Prakash Sangam:
Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Tantra’s Mantra where we go behind and beyond the tech news headlines. I’m your host Prakash Sangam, principal and founder at Tantra Analyst. We are continuing our discussion on CoPilot Plus PCs today. As all of you know, these PCs have been on the shelf for almost a month now, and people have had a hands-on experience of them. Many reviews are posted on the websites. I’ve gotten a few units for myself from different vendors, and I’m still testing them.
The first one I got was from Lenovo. It’s a Lenovo Yoga, and I’ve used it for the last few weeks as my daily driver, and I have some mixed experience in terms of software and app compatibility and so on. I would say most of it is on expected lines, but there are a few surprises as well. I will publish my review in the next couple of days.
But today, to discuss the present and the future of CoPilot Plus PCs and AI PCs in general, we have Pooja Sathe, who is the Director and Category Leader of Worldwide Commercial AI PCs at Lenovo with us today. We will discuss the history of arm-based PCs, how their journey has been, what has changed now, what the future holds, and other issues as well as Lenovo’s point of view on CoPilot Plus PCs as well.
Pooja, welcome to the show.
Pooja Sathe:
Prakash, thank you for having me on this show. In fact, this is my inaugural podcast. I have not done a podcast before, so thank you for having me. I am really excited to be here and talk to you. Thank you.
Prakash Sangam:
It’s an honor to be your first podcaster. Could you give us a quick background on your experience in the PC industry and at Lenovo?
Pooja Sathe:
Absolutely. As you said, I’m leading the commercial AI PC category at Lenovo. This is a newly created team, as you would imagine, with all this AI work streams going on in the industry. I completed 12-year milestone this June with Lenovo. I have been associated with many first product launches, and it has been unintentional. But I was part of the first desktop tiny, if you remember the tiny form factor that Lenovo launched first.
Then the first PC is workstation, which is a complete new redesign of the workstation class of devices, very modular. And then recently, I was part of the first Windows on Arm commercial PC with ThinkPad X13S. And this year, the first CoPilot Plus PC with the ThinkPad T14S. So a lot of first product launches, and I like to call myself an architect, really developing something from ground up. So a lot of learning, excitement, listening, working across teams internally and externally. But it has been a great journey so far.
Prakash Sangam:
Indeed, and launching new and new category of products, I think that’s quite some experience, right? And congratulations on launching the CoPilot Plus PCs. I think this is the big one, right?
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah, it’s been like it’s huge. A lot of good feedback so far. Very well. So on the feedback, as I mentioned earlier, it’s been on the shelves for a month now.
Prakash Sangam:
What has been the market response so far? Any information on how well these are selling and so on?
Pooja Sathe:
So Lenovo launched two CoPilot Plus PCs last month. And so one is the ThinkPad T14S, which is I’m part of that team. And then you talked about the Yoga Slim 7 that you have it, you have used and had hands on experience with it. So both iconic, well known brands in enterprise and consumer space, right? Yoga and ThinkPad. And both are powered by the Snapdragon X series.
And if you think about it, and I’ve seen some of, I’ve heard your podcast where you talked about really the key pillars of these CoPilot SPCs and it’s really the best in class performance, the battery life, right? And really built for AI with 45 tops NPU. So huge excitement in market, right? Our channel partners, our retailers, definitely stocking up.
Our enterprise customers, as expected, they’re requesting devices for testing and evaluation.
And that’s how the enterprise cycle is. They want to test the device first before they deploy it. So we have a huge seed program for them. So without, again, it’s too early, without delving into the numbers, the response has been fantastic. Really, really positive so far from the market.
Prakash Sangam:
Well, good to hear, good to hear. So taking a step back, right? When you are designing these PCs, right? Obviously a new category, a new processor, I mean, not really new, but a kind of processor and you’re going big instead of just one model, test model that you had before. And more importantly, going with enterprise market, which is very crucial and it has its own requirement and so on. So what are some of the design criteria that you are talking through with your customers and internalizing and so on when we’re designing these?
Pooja Sathe:
So Prakash, we are constantly looking for customer feedback and their input as we create our product roadmap. And one of these platform for us, I’m not sure whether you know it or not, but it’s our customer advisory forums that we hold many times a year across the Geos.
And again, you may be surprised, may not be surprised, but one of the top requirements coming out of these advisory forums was really around power efficiency.
