“Disclaimer: This is a computer-generated transcript. There may be errors”
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, founder and principal at Tantra Analyst. Today’s episode is special because it’s our 50th. To celebrate that, we have a special guest and an important topic to discuss.
So, 2024 has been an important year in the PC industry, for the PC industry, where Microsoft tried to redefine PC through the introduction of Copilot Plus PCs. This new breed of PCs not only brought AI in a big way to laptops, but also significantly elevated the performance and battery life of PCs, making them effectively compete and win against Apple. And we’ll see how that goes.
As you all know, the first Copilot Plus PCs were brought with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XL8 platform, followed by Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI300-based PCs a couple of months ago.
We have extensively covered this topic on all of our channels in terms of many episodes of Tantra’s Mantra, many articles on it, blogs, reviews and so on.
I’ll include a link to them in the description of the podcast. Please do check them out. But now that the laptops have been around for some time, obviously XL8 is longer than Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI300. Consumers have had a chance to buy, experience them and so on. And I know many of the enterprises are running POC and trials and getting ready for upgrade season in 2025.
Of course, there is a Windows 11 upgrade cycle coming in 2025 as well. Actually, some of this upgrade has already started with Windows 10 in the extended support mode and sunsetting in October 2025. So the questions everybody has is, how are these Copilot Plus PCs fairing in the marketplace, especially in the enterprise market? What are the market drivers? Is AI really that big a deal for enterprises to go buy these PCs now? If so, what are the use cases they are looking at and so on? To hear answer to all these questions, let’s hear them from a horse’s mouth.
So our special guest, Steve Long, who is SVP of commercial business at market leader Lenovo.
Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Long
Hey Prakash, thanks for having me.
Prakash Sangam
Excellent. So before we get on to the discussion about Copilot plus PC’s, I hope they change the name. It’s such a tongue twister. Your experience at Lenovo, so you spent a significant amount of time at Intel, and recently moved to Lenovo. I think it’s a different flavor, different challenge, I would think. And also going from a sales kind of a role to a P&L and a general manager kind of a role.
So would love to hear how last few months have been.
Steve Long
Thanks Prakash again for having me and congrats on 50 episodes. That’s a big milestone. And you know, I’ve been called a lot of things, but I’ve never been called a horse and a horse’s mouth. So let’s preface with we’re going to have some fun and give you a perspective of someone who, like you said, has been at this amazing company Lenovo for the last nine months.
I started in March after, like you said, 20, 24 years coming at things from the from the semiconductor side at Intel, living across the world in different roles. Joining, joining Lenovo has been been a ton of fun, to be honest. This company is a lot of companies professed to be global.
This company absolutely is.
Our leadership is distributed. We act in 180 plus markets. We have the scale that many wish they had. Top 10 global operations supply chain, a partner first mindset, and a culture that lets us innovate and really experiment. I’m responsible, like you said, for the commercial business here, the commercial devices business, which is everything from what you’d expect in PCs, which you want to talk about, but it actually crosses across things that are things that we bring along with the PC, so visuals and accessories and things that make an experience better, and as well as some businesses which are solution businesses from things that we can help people in proved collaboration conference rooms to even on-prem like solutions room workstations to, we call it our OEM business, which actually integrates and is all about what a customer is actually trying to do with devices and driving outcomes for businesses.
So it is a ton of fun and it’s an exciting moment because, as you said, there’s a lot of enthusiasm around both the opportunity to refresh in just your core business but also on what AI can do to transform things. So and next couple of years are going to be really interesting for the whole industry. So obviously, as I mentioned, we are at the beginning of the AI PC or Copilot plus PC cycle.
Prakash Sangam
What has been this traction so far? The initial sales numbers mentioned in public were not that impressive. I think 700k from me till the last month or so, and it’s still early for Intel and AMD. But I would love to hear your sense of the traction from the enterprise market specifically.
