The Growth of AI and Lenovo’s AI Innovators Program

In 2022 Lenovo launched the AI Innovators Program aiming to help companies leverage ready-made enterprise AI solutions across multiple industries, that can be easily deployed on premise, even at the edge close to their production areas with our rugged and scalable ThinkSystem and ThinkEdge infrastructure.

Lenovo continues its commitment to help customers start and scale their AI journey by providing access to a partner ecosystem that now includes more than 50 Artificial Intelligence Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) across various applications and services.

Through these partnerships we make it easier for customers to access state of the art AI solutions, helping them deploy AI faster, more efficiently and safely. The solutions offered are vetted and validated by Lenovo AI Discover Lab assessing their proven AI experience, solution offerings and capabilities.

To help match today's developing AI demand, Lenovo has increased its investments and focus on AI infrastructure and the AI Innovators program, offering solutions that improve our customers’ performance, helping to better understand their operations, make smarter decisions, faster.

Interest in Artificial Intelligence has spiked with the growth and adoption of Generative AI, but companies struggle to find solutions that have real business applications. Lenovo is working with the AI Innovators to integrate Generative AI into Enterprise AI solutions creating a new opportunity with more features for more automation and faster performance.

Lenovo’s AI Innovator program offers access to applied Generative AI solutions across several industries, solving needs ranging from Wildfire Prevention using automated prompts to enhance computer vision, to enhanced Virtual Assistants that can use LLM to find company owned information and provide accurate answers in video, to improved customer guidance for banking customers.

Lenovo gives customers access to both the infrastructure and the software they need to train and deploy their own models to create tailored applications to solve their needs, including access to the top performing CPUs and GPUs.

Partners joining the program go through an evaluation process that includes criteria for Responsible AI to provide solutions compliant with Lenovo’s Responsible AI principles. These principles can be grouped as follows:

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Privacy & Security
• Accountability & Reliability
• Explainability
• Transparency
• Environmental & Social Impact

With these principles we make sure the solutions deployed have systems that secure data, allow for clear understanding of the outcomes or predictions made, mitigate bias and discrimination, facilitate auditability and have responsibility frameworks in case of failure, follow human rights and the rule of law, while protecting privacy and personal data throughout the system’s entire lifecycle.

Lenovo currently offers customers a one-stop shop experience enabling enterprise AI to help customers on their AI journey, guiding them to find the right mix of hardware and software with access to unique and diverse technology providers, ISVs, industry-focused solutions, scalable infrastructure and more, ensuring quick access and scalable solutions with validated providers that best suit their business needs.

Through our strategic partner, NVIDIA, we can ensure the partners in the program can validate their solutions using state of the art Lenovo infrastructure partnered with NVIDIA GPUs and software, including newly released products for Generative AI.

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:

• Early Wildfire Prevention with Generative AI: Chooch, with the support of Lenovo and NVIDIA, offers an innovative solution using Large Language Models and Computer Vision to identify wildfires from an early stage to prevent their growth and spread. Their solutions are powered by GPUs like the NVIDIA A2, NVIDIA A10 and NVIDIA A100.
• ML Platform for Faster Model Deployment: Edgebricks is using Lenovo infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GPUs to provide a fully automated Machine Learning platform to build, train and deploy AI models 10 times faster using a ThinkEdge SE450 with an NVIDIA A30 GPU or a ThinkEdge SR650 V2 with an NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU.
• Virtual Assistants Powered by AI: Lenovo has partnered with Deepbrain to offer real time conversational support, that can be enhanced with Generative AI, to provide guidance on shopping, banking processes, financial analysis, and more. This solution is powered by GPUs like the NVIDIA Tesla T4, and the NVIDIA A100 can be used for training and NVIDIA L4 and NVIDIA L40s for inferencing.

The Lenovo AI Innovators program helps reduce AI software developers' costs while providing them with direct access to Lenovo AI Discover Lab 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 have grown to include more than 50 Lenovo AI Innovators, representing more than 150 AI solutions across our key verticals. 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.

Nicholas Borsotto is the Global lead for Lenovo AI Innovators, responsible for building their full-stack ecosystem of AI partners and ensuring their combined efforts translated into end-to-end AI deployments. Nicholas is a passionate Tech-onomist, always on the lookout for the trends spurring AI development and adoption. He is also the founder of Meetup Ai, one of Europe’s biggest networks for discussing practical AI, and a mentor for innovation organizations such as Applied Data incubator and Startup Bootcamp. Before joining Lenovo, he ran a boutique consulting company focused on ML Startups in Berlin, Germany.