New Lenovo AI Innovators Program Demystifies AI Execution

It's finally here…. the Lenovo AI Innovators Partner Ecosystem program! We are excited to announce our new program and to welcome more than 30 artificial intelligence Independent Software Vendors (ISV) across various applications and services, representing more than $1 billion in venture capital investment. This program reinforces Lenovo's commitment to AI solutions using our global partner ecosystem of ISVs, distributors, and technology partners. Let's examine five attributes that make this program unique and beneficial to customers in need of AI solutions.

• Partnering makes AI easier

  AI continues to be a high area of interest and promise for enterprises of all sizes. Many customers want to get started and begin their AI journey but struggle with where and how to begin. Navigating the sea of AI solution providers is overwhelming and can stifle our customers' efforts, quell their enthusiasm, and they may potentially abandon their interest in AI endeavors. AI Innovators is here to help, providing customers access to a partner ecosystem that Lenovo has vetted. We interviewed over 100 ISV partners, and 30 met our criteria for inclusion in the AI Innovator program. Through partnering, we make it easier for customers to access the right AI solutions to meet their needs.

• Deep understanding of customer needs

  To ensure this program is valuable and meaningful for our customers, we built it based on "real relationships" that include extensive technical collaboration and investments in infrastructure, expertise, and time. We believe depth in AI capabilities is more critical than volume of partners in the program. In recognition of the level of effort required, we decided to make this program selective with stringent requirements. We partner with ISVs that deeply understand our customer's needs and have proven AI experience, solution offerings, and capabilities.

• Validated AI solutions speed execution

  Two years ago, Lenovo AI engineers conceived a program to address the fact that AI is challenging, and customers need help on their AI Journey. Determining the right mix of hardware and software is often difficult to implement quickly and reliably. Recognizing these obstacles was the catalyst to making AI more straightforward and accessible for our customers. Designed as a one-stop shop for enterprise AI, Lenovo's partner ecosystem offers unique and diverse technology providers, ISVs, industry-focused solutions, hardware, and more, ensuring innovators can quickly access and deploy scalable solutions using validated providers that best suit their business needs. 

• Real-life implementation and execution

  AI is everywhere, from finance and manufacturing to healthcare and retail. Customers of all sizes seek ways to gain a competitive advantage from their data insights using AI. To make this real, here are a few examples of Lenovo partnering with ISVs:

  • Deforestation Solution: With help from Lenovo, byteLAKE's Ewa Guard program uses drone imagery and advanced analytics to help in the fight against deforestation.
  • Retail Loss Prevention Solution: Lenovo teams with Everseen to provide Retail Visual AI Solutions ideal for computer Vision and AI for Loss Prevention and beyond. A large supermarket chain reduces customer friction and stock losses at self-service checkouts with Everseen's Visual AI platform enabled by Lenovo's AI retail solutions, servers, and the latest NVIDIA GPUs.
  • Crowd Intelligence Solution: Lenovo partners with WaitTime to provide solutions for the customer to observe, measure, and maximize the impact of the wait times using real-time data and historical analysis.
• Catering to the Developers

  The Lenovo AI Innovators program helps reduce AI software developers' costs while providing them with direct access to global AI labs for testing, benchmarking, and cross-stack support (hardware, middleware, and software). Additionally, this program leverages industry-leading open source and commercial tools such as Intel OpenVino and oneAPI, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD Vitis for optimizing AI solutions across the broad portfolio of architectures. This ensures enterprises get the best performance from their AI solutions, hardware, middleware, and application.

Our mission is simple: to make it easier for enterprises to adopt AI technology, and our goals are aligned with that mission. We plan to have 50 Lenovo AI Innovators in the program, representing more than 150 AI solutions across our key verticals. The program will represent more than 20% of our enterprise AI deployments next year. We have AI software partners that specialize in running code on CPUs at the edge, those that focus on GPU-based training in data centers, partners using a new generation of FPGAs – and most of our partners use a variety of these technologies. This "agnosticism" allows us to meet organizations deploying AI where they are or want to be instead of pushing them down a rigid path.

author_bio slug='nicholas-borsotto'}