Vlad Rozanovich, Senior Vice President of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, shares insights from Tech World 2024 on navigating the hybrid AI landscape.
Note: At Lenovo, we like to do what we say and that includes using AI as a real-world tool. If you only have two minutes, here’s my Copilot summary below.
Lenovo is advancing AI adoption with hybrid, scalable innovations and collaborations, notably with NVIDIA. The company emphasizes the importance of hybrid AI, which combines public and private data sources, to unlock AI’s full potential. Lenovo’s TruScale GPU as a Service is highlighted as a key offering, providing scalable AI technology access. The company’s AI solutions are impacting various industries, and their commitment to hybrid AI is shaping the future of enterprise AI infrastructure.
- AI Applications are built and run on a full stack of compute, networking and software: New collaboration with NVIDIA – the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA – streamlines enterprise AI adoption
- The path to AI is hybrid with the right mix of public and private solutions: Pilot solution New Talk Hybrid AI Implementation guides businesses to generative AI, securely leveraging data from across the organization
- Fast-tracking AI adoption means innovating for scalability, deployment ease and greater ROI: Mass Open Cloud Alliance grows collaborative AI research faster with Lenovo TruScale GPU as a Service
Last week’s Tech World brought audiences far and wide, eager to explore the transformative power and potential of AI. Engaging with partners and customers, I was deeply impressed by the significant impact Lenovo is making across the industry. The feedback has been overwhelming, and one key takeaway stands out: the conversation surrounding hybrid AI, the critical importance of data, and the pursuit of greater ROI has truly energized us all.
In my new role co-leading our infrastructure business, I am incredibly humbled to reflect on the fact that enterprise infrastructure is at the heart of enabling this incredible AI momentum. What many of us know but don’t often stop to think about is that, behind every phone, handheld device or personal computer is a network of infrastructure, including servers, storage, software and services that computes your data and makes it all work. This data is growing at incredible rates, residing everywhere across public and private sources, from your personal device, to clouds, data centers and its point of creation in the grocery aisle, nursing station, factory floor and countless other far-reaching locations at the far edge.
Empowering People and Enterprises with the Right Mix of Data
With this massive growth across public and private sources, harnessing the ability to securely, quickly and efficiently leverage all of this data for AI is a big challenge for businesses. While today’s powerful AI capabilities started in the public cloud, customers are realizing they also need AI for their private clouds, and at the edge of their business. In fact, offering a way to leverage all of this data wherever it resides is the only path to achieving the full potential of AI for every organization.
We call this hybrid AI, and it is defining our future. Hybrid AI bridges the gaps between private and public data securely to unleash new potential for individuals and enterprises alike. It helps businesses unlock the power of their data anywhere it is created. It simplifies the path to deployment and adoption of AI beyond the cloud, delivering it privately to businesses in their data centers and at the far edge in real time.
A hybrid approach requires finding the right mix of public and private AI solutions for the applications and data needed to run generative AI workloads. On stage, we unveiled a full stack of hybrid AI capabilities that are accelerating AI adoption for global enterprises and service providers. In fact, since first announcing our commitment to a hybrid approach with NVIDIA at last year’s Tech World, our end-to-end portfolio has grown to offer over 80 AI-optimized products that are creating the foundation any enterprise needs to achieve better business outcomes using AI from edge to cloud.
Lenovo is designing the next generation of AI solutions and technology—all with some of the industry’s fastest time to market, thanks to the strength of our hybrid AI collaboration with NVIDIA. And last week, we introduced the next phase of this work: Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA, which combines full-stack AI capabilities optimized for factory-like industrialization and reliability with a library of ready-to-customize AI use-case solutions that help customers break through the barriers to return on investment from AI. The companies have partnered closely to integrate NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking, software and AI models into the modular Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solution framework for optimized performance.
Additionally, our evolving partner ecosystem includes 165 validated AI ISV solutions, as well as collaboration with other technology companies such as AMD, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, RedHat, SAP, Veeam and VMware. Our global AI Centers of Excellence and service options that are accelerating enterprise AI innovation in every industry by bringing AI to business data, securely and responsibly making AI use cases real in classrooms, in stores, in banks, at manufacturing sites, and within healthcare settings.