Steve Long
So I’d say a couple of things. First off, Lenovo is number one in the enterprise space. We’ve been in that privileged position for some time because we, again, give our customers what they want and give them choice. Silicon, the first silicon vendor that you said that came out with, I think it’s important to set back probably and just say, what is an AI PC?
And it’s a little, everyone’s trying to define it a little bit differently, inclusive of different silicon vendors, different. Microsoft has a definition. I think we’re converging on some things that are important to have. And, you know, there’s some architecture differences, which at the end of the day, people shouldn’t care about, but CPUs, NPUs and GPUs. And what that architecture does is it allows people to, over time, as software catches up, use the device in a different way.
And so I think there’s enthusiasm because, okay, this architecture change is going to enable a wave of momentum and a wave of different use cases that I would say we’re in the very early stage of even as an industry and as enterprises figure out exactly how we’re going to use them. So definition wise, in the beginning, like you said, there was, I think, enthusiasm around Copilot Plus, which required certain metrics around these different architectural elements.
But at Lenovo, we have defined it probably in the most, the real way in which, I think, ultimately we’re going to measure success over time of AI PCs. And that’s, you need the architecture, yes, but you also need the open ecosystem of vices, you need security, and more importantly, you need an agent or a different way of accessing or using personal data. So you need an agent and you need some personal localized data.
And I would say that part, the hitting all five of those elements is a transition and a transformation in process. And so if you’re measuring AIPC by the early days of Qualcomm was the first out of the shoot, the Snapdragon X and Snapdragon X Elite processors that came out in May timeframe or so, or into June really was when they were launched and into market. There’s been some traction.
These are great devices generation on generation, but I think the transformation is still upon us. And there are some interesting use cases which we can talk more about, but it’s early, like if you’re in, I’m a big soccer fan or a football fan. So if you’re in the football realm, like I’d say we’re in the first five minutes of the game, and this game is going to go all the way to a nice overtime like the last World Cup and it’s going to end in the penalty shootouts at some points or early, early in the stage.
Prakash Sangam
Yeah, indeed, indeed. A nice analogy there. So going back to the basics as you mentioned, so what are some of the key drivers and the reasons that the enterprises are looking at this will buy, buy this?
Steve Long
Yeah, I think, well, first and foremost, like IT decision makers pretty secure, pretty historically have looked at productivity indicators is one of the first things that they measure. Can they, you know, can they take cost out of their equation? Can they make ease of deployment, things like that to their users, user experience, employee experience, productivity, security?
Those are probably the top kind of fundamental reasons why anybody would, in an IT shop, would be looking at continuing to change things. I think there’s some new metrics that are coming in around, you know, opportunities again to, sustainability is starting to become a bigger reason to purchase if you’re in the enterprise.
And ultimately though, I think where and why people would want an AI PC is, what can I do transformatively with the device? And you could angle that into productivity. We’ve tried to simplify it and say, you know, with an AI PC, there are things that you can make devices more personal in terms of, again, local language models, local access to things that you do, PCs that respond or devices that respond in the way that you are working.
You can make them more productive or you can be much more productive because you can access information easier. You can do, you know, real-time translations. There’s some use cases of things that are enabled because of some of the functionality on the device. And you can get some improvements in security and protection because of the dynamic usage of some of these architectures in the background can make the PC or the device more secure, right? Or move in from reactive to a lot more proactive features in some of the security softwares.
Prakash Sangam
Okay. And also the battery life and the performance, which has been, you know, step up compared to the previous generations with these AI PCs, right? Is that a driver’s problem as well?
Steve Long
Absolutely. And I’m painting a picture where I tell this journey, I think there’s a journey, right? Why are people going out to refresh? Productivity metrics are around what you just described, like a productivity and employee metrics around, is the device more responsive? Does it have a longer battery life? Is it thinner, lighter, the things that you would expect in a generation on generation, you know, device transition?
And I think with some of the capabilities in these different, in this new architecture that’s come out, you can achieve all those. We are seeing real use case. I’m carrying today one of these devices that gives me basically, I have, I do not carry around the charger, even using Teams applications, right?
