Speed, Ease, and Expertise With AI: Lenovo’s Linda Yao

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Stay tuned after today's episode to hear Sam and I break down the key points made by our guest. What are the four areas that companies need to prioritize for AI readiness? Find out on today's episode.

**Linda Yao** (0:57)
I'm Linda Yao from Lenovo, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:02)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:21)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:48)
Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today, Shervin and I are talking with Linda Yao from Lenovo. At Lenovo, Linda is the Vice President of AI Solutions and Services, as well as the Chief Operating Officer and Head of Strategy for Solutions and Services Group. Linda, thanks for joining us.

**Linda Yao** (2:04)
Thanks so much, Sam. It's great to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:07)
All right. Let's start with Lenovo. For our listeners who are not familiar with Lenovo, can you give us a brief overview?

**Linda Yao** (2:13)
Yes. Lenovo is a global technology company. We operate in 180 markets. We're part of the global Fortune 500 We started many decades ago as a PC manufacturer. Then with that, we acquired in 2005, the IBM PC division and then decided to diversify our technology business. We acquired the x86 data center infrastructure business from IBM.
We acquired the Motorola Phones business from Google after they had bought Motorola. With that, we created what we call our end-to-end pocket-to-cloud portfolio. The latest journey that we've been on the past three to five years has all been about service-led transformation. Lenovo just launched three and a half years ago, our Solutions and Services Group, which is all around moving up the stack and answering the demand from our customers to help them not just with their hardware technology needs, but also with their software, their services, solutions, and generating those customer outcomes.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:14)
I'm guessing artificial intelligence ends up being a big part of those solutions and services. Tell us about that.

**Linda Yao** (3:20)
Absolutely. I'm probably dating myself here, but this has been the third wave of AI to hit the enterprise since I've been working in technology.
The first wave about 20 years ago was when big data really began finding itself into enterprise commercialized applications, most notably high-frequency trading. Then we fast-forward 10 years to about a decade ago, and that was around the time when AWS really made computing more accessible and democratized. And so we had a way to use that big data. At that time, every enterprise was looking at setting up their own machine learning team. Every university was trying to launch a data science master's program. And that was where I really saw these types of data science, machine learning, and AI applications hit the workforce and use this technology to make our workflows more efficient and generate more and more of those business results. But it was still quite niche. So what really excites me about the past couple of years is the fact that generative AI has captured the imagination. You know, the majority of AI applications that we work on today are not necessarily generative. But what Chad GPT did a couple of years ago was really put AI at the fingertips of every consumer and really put it into the mental model of every C-suite member. So it's become a little bit of the rising tide that raises all of our boats when it comes to technology adoption. Super exciting, and that is why at Lenovo, I'm very excited and proud to be launching the AI Solutions Practice.