. From a technical application perspective, this is similar to the "operating system of the intelligent computing center".

The current intelligent computing center is very complex, covering different computing powers such as intelligent computing, scientific computing, and general computing, as well as different computing architectures such as x86 and ARM, with different manufacturers such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, as well as numerous domestic entrepreneurial technology companies joining this race.

How to unify and manage these different architectures and computing systems? To address this, Lenovo introduced the "Wanquan Heterogeneous Intelligent Computing Platform" to help B-end users efficiently call computing power and maximize overall efficiency.

Amu told Wall Street News, "The Wanquan Heterogeneous Intelligent Computing Platform mainly solves two technical problems: intelligent scheduling and matching of heterogeneous computing power for general computing, scientific computing, and intelligent computing; and performing a large number of model training, inference, fine-tuning, and optimizing computing power requests."

"Wu Zong" includes five product lines that support intelligent infrastructure, namely servers, storage, software-defined and hyper-converged infrastructure, data networks, and edge.

Smart Services (SS) and Smart Infrastructure Services (SI) together form Lenovo's "Second Growth Curve". The "Yi Qing San Jian" strategy is the executable strategic guidance for the solution and service business.

"Yi Qing" refers to the engine.

Liu Jun said, "Qingtian is the initial code name for Lenovo's IT business system internally, aimed at solving the original IT system's shortcomings - the problem of not responding quickly enough. We aim to achieve 'direct access to customers'. On the previously very solid IT system foundation, we added an agile IT system that can promptly detect enterprise needs, make dynamic adjustments, and save at least 18 months and tens of millions of dollars in time and capital costs."

To promptly discover and address customer needs, Liu Jun launched Qingtian 1.0 when he took over Lenovo's China business in 2017. This is a cloud-native middle platform system that can quickly and modularly configure systems, achieving iterations every two weeks, improving everywhere that needs improvement, making Lenovo's IT business system very agile.

Liu Jun recalled, "Based on this, we found that we also need the help of robots. Because we really want to directly reach customers, directly manage hundreds of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises and billions of consumers in China. Relying solely on the system is not enough, the data is too massive, we must rely on AI."

Therefore, in 2019, the upgraded Qingtian engine 2.0 embedded AI, involving key links such as enterprise "research, production, supply, sales, and service" with AI support; now, the Qingtian engine has been upgraded to 3.0, characterized by "driven by enterprise knowledge base, enterprise large models, and enterprise intelligent body".

"We initially used 'Yi Qing' to serve Lenovo's transformation. Later, many customers requested us to share these IT modules with them. Therefore, this drove the rapid growth of our entire third business solution and service business." Liu Jun said, "By 2023, Lenovo will become the second largest IT service company in China (excluding operators)

"What is the "Three Arrows"? This includes solutions and services for government and enterprise clients, SMB (small and medium-sized enterprise) clients, and consumer users, which can be understood as large B, small B, and C.

## New Developments in Tianxi, Wanquan, and Qingtian Ecology

Huawei noticed that companies like TSMC, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, as well as Microsoft, AMD, and others, are able to have strong market dominance not only because of their respective technological advantages, but also because of the rich ecosystem they have built.

Amu told Huawei, "Relying on full-stack AI, Lenovo is committed to developing the Tianxi, Wanquan, and Qingtian ecosystems."

The role of the Tianxi ecosystem is to provide a variety of AI applications. These applications come not only from Lenovo's killer applications, but also from third-party ecosystem partners.

When C-end users access these applications, they do not need to select them separately. They only need to "call out" "Xiao Tian", and "Xiao Tian" can distribute the fully understood user intent to the corresponding applications, and feed back the application results to "Xiao Tian" to meet the user's needs.

This is equivalent to users interacting directly with a purpose, without having to search for different applications. Through "Xiao Tian", needs can be met.

In order for "Xiao Tian" to access, Lenovo has built a mini-program platform. Applications on this platform do not need to be installed and are very light. Therefore, unlike previous apps, the frequency of application use may not be high, but they occupy valuable end-side space.

Currently, Lenovo's mini-program platform has hundreds of native AI applications, and the Lenovo AI App Store has over 900 applications. These include kimi, Wenxin Yiyuan, Tongyi Qianwen, Netease Youdao, Xunfei Tingjian, as well as a large number of general or specialized native AI applications in fields such as medicine, law, education, and engineering design.

Corresponding to the Wanquan heterogeneous intelligent computing platform is the Wanquan ecosystem. According to Amu, the Wanquan ecosystem mainly involves three types of partners: GPU manufacturers, algorithm optimization manufacturers, and large model manufacturers. "We have connected with mainstream manufacturers of these three types, and will continue to expand the scope of connections in the future."

The core of the "Qingtian ecosystem" naturally revolves around the "Qingtian Engine", which is the "one engine" in the "Three Arrows". Amu said, "The Qingtian Engine can provide enterprises with various intelligent solutions from general to industry-specific, and naturally cannot do without close cooperation with two types of ecosystem partners - ISVs in vertical industry fields and general model providers."

Currently, Lenovo has cooperated with many ISVs in fields such as education, medicine, and industrial manufacturing to launch various solutions; in addition, Lenovo has also partnered with many large model manufacturers to provide landing services for enterprise-specific intelligent bodies.

The "Three Arrows" strategy's "Three Arrows" serve the B-end, which is also the core business service object of Lenovo's 3S strategic transformation.

Among them, SMBs, due to their large number, Lenovo has designed a service platform called "Baiying Intelligent Body" to meet various needs of SMBs. "Baiying Intelligent Body" is a type of "Enterprise Intelligent Body" empowered by Qingtian 3.0.

Liu Jun said, "The positioning of the Baiying Intelligent Body is to provide a full range of IT services for small and medium-sized enterprises in China. We hope to use it to help small and medium-sized enterprises solve all IT-related matters, such as business processes."

Wang Liping, Vice President of Lenovo Group and General Manager of China's Government and Enterprise Business Group, explained, "Many SMBs do not know how to build IT business systems, so we have developed this enterprise intelligent body solution, which can be deployed by enterprises to complete intelligent infrastructure construction. Enterprises can purchase corresponding enterprise intelligent bodies according to their business needs."

Lenovo divides the IT needs of enterprise services into two categories: general enterprise product services, including research, production, supply, sales, and services, with corresponding modules such as "supply chain intelligent body, sales intelligent body, marketing intelligent body, service intelligent body, and research and development intelligent body." These intelligent bodies in different links, together with enterprise models and enterprise knowledge bases, can enhance the operational capabilities of enterprises in relevant links.

The second category is for specialized needs, where Lenovo has customized a full set of enterprise intelligent bodies. Compared to general needs, one part is responsible for solving standardized needs, while the other part meets personalized needs based on standardized requirements.

It seems that in the first year of Lenovo Group's entry into the fifth 10-year period, starting from 2024, with the support of AI technology, the business performance under the guidance of Lenovo's full-stack AI strategy will refresh market perceptions