Lenovo is building an AI assistant that ‘can act on your behalf’

While astir attraction successful the AI title is focused connected exemplary builders and unreality platforms, Lenovo sits person to millions of users than astir companies. As the world’s top PC shaper by volume, Lenovo ships tens of millions of devices each year. What it decides to ship, bundle, and merge tin straight style really AI shows up successful galore mundane lives.

That’s what made Lenovo’s announcement coming astatine CES notable. At a flashy arena connected Tuesday astatine The Sphere successful Las Vegas, it introduced Qira, a system-level, cross-device AI adjunct designed to unrecorded crossed Lenovo laptops and Motorola phones. It’s Lenovo’s astir eager AI effort to day and a uncommon look astatine really a hardware elephantine pinch world scope is reasoning astir integrating AI much deeply.

Jeff Snow, Lenovo’s caput of AI product, told maine really Qira came together, why the institution is deliberately avoiding a azygous exclusive AI partnership, and what he learned from earlier experiments for illustration Moto AI and Microsoft’s Recall debacle.

Qira emerged from a quiet but meaningful soul reorganization little than a twelvemonth ago, according to Snow. Lenovo pulled AI teams retired of individual hardware units specified arsenic PCs, tablets, and phones and centralized them into a caller software-focused group that useful crossed the full company.

For a institution agelong optimized astir hardware SKUs and proviso chains, the move signaled a displacement toward putting AI much beforehand and center. “We wanted a built-in cross-device intelligence that useful pinch you passim the day, learns from your interactions, and tin enactment connected your behalf,” Snow said. He mentioned utilizing Qira’s on-device exemplary during his formation to CES to thief him shop really to talk astir the news successful meetings based connected the notes and documents connected his PC.

Qira is not built astir a azygous flagship AI model. Instead, it’s modular. Under the hood, it mixes local, on-device models pinch cloud-based models, anchored by Microsoft and OpenAI infrastructure accessed done Azure. Stability AI’s diffusion exemplary is besides integrated, on pinch tie-ins to app-specific partners for illustration Notion and Perplexity.

“We didn’t want to hard-code ourselves to 1 model,” Snow said. “This abstraction is moving excessively fast. Different tasks request different tradeoffs astir performance, quality, and cost.”

That stance runs antagonistic to the push from awesome AI labs, galore of which would happily go the exclusive intelligence furniture for a institution pinch Lenovo’s reach. Lenovo’s position is that optionality matters more, particularly fixed its power complete 1 of the largest user computing distribution channels successful the world.

Snow antecedently worked connected Moto AI, Motorola’s assistant, which he said saw precocious first engagement. More than half of Motorola users tried it, but retention wasn’t good. He said that excessively overmuch of the acquisition felt for illustration prompt-based chat features group could already get elsewhere.

“That pushed america distant from competing pinch chatbots,” Snow said. “Qira is astir things chatbots can’t do, for illustration continuity, context, and acting straight connected your device.”

Lenovo besides paid adjacent attraction to the backlash astir Microsoft’s Recall feature. Snow said Qira is designed from the outset pinch opt-in memory, persistent indicators, and clear personification controls. Context ingestion is optional. Recording is visible. Nothing is silently collected.

Cost pressures loom complete each of this. Memory prices are rising arsenic AI request strains proviso chains, and analysts expect PC prices to follow. Qira does not raise baseline strategy requirements for PCs, Snow said, but it performs champion connected higher-end machines pinch much RAM. Lenovo is moving to bring section models down to smaller representation footprints, for illustration 16 gigabytes of RAM, without watering down the experience.

Strategically, Lenovo sees Qira arsenic some a retention play and a hedge against hardware commoditization. In the short term, it hopes that tighter integration betwixt laptops and phones will nudge customers to enactment wrong the Lenovo ecosystem. Over the longer term, Snow framed Qira arsenic a measurement to differentiate Lenovo devices erstwhile specs unsocial are nary longer enough.