Which are high intents can suck out a lot of, a lot of your capabilities and battery.
So they are transformational generation, but we’re still selling them generation on generation.
And I think the real thing, real things will come as we move into use cases, which make experiences better and then ultimately make you drive a different way in which you’re working or drive towards a different, you know, a transformational way in which you are, you’re being productive, right?
That are doing things for you or that are more, more predictive in the way that you’re interfacing.
Prakash Sangam
Yeah, indeed. I tested out the Yoga 7X Slim. I mean, battery life is amazing. It’s unbelievable. And I’ve got the Carbon X1 now, and testing it now. We have been talking about it, a full day of battery life without a charger and such. But with this breed of PCs, you’re actually realizing it.
Steve Long
They’re real. Yeah, they’re real. They’re real now. And that’s good. And I’m glad you’re testing some of the innovation that’s coming out. And X1 Carbon is a great product. You’re going to see some other things coming up, which are extremely innovative and unique. You know, we launched at IFA, the event in Berlin early in September. We unveiled a new category of devices, which is unique to Lenovo, where we went out and actually studied users.
And this was a three year thing that we’ve done, jointly with our friends at Intel, around studying what it is that people actually ultimately care about, found three different use cases, and have developed a new brand that we’re wrapping this around. We call it Aura. Like your Aura. And it’s all about experiences.
And there’s different experiences in there around smart modes and that the PC device is adapting to you, extending the battery life, shortening it. You know, there’s smart care. So people that want to access, you know, direct communication with IT, with a back office premier support from Lenovo.
Or we can embed that into an enterprise where they can go straight to their IT shop, have a chat and improve, you know, their experience or smart share modes where, you know, intra-device operability where you can share, you know, pictures and across phones into your PC and mechanisms like that. So I think that’s where we’re going to take this thing from great battery life to actual great experiences.
Prakash Sangam
Yeah, indeed. I’m a super user of sharing between phone and laptop. I’m really interested to test the speed, the ease of use with Aura between an Android phone and the laptop. And I’ll definitely speak about it.
So moving on to the use cases itself, obviously, AI is developing at a break-neck speed. There will definitely be more applications, use case experiences coming in the future. But right now, there are a few that are useful, like the Windows effect for your camera and so on. Many, like the translation and other things, they are a limited utility. So, the use of AI itself in enterprise especially is pretty limited right now.
I mean, recall was one use case, lot of controversies, but ultimately it’s coming. What is your read of the adaptability of recall in enterprises? I think it has challenges in consumers because, you know, it’s my PC, my data, I don’t want to give access to anybody else, and that kind of sentiment.
But in enterprises, security, confidentiality, maintenance of that is much more important. And I know obviously many enterprises have some third-party applications which are sucking a lot of performance out of the PCs right now. I think recall would be a good option for them. I would love to hear your view on recall for enterprises, the recall feature as such.
Steve Long
Well, I think for a long time, let’s face it, IT shops can see what we’re doing with our devices today. I think for those that don’t understand recall, it’s basically an ability to take time-based images or I should say, time-based moments of what you’re doing on your device and make it easy for the user to access it over time.
The reason has come under, I think, a little bit of scrutiny has just been looking at whether or not we want people to be able to go back and someone third party or someone gets something that you think maybe you don’t want. Maybe you want that to disappear.
But the reality is, in a cloud-based world or in, I joke, some of my kids, they don’t even realize that they’re disappearing messages. They’re out there somewhere and people can find them, right?
So the technology has always been capable. It’s about letting people opt-in and choose that that’s what they want and take control over it.
So I think in a lot of ways, that’s how enterprises think about what they, from a security standpoint, that’s what they’re trying to do. They just want to remain, I’ll say, in control and not let something inadvertent happen with data. Data is the treasure. You don’t want somebody to be able to inadvertently make a mistake on that.