It was really around the battery life, which is interesting. So it became like out of the top three priorities for customers that full day battery life was a big ask. So we knew that it is really important for the customer and that’s why our partnership with Qualcomm. But it becomes more important, especially when you are running AI workloads on the PC.
Battery becomes much more important.
So that’s why the introduction of NPU on the PCs. So that was big. And then I think about the other consideration. It’s obvious, but it became more evident, especially with AI PCs, with security. So that’s another huge aspect when it comes to enterprise and AI adoption in enterprise. So while consumer folks would say thin and light design, beautiful screen, right? We’re really looking at providing that best-in-class battery life and enterprise security.
Prakash Sangam:
And specifically you mentioned about AI features and so on. So during those sessions while you’re designing, before making these, and now once these things are with the customers, what is that you’re hearing on? How many features, what features, CoPilot Plus AI features that people are really using? You know, consumers on yoga, but more importantly, I would think, enterprises on ThinkPads. What specific features of these they’re using?
Pooja Sathe:
So when Microsoft announced these CoPilot Plus PCs in May, we started shipping our products last month. So again, it’s been a couple of weeks only. Our enterprise customers are starting to get their hands on the devices. We’re also running some external customer betas with some key customers who really want to be part of the early pre-production units also. So we are gathering feedback from everywhere.
Pretty much, AI is very interesting. Customers have tested the enhanced studio effects and they have also looked at the live translations. These are some of the good features, in addition to if you use the M365 CoPilot features, which is on the cloud. So really good feedback, but the feedback has been really around, honestly speaking, the performance curves and the battery life and sustainability.
The power efficiency gains definitely use to sustainability also. So I don’t see the CoPilot plus PC category just AI PC. It’s a category itself and Microsoft called it, if I recall, the fastest, most performant PC category. So AI is definitely a big part of it, but it’s not the only part of it.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, I mean, as I said, I’ve been using a Yoga Slim 7X for a couple of weeks now. I think the hardware is top notch. No question about it, especially the display. I’ve used AI features, some more than others. For example, studio effect, of course, is useful anytime you get on a camera, the team’s calls or other calls with friends and so on. I kind of use just to test out co-creator and others. My feeling is these are not yet at a level where they become necessities. They’re good to have, but not necessarily anybody goes and buys a PC for these features.
On the contrary, I think battery life, as you mentioned, is stellar. You don’t have to even think about whether I have enough battery life to last for the day, even after using it for a few hours. I think display, and as a consumer PC, of course display is really bright and very colorful. Of course, leak and light, which is perfect.
I think my view is since this is the back to school season, I think it’s perfect for kids going back to school, the high schools or the colleges, obviously at that price point. I agree with you that I think still, of course the performance, battery and display and the form factor for consumers are key things. And enterprises, of course, same things, but more on the battery and security.
Pooja Sathe:
Good to know. And then, as you mentioned, one of the biggest factor in bringing this performance into you and more importantly, battery life is use of Qualcomm X Elite platform in these. So as you mentioned, they’ve been working on Windows and ARM for some time.
Prakash Sangam:
Actually used the 5G PC as it’s called in the US, Lenovo 5G PC for almost a year as my primary PC for productivity use cases to see it. I think it was really, really nice connectivity. Battery life was top notch.
Pooja Sathe:
Good to hear.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah. And the biggest issue, app compatibility, right? And it still has significantly improved the situation that is, but still not a solved problem, right? Not a fully solved problem, I would say.
Pooja Sathe:
So you’re right. It has been a journey. And I, as I initially mentioned, that my team was responsible to launch the commercial Windows on ARM device with X13S. So it’s not new for us. It has been a multi-year partnership with Qualcomm and Microsoft. And as I said, we aim to solve the biggest pain point for our customer, which was battery life, right? So we launched on the consumer side, we launched the 5G PC, the Flex 5G, on commercial X13S.
We ran a lot of customer beta, since it’s a new architecture, and really massive testing across hundreds of customers.
And what didn’t work, right? If you think about it, of course, application compatibility. It was a big challenge. It was not very mature back in 2022. And in fact, my team pretty much worked very closely with Microsoft and Qualcomm. And based on the customer testing that we were doing with the product, we created a list of top 100 critical applications, the enterprise critical applications that’s needed. And it was really around security, device management, you name it, productivity, collab, VPN.
So we created a list of 100 applications and we said, we need to solve the list of these top 100 enterprise applications. And we worked closely with Qualcomm, Microsoft. We jumped on multiple ISV calls to talk about the business case, to talk about the value proposition of these devices. We started with 40 compatible applications in 2022. Fast forward it to 2024. We achieved all the 100 applications compatibility, like all those 100 applications are compatible now and many, many more.
