At Lenovo’s Global Industry Analyst Conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina, the conversation was unmistakably centred on AI. The company’s leadership spoke with the confidence of an organisation that no longer views AI as a feature or a future trend, but as the operating principle of its business. The strategy builds on the foundations laid at last year’s analyst meeting in Shanghai; this time with clearer alignment and tangible outcomes. 

Lenovo’s Next Chapter: AI as the Operating Principle

Lenovo is positioning itself as an enabler of AI, building the hardware, software, and service layers that make large-scale, sustainable AI possible. The company’s ambition now extends beyond devices and data centres to the connective tissue that binds them: services. That message came through strongly in both the narrative and the numbers. The services division has emerged as one of Lenovo’s most dynamic business areas, delivering consistent double-digit growth and operating margins that outpace its devices and infrastructure groups. 

What makes this evolution noteworthy is that Lenovo is not merely infusing AI into existing offerings but creating AI-native services – propositions built around AI as a core capability.  

These are powered by the same infrastructure innovations that underpin Lenovo’s broader AI strategy: greater power efficiency, higher compute density, and the widespread adoption of liquid cooling technologies that enable sustainable scale. 

The Physics of AI: Liquid Cooling 

Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) operates through two primary segments increasingly driven by AI investment: Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Enterprise & SMB (ESMB) clients. Growth in the CSP segment reflects large-scale AI capacity expansion among global cloud platforms, while ESMB clients are modernising existing IT estates to operate more efficiently and allocate power toward AI workloads. Across both segments, energy efficiency has become the critical constraint.  

AI expansion now depends not only on capital and chips, but on the ability to deliver and dissipate energy effectively. 

Lenovo’s response is Neptune, its liquid-cooling technology first developed in 2012 for a client in Germany, aiming to reduce energy costs. Now central to Lenovo’s AI infrastructure strategy, Neptune enables more efficient operation of traditional workloads, creating power headroom for AI compute. In a typical data centre, cooling fans account for up to 40% of total energy use – energy that liquid systems can redirect to computation. This approach supports denser rack configurations, with capacities approaching one megawatt per rack, beyond the limits of air-cooled systems. 

Neptune’s design uses warm-water cooling at around 45°C, eliminating the need for chilled systems and supporting both efficiency and sustainability objectives. Lenovo cites an ROI of roughly 18-24 months, as savings from power and space consolidation offset the higher initial cost. The approach is already proven in the field: DreamWorks replaced 210 air-cooled servers with 72 Neptune units, achieving substantial gains in both efficiency and sustainability. 

Lenovo expects tokens-per-kilowatt to be the next key metric for AI infrastructure, measuring computational productivity by energy use rather than only monetary value used currently. This marks a broader shift in how performance is defined, moving from financial to physical efficiency. Introducing water into the rack environment has also redefined data-centre engineering: cooling now extends beyond airflow to include chemistry, physics, and even biology, leading Lenovo to describe liquid-cooled facilities as “living, breathing systems.” Reflecting this evolution, it now advises, designs, implements, and manages water-cooled environments for clients such as PIK in Germany. 

As AI transitions from training to inference, not all workloads will remain in large, centralised data centres. Many will move closer to users – to edge facilities or devices. This shift underpins Lenovo’s “pocket-to-cloud” strategy, which distributes computation intelligently across devices, edge nodes, and data centres to balance performance, cost, and energy use. 

From Products to Services: Lenovo’s AI Revolution 

Services were another major focus of the event, signalling Lenovo’s continuing evolution from a product-centred organisation to one in which services are a new engine of growth. Services have maintained a double-digit increase in revenue, demonstrating that Lenovo’s diversification beyond hardware is gaining real traction. Operating profit from the Solutions and Services Group (SSG) is now more than 50% of that generated by the Intelligent Devices Group (IDG), underlining the growing financial weight of services within Lenovo’s portfolio. 

Workplace Services: Labour-Light Delivery with AI. Lenovo’s workplace services continue to focus on cost efficiency by reducing human effort in managing large, distributed IT environments while maintaining reliability and scale. AI and automation are embedded throughout service operations, creating a labour-light model. 

Practical applications include self-service interfaces powered by LLMs, AI agents handling routine tasks such as password resets, and predictive maintenance tools that identify and resolve potential issues before they reach the helpdesk. These capabilities allow Lenovo to sustain service quality in a traditionally labour-intensive, low-margin market. 

Employee experience is increasingly central, measured through system uptime, ticket-resolution times, and Digital Experience (DEX) scores, offering a clear view of how employees’ digital environments perform in practice. 

The approach builds on Lenovo’s extensive expertise in device and endpoint management, supported by its global service network. In Starbucks Philippines, Lenovo delivers its Intelligent Store-as-a-Service solution, managing in-store devices and retail systems via a fully managed, AI-enabled platform. Similarly, in McDonald’s Singapore, collaboration with ServiceNow enables new stores to open roughly three times faster than traditional roll-outs. Both examples illustrate how automation and workflow intelligence can compress deployment timelines and improve service consistency. 

Agentic AI Services. Lenovo is extending its services into hybrid AI platforms – tolls designed to help organisations create, manage, and control AI agents and models responsibly across device, edge, and cloud environments. This represents a clear expansion, moving beyond Lenovo’s traditional strengths in infrastructure and device management into AI software and governance. 

The platforms include agent builders for task-specific automation, model-management tools for versioning, retraining, and deployment, and governance frameworks that ensure AI agents operate safely, predictably, and in compliance. Lenovo emphasises supervision and “graduation,” recognising that AI agents evolve over time and require ongoing monitoring and control rather than one-off configuration. 

The market is competitive. Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google dominate the applications layer through which most employees interact, while hyperscalers including AWS control infrastructure and mature AI platforms. ServiceNow leverages its IT-service-management heritage to offer agentic AI connected to enterprise workflows. 

Lenovo’s opportunity lies between these layers. Its visibility through endpoints and data-centre infrastructure enables it to link users and workloads, delivering hybrid AI that integrates workflow intelligence with compute governance. Positioned between workflow automation providers and hyperscalers, Lenovo can offer enterprises a managed environment where AI agents operate securely and efficiently across device and infrastructure boundaries. 

This emerging proposition illustrates Lenovo’s broader ambition: to move from enabling AI infrastructure to orchestrating AI operations across the enterprise stack. 

Ecosystm Opinion 

Lenovo is redefining its role in a world driven by AI, combining its expertise in devices and infrastructure with AI-native services to deliver a unified, energy-efficient platform for enterprise intelligence. As workloads become more distributed and sustainability increasingly critical, Lenovo’s ability to manage AI seamlessly across devices, edge, and data centres may emerge as its strongest differentiator.