And so I think a lot of our AI use cases, whether recall or again, some are agent AI. So we have an agent AI now, which we are actively looking at how we can enable these personalized uses on device inside an enterprise, make sure that we allow the enterprise to remain in control.And they can opt in what they want to be their local database or their local data access.
Very clear rigors of when something would then go into the cloud and when it would go, or if you’re exiting things that are on your device versus when you’re leaving the device and you’re actually going to go into the cloud, making it very clear with prompts, making it clear with opt-in messages.
I think those are the things that will overcome any resistance that people may have of use cases like that of recall in the enterprise, or just even in deployment of large action models or agents inside the enterprise.
Those are the things we’ve got to overcome. I’d say Lenovo is in a pretty good position to be doing that. We were ahead in experimenting with some of these use cases. Again, our agents and the consumer space were out, it’s time to market with these devices as they went out. We’re starting now to get better data, and we think of this as like a flywheel of learning on what it is that people are, what’s useful to them and what’s not. We can adapt to that.
Prakash Sangam
When we keep talking about use cases and new experiences and so on, and while we are waiting for those, I think the enterprise, I talked to CIOs and IT managers, they see an opportunity of improving the performance with some of the applications they already run like security, which is running 24-7 on the back end of your PC, sucking the performance away. I think NPU, with this Copilot PC, can manage those in a much, much better, much battery efficient way.
So of course, there will be new use case and interesting use cases using AI, but even in my view, the initial traction will be more moving over these applications that a lot of enterprise applications, you know, device management, security and others, moving to better processing node like NPU to improve the performance that way, right?
Steve Long
No, I think you’re spot on. It’s back to your comment that you kind of led with around, hey, I really like the battery life of these new Lenovo systems. And we said, yeah, that’s great. I think you’re right.
Existing applications, which can run better or more effectively, like the so we’ll give an example on security to your point.
You know, we have partnered with Sentinel One, one of the fastest growing SaaS security SaaS companies out there. We have worked with them to first bring them in to our ThinkShield, which is industry leading security software by Lenovo. We’ve taken some of their capabilities of their product.
And we have now in some mid-market spots and smaller enterprises, we offer in a very easy way bundled in with ThinkShield with differentiated experience because we are rewriting their software to take advantage of this new architecture so that what you’re describing, the threat detection mechanisms, which can be a drain on the battery, those are now happening on the NPU.
Again, end user or an IT shop should not care that we have a GPU, an NPU, and a CPU, but what they should care about is that as these software vendors like Simpsil one, partnering with leadership companies like Lenovo, that we can work together to make their experience better because we’re offloading this thing in the background.
That’s what they want. Better productivity, longer battery life, more secure, protected users at the end of the day. I think you’re right. You’re going to find people rewriting and using some of their existing applications, and ultimately, we’re going to keep experimenting to find the use cases which will be truly transformative.
I think we’re, like I told you, we’re in the five minutes of the football game in figuring some of those out. We have some examples which we can talk a little more about, but I think everyone’s looking for the killer app, and a lot of times hardware leads software. Not a lot of times, but always. Hardware is first, software catches up. I think that’s where we are.
Prakash Sangam
Indeed, yeah. You’re talking about the use cases. At the Lenovo Tech World event in September, I think you talked about, especially Genia use cases, implementing in your own enterprise systems and seeing the benefits, eating your dog food. Can you talk about some of those?
Steve Long
Yes, exactly. We like to pilot our own things first so that we can learn and then help our partners and help our customers along with theirs as well. So there were a few different use cases. And this is also where I think AI will be on the Edge devices or these PCs or any endpoint device is going to be evolutionary as to how we even talk to customers about it, right?
Because you have to go in and sometimes the IT shop, which cares about productivity or cares about the security aspects that we’ve spoken to, they care about transformation, but the real people that care about transformation are the departments that are implementing the use cases. So, an example in marketing, let’s start in marketing, right?
