Lenovo’s Tech World 2024 has been one of the most interesting in recent years and, perhaps, an event that – at least within the sector – will be remembered for many years. First, because of the number of CEOs from top companies who gathered in the same place and, second, because the world as we know it is going to change… and it is going to do so a lot and tremendously quickly.
Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay and to sneak through all the possible gaps that we believe are possible. Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo, made it clear in a meeting with journalists, together with the company’s CTO, Tolga Kurtoglu, after the keynote at Tech World 2024 when he was asked which of all the places and sectors where will it be present? AI, which one did you think would be the most important. «YY» (JayJay), as they refer to him colloquially, did not hesitate for a moment: «the PC with AI«. Lenovo’s chief executive expanded that “it is the gateway to AI that we will all have, regardless of whether it is at home, at work or at school.”
And this is going to materialize because the entire sector is moving in the same direction. Good proof is that none of the big names in “big Tech” were missing from the appointment with Lenovo AI. We were able to see both Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, and Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, without forgetting the intervention of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA and Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, on behalf of the chip block. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, although it was only on video, did not miss the event to represent Copilot+ – without forgetting that they are the owners of OpenGPT, and Meta Llama 3.2, as main agents in the market from LLM (Large Language Models).
In socio-economic terms, the feeling we got after attending this event is that we are facing an industrial revolution as important as that of computers or the Internet. And the world will not be the same again.
In a few years, your office colleague will be an AI
Jensen Huang himself, CEO of NVIDIA, in his speech on stage alongside the CEO of Lenovo, made a call to sailors that should not be forgotten: we are going to have to welcome AI Agents. This means that in companies there will be “entities” that will essentially be “virtual” co-workers, who will be assigned tasks and responsibilities like any other worker.
And what’s more, they will interact with the rest of the organization as they do now. And for their part, data centers are going to stop being “warehouses” of information and become “AI Factories”, that is, where AI Agents will be created that will then be able to connect and interact with us… and in the future, manufacture themselves. Let’s not forget that Elon Musk in his recent presentation of autonomous robots (or almost at the moment), indicated that he has the same objective in the “real” world with these androids.
It is an exciting world and, why not say it, it is somewhat scary. Yang Yuanqing in his subsequent speech stated that the arrival of AI Agents into our lives will “increase our productivity and efficiency. “We will be able to do more, in less time and productivity will grow exponentially.” Some of the scenarios that we will encounter sooner rather than later, since it is undeniable that, from a business point of view, it will be an opportunity to save costs, may be that we have a “secretary” from whom we ask for plane tickets to attend an event, who keeps the agenda for us and, at the same time, is able to take from our mobile phone all the receipts that we are photographing to pass on all the expenses to the company or, when we get off the plane, give us a summary of all the messages and calls we have received – and the responses he has given to someone if we have given him permission to do so -.
And AI is going to be in everything. We cannot forget either the stellar appearance of Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, to announce the agreement by which Lenovo would become the technological partner for the next World Cup, both men’s and women’s, in North America and Brazil respectively. Yang Yuanqing clarified in the subsequent talk that his job will be to facilitate the processing of the tremendous amount of data generated by an event of these characteristics and, obviously, to put to work as many AI Agents as possible to improve the enjoyment of the events. fans as well as the organization.
You will have a “digital twin” who will know more about you than you do yourself
And these AI Agents are not going to be waiting for us to call them reactively, the CEO of Lenovo indicated that they are going to be proactive elements, not only in our work life but also in our personal life. They are going to learn everything from us to be able to anticipate what we want. Luca Rossi, Vice President and President of Lenovo IDG, in a subsequent meeting, told us that they will be able to anticipate and know our tastes to, for example, suggest and order the coffee we like or send us a taxi if they see that we will not be able to arrive. to catch a flight and it is the only option.
This raises many suspicions. Do we want an AI to know so much about us that it anticipates our desires? For some it is an idyllic situation, for others, not so much. From Lenovo, in the words of its CEO, they advocated for the responsibility that companies have beyond facilitating this technology and putting it in our hands: “I am a technological optimist, so I get excited about the type of, the opportunities they bring, since be it for productivity and for many other aspects. But all of that has to be done through strong governance around the development of AI in a highly responsible way.”
It is a ray of hope, given that Lenovo has at all times indicated that responsibility and people’s safety will come first, in the face of a world that we do not want to change or not, it already has. In the coming years we will have to get used to this new situation for which Luca Rossi pointed out “obviously, AI brings more opportunities and, at the same time, more challenges due to regulation. If you look at many territories, they have already issued some type of AI legislation, especially in Europe. Still, our effort is to create a common platform that suits everyone, probably 80 or 90%. But for the “last mile”, that last step before reaching the user, we have to make the effort to comply and take advantage of the opportunities based on the different regulations, which is what we are doing.
It is evident that in some sectors such as the medical field, these AI Agents will have a very positive impact, with projects such as those shown by Lenovo for the development of ultra-realistic avatars with AI capable of communicating and empathizing with both Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and their families, the constant monitoring and early warning of arrhythmias for patients who have recently undergone heart surgery or the project that, through AI, gives voice back to ALS patients.
But, as in all revolutions, the future is exciting and at the same time uncertain. And as on other occasions, it is likely that we are only seeing what it can take from us and not what we had never imagined it could give us.