So of course it’s not 100% compatibility and you will still see issues here and there. But I like to see the growth and I like to see where we started and where we are. And I definitely expect as a customer starts testing these devices, we would remove a lot of their hurdles around the applications. If not 100%, but very, very close to 90, 95% of the applications.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, and Chrome supporting on native, I think that was a big change, right?
Pooja Sathe:
That’s a big one, yeah. So yeah, this is a work which I’m really proud of that we did, and it’s going to benefit pretty much all the OEMs. But it’s an important work to move the ecosystem.
Prakash Sangam:
Absolutely. And I know one thing I find it still surprising is, especially coming from a consumer side while testing yoga, there is no good source to find out whether a specific application may not be top 100, but the assertive application that you might be using, whether it is supported or not, basically you have to install, it sometimes works, it doesn’t work, then you have to find out whether it’s a compatibility issue or something else and so on.
I don’t know how is it on the enterprise space. Maybe there is a good resource where it could be a simple lookup table that anybody could go check whether the app they’re looking at works, supported either as a native app or through emulator and so on, but that is seriously lacking, at least from a consumer point of view.
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah, no, welcome to my world. I’ve been working with both Microsoft and Qualcomm on this. In fact, Qualcomm, I’m not sure, but they listed a lot of applications on the website.
Prakash Sangam:
Correct, yeah, they do have a list, yes.
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah, like window application lists on their website there. Without going into details, they’re also probably working with a third party to list all these applications so that it’s accessible for consumers specifically. On the commercial side, you might be aware of the Microsoft App Assure team. They work very closely with the commercial customers.
We internally have a list of all these applications showing compatibility across all collaboration, productivity, device management, pretty much all the categories.
So in terms of Lenovo sellers. But the App Assure team is a good place to start with for commercial customers. They have a fast pass program and they can really help the customers. But you’re right, I think a third party or a place that houses all the applications would be super beneficial.
Prakash Sangam:
And also when you’re using an app, you don’t know whether it is running natively or through emulation, right? And that’s been my pet peeve. But I would agree that for regular consumers at least, doesn’t matter as long as the app experience is good. It doesn’t matter that it is running in emulation or the native mode, but of course the performance will always be better in native mode.
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah.
Prakash Sangam:
So, sure, you’ve been testing the new emulator that Microsoft has. What has been your experience?
Pooja Sathe:
We’re seeing, if you run the benchmarks, and I’ve seen the benchmarks from Microsoft as well as our development teams, we definitely are seeing up to 10-15% performance improvements, right? So that’s huge. And it’s competing really effectively with the native application. So it’s pretty good. I’m pleased with the performance improvements that we have seen.
Prakash Sangam:
Okay, cool. So another one on the app compatibility. When I talk to CIOs and IT managers, I mean, they have had this experience before. So they’re still a little bit skeptical. And I’m sure, as you mentioned, they’ve got these pieces in their hands now and testing and so on. So are you guys doing anything specifically to ally those fears?
I mean, yeah, top 100 applications is good, but if you’re a CIO, buying thousands of pieces and giving it to all of your employees, you want to make sure all the applications that I’m using, not just the top 100, be compatible. Otherwise, there will be a long list of tickets that you’ll be ready to address. So specifically on the app compatibility, you’d like Tiger team to address this if things come up and so on. What does industry and as Lenovo, what you guys are doing to address that?
Pooja Sathe:
We definitely learned that application compatibility is a huge, huge challenge and it needs to be addressed for enterprise customers. But let’s be honest, there is no US that has 100 percent compatibility. But what we have to see is the focus and the growth overall on the ecosystem. And I feel like with the use case that these devices are bringing the market, we will see the ecosystem move very, very fast.
I think when it comes to enterprises, I think the right approach for enterprise is to identify the personas that will benefit from these Windows and Snapdragon CoPilot plus PCs. So if it’s really around the use cases around the portability or battery life, so think about the road warriors, the sellers who are always on the go, the sales team, right? Or if it’s really around the knowledge workers in a business unit, in a particular business unit, the enterprise ITDM would need to look at what are the applications that are required and critical for these personas, versus looking at all the applications in my environment needs to work.