The marketing teams, a lot of what we do in marketing is customizing content and collateral to different audiences, right? Different verticals, because some of our use cases, they’re horizontal, they can go across any industry, but many of them are very unique and the more sophisticated you get in talking about a solution, the more oriented you have to be to what the custom problem is in a certain sector.
So our marketing teams spend a significant amount of time and money with different agencies in customizing content and trying to repackage things that honestly we have the ability to do that. So we deployed internally at our company a thing called Lenovo Studio AI. It’s an AI powered engine, a platform that basically empowers our marketing team.
And we’ve translated now to our partners to quickly create some personalized content that they can quickly turn into collateral that’s relevant to the audience that they’re with. Prior to that, it would have been, OK, let me stop, let me pause. If it hasn’t been created, maybe I even have to go to an agency because, you know, the same look and feel.
How do I package it? The wording, all of this. So we’ve been able to accelerate. And there are numbers behind this. I won’t quote them on this podcast, but they’re, you know, percentage of improvement. So we’re talking about things that people can do faster. And frankly, they can save money on.
And that’s one example inside the marketing collateral. Legal teams, let’s go to the legal department. You know, legal departments have to review all sorts of different contracts.
And one of the other capabilities that we’ve deployed is an AI agent engine that will run across contracts and basically come back to the person reviewing the contract or a legal department.
And it can siphon through and quickly highlight the things that are not standard or that are different than what the policies say.
So they’re getting intelligent enough to where they can cross pollinate between here’s what I want, what’s in this document, right? And it’s a translation of those two things. So very, very revolutionary for looking at contracts. So that’s an example in legal.
Our sales teams making their use cases, who do they call on, right? We have hundreds of hundreds, thousands of customers, or some of our reps have 50, 60 customers in their portfolio. And they’re like, well, who do I call on today? Why do I call on them? So translating different databases of customer insight information or data into information and actions to the sales team.
Another thing that we’ve partnered on with internally. So those are a few different examples. Now, each of those are heavy lift because they require customization. And they’re heavy lift also because they require people to do work differently. And we’re not used to that.
Prakash Sangam
And so I like to say a lot of this is also going to be a journey of people thinking different about how they work. And how are you taking the learnings from your own experience to your customers? And being a market leader, I think you could kind of have a guideline for everybody to follow, if you will.
You test them in your own yards and then introduce them to the customers so that they can see for themselves. And then that’s kind of the cycle of adoption, right?
Steve Long
No, you’re spot on. And that’s actually Lenovo’s strategy is one of founded in. We have great, great core business has developed great, innovative, started in hardware. And this hardware makes its way to improving experiences through software. That’s both in the data center side. So our infrastructure group, who obviously helps in the back end, but also our devices team.
And we make our way into then offering great experiences with different software. We’ve talked about some of the things we do. Now, where it all comes together in the group that puts it all together is our is our is our services team. And our services business is one of the fastest growing service businesses in the industry. I think we’re at, don’t quote me, but it’s like 13th, we might be 14 now, consecutive quarters of continued growth in this business.
Started with some services that are, I’ll call them close to the device, where warranties and things that you’d expect that we would just bundle premier support, you know, tiering support. But now we’re maturing that much beyond into capabilities of taking our customers and partners through experiences that we’ve had, whether that’s in like how we have deployed and what we’ve learned from customization deployments of our devices with different personas inside our enterprise.
So, you know, thinking of the high end users, what are their needs to somebody who might just be, you know, a data inputter or something that they need more basic. So those are, we have a platform called Care of One, which pulls people and enterprises through, that can customize workloads and customize kind of solutions for worker types. But on the AI front, we’ve created a series of services that we offer.
We’re calling them kind of some of our AI fast starts, fast start where we can come in, take a customer through a workshop, talk about some of their pain points, and then stitch together either from our own learnings. Obviously, we have an AI library which shows the use cases, but it’s really about what each customer is trying to accomplish and where their biggest pain points are, and then helping them go through that journey with our experts from all of the things that we’ve already learned or that we have capabilities that we can apply at problems. We’re a deep engineering culture with, again, that global reach, which really is a differentiator for Lenovo.
