Photo: Mare Nostrum, Barcelona Supercomputing Center – one of Lenovo’s projects.
In March of this year, at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference, Lenovo unveiled new hybrid technology solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, suitable for deployment to any enterprise or institution, in virtually any industry, whether running on its own IT infrastructure or in the cloud. This is another breakthrough in the development of IT, which, affecting individual economic ecosystems, ranging from individual industries to entire economies of countries and continents, has been referred to as digital transformation. Digital transformation, in this sense, is nothing more than the creative and practical application of ICT innovations, which have a history of more than 100 years.
These innovations are helping businesses and IT service providers meet, ever-increasing computing needs that are increasingly critical to business success. In today’s rapidly evolving era of artificial intelligence – moving the field from futuristic concepts to everyday reality, we enable companies to develop the best application scenarios and then support them in implementing the latest technologies in an optimal way. These solutions create innovation, both reducing costs and increasing revenues, by producing new products and services and building new business models. It’s not uncommon for a number of entirely new, non-obvious revenue streams to emerge. That’s what the magic of AI is all about!
If you take a closer look, each project involves hybrid solutions, created through the collaboration of engineers from multiple disciplines, both technology and industry. Lenovo’s solutions leverage artificial intelligence and infrastructure to help customers realize new potential in every industry that has embraced digital transformation. And today it’s hard to find one where this hasn’t happened.
In retail, these solutions analyze customer traffic and behavior to improve sales flow, delivery flow and better manage inventory in real time. In manufacturing, integrated IT solutions help improve worker and machine safety by improving assembly line control processes.
In cities – as administrative and spatial units, AI-enabled integrated solutions help local administrations optimize the use of space, infrastructure and resources. In this way, they improve urban mobility management, reduce energy consumption and negative environmental impacts.
Lenovo’s recently opened AI Service Center of Excellence brings together business advisors, data scientists, engineers and AI-optimized infrastructure. It aims to maximize the use of AI as an enabler to accelerate the adaptation of technology functions to business applications using Lenovo’s proven methodologies for AI readiness. The methodology encompasses people, processes, technology and digital security. It offers knowledge, hands-on experience, and use case testing and sampling capabilities. All to shorten and accelerate its customers’ path to deploying a powerful tool – such as AI – responsibly and under full control.
This is such an important challenge, the scope of which is recognized to such an extent that in recent days the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the first-ever global resolution on artificial intelligence, monitoring AI for risks and protecting human rights. While the resolution is not legally binding, but by being put forward by the United States and receiving support from China and 121 other countries, it gains the character of an official interpretation in the further development of this field.
At the same time, a process has been underway since January 2023, which will culminate in the European Union’s first legal regulation (the so-called AI Act), which will finally take effect in mid-2025.
The new AI Act regulations will ban certain applications of artificial intelligence that threaten citizens’ rights.
These include:
– Biometric categorization systems that use sensitive features and untargeted downloading of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage to create databases for facial recognition;
– emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions;
– scoring classification of citizens;
– predicting crime based solely on profiling a person or assessing his or her characteristics;
– artificial intelligence that manipulates people’s behavior or exploits their weaknesses will also not be allowed.
Lenovo has more than 30 years of experience in these activities, creating or co-creating the key technology solutions that drive the process. The THINK brand, is now celebrating its 30th birthday, and includes a wide range of products, from smartphones to personal computers, data center equipment (servers, storage) and high-powered computers, so-called HPC (High Performance Computing) supercomputers.
These last products, are particularly related to the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence, as it was based on these technologies that the world’s first AI solutions were forged. Among the five hundred largest supercomputers in the world listed at www.top500.org, Lenovo is the manufacturer of more than 33% of the devices (168 units) – the next two manufacturers in this competition do not reach – combined – this number of supercomputers built yet.
I hope that the above arguments will convince readers that it is worth thinking about Lenovo when you are considering with whom you want to plan a journey in the world of artificial intelligence, bringing many new opportunities and possibilities, but at the same time filled with challenges that require a great deal of knowledge and experience to meet.
Marek Okularczyk
Lenovo Global Technology
The article appeared in the March issue of Business HUB.