So you have to look at, okay, this particular persona will benefit most from Windows on Snapdragon devices. Let’s look at the apps that are required and critical and let’s see how that is working. If we look at that, the critical applications for enterprises, what, security applications? That should work. Most of these enterprises are using multiple security applications, not one. The VPN, your device management, and of course your productivity applications for that particular persona.
I think that it reduces the subset of applications that need to work. I think that’s the right approach with the Windows on Snapdragon devices. Of course, if you start looking at the legacy applications, you will get them working on the Windows on Snapdragon. They are legacy applications. Very few users are using those applications. I think we have to change the way we are looking at how to deploy these devices in the environment, and how to deploy them in the environment.
Prakash Sangam:
Maybe start with, as you mentioned, Road Warriors and others. For them, battery life is more important than supporting a small application and they are efficient. Maybe start with those.
Pooja Sathe:
Even some of the knowledge workers, the CoPilot, PC, the biggest persona, Microsoft identified as really the knowledge creators, the knowledge creators in any business unit.
So it’s much broader, but you can definitely, I definitely see potential in the right fit.
Prakash Sangam:
Okay. X Elite itself has been compared quite a lot in the reviews and benchmarks and so on with Apple Mac and M3, even M4 and so on. Who do you consider your primary competitors? Is it other Windows, PC, OEMs or Apple? I mean, obviously Microsoft had to make that point that now they are competing neck to neck with Apple, but realistically from an individual OEM perspective, how are you seeing the competitive landscape?
Pooja Sathe:
So our decision to launch the Windows on ARM devices was really around solving customer pain points and ultimately provide choice to that. So if you think about it, one in three PCs sold is Lenovo. We still have two-thirds of the pie that doesn’t buy Lenovo PC. So if I have to pick the competition, pretty much everyone is our competition. So we’re looking at the total addressable market and it’s going to be bigger in 2024-25, especially with the Windows 11 refresh cycle.
It is this replacement cycle after the COVID peak in 2020. So the market is going to be big. So that means we want to give the customers the choice. And AI, like I think there was one study, EDC released, which was like three in four ITDMs, definitely consider AI one of the biggest buying criteria. So we want to be able to provide the best-in-class AI devices to our customers. So it’s really providing the choice to our customers, and every one is our competition.
Prakash Sangam:
And also, I mean, you know, the way AI is going, everything that you do will have AI in it. So if you’re an IT manager, you want to make sure you feature-proof the pieces you’re buying for next few years. So it makes sense that it has the best in PU.
So quick on Windows ARM.
So it’s been tried before, but it is much bigger, much different now, specifically, what are the top three things you think Windows and ARM has different this time and make it work and make it a success?
Pooja Sathe:
Windows 11 is a big one, right? When we launched the X13S in 2022, handful of customers were on Windows 11. So with Windows 10 and of service in 2025, what’s favorable for ARM is customers are moving to Windows 11. So that’s why I would say the application compatibility is improved significantly. Of course, they have a great value proposition, right? It’s just aligned the battery life, the performance, right? It’s not the performance is stellar, the benchmarks we are seeing and of course, a huge sustainability story for them, right?So the value proposition in addition to AI is huge this time.
Prakash Sangam:
And it’s much bigger ecosystem as well. And all the OEMs like yours coming up with multiple pieces, not just one piece is standing in the corner here somewhere, right?
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah. And I also think like AI from AI perspective, the devices are in the market with these and capable CPU, GPU and PU. The software ecosystem is going to grow further, right?
It’s the hardware first, software follow. So we have to just wait and be patient. It’s going to change. I think it’s going to be changing like next year or two very drastically.
Prakash Sangam:
Okay. So thinking about processors, I mean, AMD and Intel are not behind. AMD said they will have their PCs with their latest in few supported AI 300 soon. So from your vantage point, I mean, you’ve been a collaborator with them for a long time, right? And as I said, the biggest PC providers. How are you looking at the positioning of these?
Will it be like, you know, you have similar models with option like what you have now? Now you can select different SOCs for when you’re configuring your PC, when you’re buying. It will be just like that, they’ll have, you know, ARM or X Elite as one option, or it will be different categories with different tiering and different positioning and so on when the Intel PCs come into market.
Pooja Sathe:
Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest thing without going into the roadmap here, I would say the biggest thing is providing options, right? So different SOC options for our customers. And as a number one PC provider, it is essential that we offer a robust portfolio that caters to all customer needs. So Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, it really provides unique value proposition to the customer with Intel’s mature ecosystem, with Qualcomm’s great battery life, right?