Prakash Sangam
Indeed. Going back to traction a little bit, how do you see the AI PCs and the ingestion of AI itself into enterprises? Is it that taking AI PCs as an example, are enterprise looking to increase the penetration, like a regular upgrade cycle, and after a certain period, everybody gets the laptops upgraded in the company, or are they looking at specific personas, profiles?
For example, as we talked about, these have great battery life, which would be perfect for sales, of the road warriors kind of persona in the company. Start there and go from there. And also, is there any regional differences in terms of adopting AI PCs that you’re seeing?
Steve Long
Yeah, those are great questions. First, I’d say, again, let me start with just what’s happening market-wise in the enterprise device space and more so the PC space. I feel like I’ve got one of the best jobs in the industry because I come in at a moment where the opportunity has never been better. We have, in COVID, when everybody had to go work at home, we all refreshed and got new devices and we worked from home.
Well, those devices are now entering a four into five years as we walk into next year life cycle.
So there’s a refresh that is pent up, which is proven it will happen. It’s a matter of when. And you layer on top of that some of this excitement around, or some of this expectation around capabilities of AI and what that can do. So that’s, I think, also a good, I’ll call it a tailwind in our direction.
And then the third thing is Windows is going to end to service Windows 10 by the end of next year. So some enterprises are going to have devices which will no longer have security, or if there’s patches that need to happen, and things of that nature that they’re used to from Microsoft, they are going to be in a bind of either having to get to an agreement with Microsoft, which Microsoft is saying they’re not going to, they’re going to limit that to, you know, pay an extra and transitioning.
So I feel like there’s a lot of tailwinds. And I think over time, I think there’s two things that are going to happen over time. One is people are going to just, they continue to want to upgrade the device because it’s got better, better battery life, better screen, better keyboard, better architecture, better all the things, device on device things are going to happen.
So that’s just going to naturally happen. AI PCs are going to come down and system price points over time as you alluded to. Qualcomm at 40 tops plus came out. One could debate whether or not we think that, you know, Meteor Lake, which was Intel’s last generation PCs are AI capable or not. They have some functionality.
They have an NPU, you know, the functionality. But all devices, as we move forward, or most of our price points start to get covered by an AI kind of capable device that has these NPU, CPU, GPU.
And so that’s going to happen naturally. And so I think you’re going to see a faster transition just because that’s going to happen. So IDC would say that two thirds of these by 27 sometime, maybe it’s 20, 2027, over two thirds plus will be the devices are going to be AI capable as defined by the architecture.
I’m more bullish in the sense that I think we as an industry and with our enterprises, we’re going to find the other side of this second phenomena that’s going to happen, which is we’re going to find real use cases where people extract value out of this thing. And we’re going to, we’re going to discover these. We’re looking for that killer use case as we go.
Copilot’s got some interesting things. I mentioned two or three examples inside our company.
There’s some real applications with code development that we haven’t spoken to, and different financial service sectors. I mean, there’s, we’re going to find these as we go. And those are going to be reasons why people are going to move and really transform and take advantage of the real opportunity that’s here. Not just future proofing themselves, but really transforming. So I think that’ll happen. You know, that’s why I say the next 18, 24 months in this space is going to be, I think, really, really exciting.
Prakash Sangam
And the Windows 10, as you mentioned, is in the extended support mode, which means if you want to keep Windows 10, you have to pay, I think, a significant amount to Microsoft to support that, right? It’s on a per PC basis, think like 60 bucks or so for enterprises. So is that kind of this additional fee that they have to pay to Microsoft, is that sufficient enough incentive for companies to move quickly to Windows 11? I know by definition, those will be AI PCs or are they still waiting? Okay, we’ll wait till October 2025, is that when real sunset happens for Windows 10?