In fact, for industries like healthcare, data is very private and subject to compliance and regulatory constraints. Many industries have workloads and data that must stay private for numerous reasons, including security, compliance, latency, and data gravity. For private clouds and edge, delivering secure, on-prem infrastructure and AI solutions that offer control and customization are critical to enabling AI-powered outcomes.
So, how does an organization navigate all of this complexity and realize the full potential of a hybrid approach to AI? On stage, we shared a full view of how we are bringing generative AI to market with a demonstration of a pilot hybrid AI assistance that guides organizations through AI implementation of public and private data and shows just how far you can go using the right size and mix of AI devices, infrastructure, operations and expertise.
Hybrid AI Implementation with New Talk
Among other innovations, Lenovo demonstrated the power of hybrid AI to accelerate adoption and enable real-world use cases with the premiere of our pilot solution codenamed New Talk. The innovation is Lenovo’s revolutionary hybrid AI assistant that helps businesses seamlessly adopt generative AI by leveraging private and public data across an organization while guiding them along the way. Using the software solution, customers can integrate AI in their own environment while safeguarding data and ensuring unparalleled security when and where it’s needed most, in cities, classrooms, stores, banks, factories, hospitals and beyond.
Acting like an air traffic controller, organizations can use the tool to create and deploy real AI use cases, starting with a simple request. From there, the solution helps direct where the AI request should go and which data sources it should use. Should it go to a company’s private AI solutions? Should it use public data or AI tools like Chat GPT, or even to the requestor’s personal AI PC?
Lenovo’s New Talk solution is built to do exactly that. On stage, our very own executive vice president of international sales, Matt Zielinski, used the tool to replace himself as host and used AI to run the show with an avatar instead. Currently in pilot with a global retail enterprise, New Talk is designed to address three main use cases: knowledge search and Q&A; AIOPs support; and complex reasoning in a hybrid setting through Natural Language Interface.
Scalable and Efficient AI with the right ROI to Empower Adoption
Across every industry, AI-powered systems can be used to boost productivity, improve customer service and optimize operations. Organizations need agile solutions that help them see and prove the business outcomes delivered from AI while simplifying deployment. Hybrid AI solutions help businesses of any size and anywhere harness personal, enterprise and public data to flexibly build and deploy generative AI models for transformative business outcomes faster and at scale while demonstrating greater ROI.
For example, breakthrough capabilities, such as Lenovo TruScale GPU as a Service, give organizations immediate, scalable access to critical AI and HPC technology while eliminating the traditional barriers of cost and complexity. Lenovo TruScale GPUaaS will be available for a wide range of NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies, including NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
Lenovo GPUaaS accelerates the availability of NVIDIA accelerated computing to enable rapid real-world innovation, making AI use cases in the enterprise more accessible. And the very first instance of it is helping to provide open access to new AI capabilities for the Mass Open Cloud Alliance.
MOC is a nonprofit collective of universities, government organizations, and businesses, including Boston University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, MIT and the University of Massachusetts that come together to create a national, open production research-focused cloud. As the very first instance of TruScale GPUaaS anywhere, MOC is using the service to scale access to AI-level compute in support of becoming the premier destination for collaborative AI research that fuels progress.
With TruScale’s unique pay-as-you-go model and advantages provided by Lenovo Neptune, MOC is getting reliable, cost-effective infrastructure solutions to efficiently scale and power collaborative AI research. Using the solution, the MOC Alliance is addressing a crucial need for cutting-edge computational power in a cost-effective way and agile way.
In a discussion with Jon Stumpf, MOC Strategic Coordinator, on stage, he revealed MOC intends to become the destination for collaborative AI research, and Lenovo’s TruScale GPU as a Service is a gamechanger in terms for supporting this goal.
With GPU as a service, MOC is able to provide swift, scalable access to powerful infrastructure that supports collaborative AI research while overcoming budget restraints, attracting more universities and quickly scaling with new NVIDIA H100 GPUs that are going to deliver access to even greater AI-compute capabilities.
You can read more about this incredible story on Lenovo StoryHub or visit Smarter AI for All | Tech World ’24 | Lenovo US to learn more about the innovations from Tech World.
Together, with our partners and customers, Lenovo is unleashing the power of AI for enterprises everywhere by unlocking the potential of data anywhere.