AMD, great value for price. I think it’s just a win-win. I would say honestly, competition is good, right? At the end, customer wins. They get the best choice in this intense competitive environment. Our job is to make sure that we are giving option to our customers.
Prakash Sangam:
Yeah, smart way to avoid the question. And in terms of the channel strategy and others for our PCs, I mean, it needs a little bit more training, sales training and other speed consumer or the enterprise channel, right? How is that happening? Will that change as we move to AMD and Intel?
Pooja Sathe:
I think we have a, we work with all our partners to drive marketing and demand generation activities. And we have a mature channel ecosystem and closely work with our partners. So our goal is to really design a more flexible, agile strategy that benefits our customers and partners. So it’s probably going to evolve. I don’t see anything drastically changing, but we’ll work with pretty much everyone.
Prakash Sangam:
Because I mean, actually when the these launched in Best Buy, I went around. Sales folks, some were more equipped to answer the questions than others. I saw there is some sales training happening, which is good.
Pooja Sathe:
And then I think the biggest thing, Prakash is like education and training. I think it’s so important as part of the go-to-market play or a marketing effort. It’s really important to educate our customers and our sellers and our retail partners because with so many different options comes, they might come confusion. So our job is to make sure that we have a robust training and education for our partners.
Prakash Sangam:
It’s a paradox of choice, right? So many people don’t choose it all.
So at Computex, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano said that he is forecasting 50% of the PC market to be an arm in the next five years or so. So what is your view on it? And you are the number one PC provider in the world.
Pooja Sathe:
Well, I think it’s good to have ambition, right? That’s what fuels that healthy competition I was talking about. And you can look at AMD journey, right? They have massive market share now. Look where they started. And Qualcomm has a very, very competitive product. And whether or not they achieve 50% market share in the next five years, I think I can’t answer that. You may just have to ask Cristiano. But I would say it’s good to have ambition.
Prakash Sangam:
So in looking forward, how do you see the evolution of AI PCs or CoPilot plus PCs, what you want to call them, Do you see these will be a separate category in your portfolio or going forward? Every PC will have some sort of AI in it. So it becomes across the board, not a differentiated category as such. How do you see when you’re looking at your roadmap? Will there be non-AI PCs or non-CoPilot plus PCs as well, or all are like different shades of gray, if you will?
Pooja Sathe:
It’s interesting. It’s an interesting question because I’ve heard that question a couple of times from our partners, especially in this area, in this phase of change, we would see mix of devices, PCs without NPU, PCs with NPU of 10, 15 tops, PCs with NPU of 40 plus tops. Ultimately, if you just take an example from the evolution of phones, we had flip phones, dumb phones, now pretty much everything is smartphone.
So I definitely expect in the next few years, and it might be two, three years, pretty much everything would be an AI PC. I don’t know. AI PC definition for us is much more broader, actually. It’s not hardware centric definition. Lenovo defined AI PC much bigger, like IDC is focused on hardware, right? Microsoft is focused on 40-plus apps, NPU.
Our definition of AI PC has five key features. We look at personal intelligent agent using a natural language interface. We’re looking at the compressed LLM on device, which is the ColdCode plus PC features. Or you’re looking at that computing with CPU, GPU and NPU. That’s another option. Or you get rich and open AI application ecosystem, which is not just one ISV, but pretty much multiple different ISV working on providing on-device AI experiences.
Ultimately, privacy and security protection is critical. That’s the core tenet of AI PC as the data lives on the device. Our definition of AI PC is much more broader than just saying it needs to have an NPU.
Prakash Sangam:
This was a great discussion, Pooja. Thank you very much for all the insights. I think this and next year, as you mentioned, is going to be really key for the PC industry, not only from our perspective, but also in the infusion of AI in them on what the uptake is, what are the new use cases that will come on, and so on. I’ll definitely be closely watching it.
Pooja Sathe:
We are definitely. I think we want to deliver good customer outcomes through AI. Really around productivity, efficiency, and how do we transform the businesses. We are really looking at it from what are the different experiences we want to deliver for the customers. That’s important.
Prakash Sangam:
Very well. Again, congratulations on launching these PCs, and thank you again for coming over to Tantra’s Mantra.
Pooja Sathe:
Thank you so much for having me, Prakash.
Prakash Sangam:
Thank you.
So folks, that’s all we have for now. I hope you found this discussion informative and useful.
If so, please hit like and subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you are listening this on. I’ll be back soon with another episode putting light on another interesting subject. Bye bye for now.