Steve Long
Well, look, I think anytime there is a financial reason or increase, people are choosing where to spend their money, right? CapEx. Today, part of the reason I would even tell you why a device refresh we know is upon us, again, I told you, there’s 200, I’ll give you a couple of data, but there’s 270 million, and I’ll call them Windows 11 Pro and Eligible Devices. This is Microsoft data.
80 percent of those are over four years old, 80 percent, 270 million. Just for numbers sake, like that is the entire annual total market, including consumer of devices that are ready to be refreshed. So it’s huge. I think a lot of people today have been spending their CapEx or their money, IT shops or enterprises on some of the data center, AI piece. So they’ve been skimming a little bit on some of the PC or the device side.
But that’s going to catch up. When they start looking at what you described, yes, increased fees to maintain older equipment. Honestly, we have studies and we can show data around why older devices actually start draining productivity, start increasing the amount of times that they’re getting callbacks to service. All of those things are facts as well.
So, you compound that and I think there will be a natural reason for people to say, okay, it’s time to come back and refresh. Lenovo also partners and makes it easy on our customers to refresh. We’re offering devices of service so we can offer financing ways. We can offer people that want to convert from CapEx to Opex. We can offer those ease of transitions to take the financial burden off.
We can also offer service level agreements on the kinds of experiences they want to have. They want to start future-proofing only a certain level of productivity worker or knowledge worker.
We can help them with some of those things and guarantee certain kinds of outcomes that they’re looking for or experiences. I think those compounding things are going to make it, like I said, a really, really exciting time to be in this market.
Prakash Sangam
Coming to this Qualcomm versus Intel, AMD versus X86, it’s not the discussion or debate, not everybody wants to be involved in, but that is the reality. Qualcomm is fairly new to the PC space, and when you were to the enterprise PC space, I know of companies running POCs on Exelate and so on. So, yeah, what can you tell us about that?
Steve Long
There’s a lot, yeah, I look at first, I’d say just in general, and I came from one of the Silicon vendors, as I’ve learned the others, there’s a lot of rich, innovative and intelligent people across this industry, and it’s a privilege to work across all these partners. I’d say choice is good for everybody. And in this industry, it’s been a highly concentrated history in the industry, and we’re excited about offering choice and variety for what enterprises want.
And there’s enough room in the industry for innovation and people to leapfrog with each other, one another, and we’re excited to watch some of that unfold as we’re in it. We have been for three years with Qualcomm, or for three generations, I should say. Lenovo’s partnered on app compatibility, on learnings in the enterprise and with consumers on what Windows on ARM, or now the Qualcomm device, what that would look like. So we’ve got a lot of learning and institutional knowledge that, frankly, our competitors don’t, so we’re in an upper hand there.
There are, to your point, we were early in some of the enterprise deployments or proof of concepts. There’s plans with our friends at Qualcomm, but like that, we’ve quickly seen some of the AMD’s 40 top plus systems coming out. We just launched a few of those, I think a month or so ago, or we ship released about a month and a half ago.
Similar with Intel, with Lunar Lake, because they had their architecture. We talked about Meteor Lake, but also now with Lunar Lake. And those experiences are going to catch up to some of where Qualcomm had a lead, but Qualcomm’s launched a new part. So we’re just excited to see some of the competition that’s happening.
And there’s a lot of experimentation on this new architecture, whether it’s on x86 or on ARM. And I think that’s good for enterprises, good for everybody. Yeah, good for users, good for VMs like you that there is choice. But also, you have to invest in terms of development, testing and so on on multiple platforms. Yes, it is one of the hardest decisions that we have had to make as the landscape.
Look, the landscape in this industry has never been so complex at the top level, because you start with a number of devices that we carry, and then those devices multiple first differentiation, you would say is, what is inside from an architecture of a CPU, GPU, NPU, what is it? So now you have three vendors, probably some others coming into the market, so it gets really complex up at the top.
So what we’ve tried to do is really simplify the part underneath that, meaning the like components underneath.
When COVID happened, the entire industry, just to continue shipping, started to validate tons of different vendors, memory vendors, PMIC vendors, all different component vendors of things that at the end of the day, if I’m telling you that architecture-wise, the user shouldn’t care about that about NPU, CPU, GPU, they should care about the experience.
Well, they certainly shouldn’t care about some of these other smaller devices that are inside there.
So I think what we’ve tried to do is simplify the backend on this, standard building blocks as we call them. So that we can let this silicon diversity thing at the top play out. Ultimately, make the right call and let users make the right call. They’re going to decide. Our customers will decide proofs in the silicon and proofs in the experience that we can bring.
The other part that we’re moving towards is the deeper ISV relationships, which allow us to then lead with a software-based experience, which ultimately leads us to an outcome that customers care about, because we found a use case they care about.
Prakash Sangam
And your scale, that all OEMs have to do the same thing. And since you have a larger scale, so all that additional R&D that you have to spend can be amortized on a larger scale of devices compared to a competition, right?
Steve Long
A hundred, a hundred percent. You’re spot on. We have, like we said earlier, we’re number one in this market. We operate across 180 different countries. And the scale, not only our factory scale for PCs, but we’re the only vendor out there that also, or the only company out there that has a pocket to cloud, as we say. So we can load our factories up with scale from every kind of device or screen that someone interfaces with. And that gives us a big advantage on amortizing R&D, but also on supply chain strength and resilience.
Prakash Sangam
Indeed, indeed. And since you’re on both sides, both on the network side as well, device with the hybrid AI approach that you talked about. I mean, it’s a totally different and much larger topic that we can address some other time. But I was going to say, I’d love to talk to you about that.
Steve Long
That’s like opening up a whole new front. But It’s one of the advantages we have. I think we’re going to live in a hybrid world where things, devices are going to interact with on-prem data, data in the cloud. And there’s only a handful of companies that I’d argue Lenovo’s the best position because of the breadth of what we do and how we do it across the globe and successfully navigating all of the complexities that’s required on that.
Prakash Sangam
So if you brought your crystal ball today with you, you mentioned a little bit about it, but how do you see next two to three years, especially on the AIPC market expansion, adaptability and so on?
Steve Long
Well, I’d say like I told you, I am a kid in a candy store that is in front of one of the biggest opportunities I have. Everything from when I look at my core business, actually I’ll tell you, my total available market has never been larger, right?
We have opportunities in the core, which we talked about my core business, my this PC refresh, this Windows into service, this AI opportunity to really transform how people are using things.
It’s amazing. If I can take those core opportunities and then bring along an amazing visual that actually has remote management capabilities to update firmware remotely in a visual, in the enterprise, something we’ve never been done before. That’s an experience that I can embed with these devices, like massive opportunity.
And if I take it over into some of my solution businesses from how I make people more productive in a conference room to customizing a solution in a retail, where from point of sale to an experience of a shopper with how they interact with technology and how they make their purchase decision, I get super excited.
And I think we’re going to see growth in every one of these. We’re going to see growth in the core. We’re going to see growth in things that make the experience better and that attach to the core.
And we’re going to see growth in some of these solution next wave businesses.
Prakash Sangam
That was a great discussion, Steve. Thank you very much for all of your insight. I think next couple of years are going to be really interesting, not only for Lenovo, for the whole PC industry as such.
Steve Long
I would completely agree. Thanks for the opportunity. And again, congratulations on your 50th podcast. It was an honor to be the, you called me the horse, right? Horses mouth, the horse, the horse of your 50th podcast.
Prakash Sangam
I hope you don’t mind me calling you a horse.
Steve Long
Not at all. I love it. I love it. It’s great. I just, it’s good. I was just tying us back to where we started. So it’s a great conversation. Thank you very much.
Prakash Sangam
So folks, that’s all we have for now. I hope you like this conversation. 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 tech subject.
Bye bye for now.
