Lenovo’s CIO on Scaling Services, Democratizing AI, and the Future of IT Leadership
Meta Description: Learn how Lenovo’s global CIO, Art Hu, is leading the tech giant through continuous transformation, focusing on services-led growth and the strategic implementation of artificial intelligence.
Lenovo is in a perpetual state of transformation, constantly striving to overcome new challenges, according to Art Hu, the company’s global Chief Information Officer. “We seem to always be in transformation, because there’s always the next mountain that we want to go and conquer,” Hu explains.
Hu’s journey to the helm of Lenovo’s IT department began in 2009, following a successful stint as a consultant at McKinsey, where he previously advised the technology firm. He embraced the opportunity to move from offering strategic guidance to taking ownership of execution within a leading global organization. “It was good to be advising people, but I wanted to have the accountability,” he says. “The consultants advise, but the ultimate ownership resides with the people who are executing. I wanted to be part of the team that was doing the work and owning the results.”
From Globalisation to Diversification: Early Transformations
When Hu joined Lenovo in 2009, the company’s primary focus was globalisation. The organization aimed to break down regional silos across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, leveraging IT to create a unified, global system. “We wanted to be one company,” Hu states, emphasizing the crucial link between business and digital strategy. “And in that sense, it’s something that I’ve always believed, which is that the technology is a manifestation of where the business wants to go, and it’s an embodiment of its strategy.”
The transition from consultancy to leading IT operations proved challenging. “It probably took me the better part of a year to sink in and develop some muscle memory about what it is like to think and do versus just thinking and saying,” Hu admits. However, he quickly adapted, rotating through various leadership roles overseeing infrastructure, enterprise architecture, security, development, and operations, ultimately becoming CIO in 2016.
As CIO, Hu spearheaded Lenovo’s second major transformation: diversification. Building on its core PC business, Lenovo strategically acquired Motorola Mobility from Google and IBM’s low-end x86 server business in 2014. This expansion paved the way for the company’s current focus: a shift towards a services-led business. “Increasingly, that’s where our customers want us to be,” Hu notes. “And to meet our customers where they are, we started shifting the company to be more services-led, and that, as a CIO, is where I am today.”
Building a Services-Led Future
Creating a services-led organization, Hu argues, is akin to building a new company from the ground up. The required systems, processes, and talent differ significantly from those of a traditional hardware specialist. “As a CIO, I’m excited because it’s like starting again,” he says. “You have some things that you can reuse, but those are the minority. And so, fundamentally, it’s a business-building process intersected with an awareness of how to manifest the strategy in the technology architecture.”
To accelerate this transition, Hu assumed the additional role of Chief Delivery and Technology Officer for Lenovo’s Services & Solutions Group (SSG) in April 2023. SSG represents Lenovo’s commitment to a services-first approach, integrating the company’s device, intelligent, and infrastructure solutions with a comprehensive suite of services. The goal, Hu explains, is to extend the internal IT expertise honed at Lenovo to its customer base. “We want to take the best of the services I deliver internally as CIO for Lenovo to our customers.”
Hu believes that Lenovo’s relatively late entry into the services market presents a unique advantage. “If we had already had 100,000 people doing services, then maybe it’s not the best fit,” he says. “But given that we were starting from essentially zero, and we had not built the business before, what we’ve learnt is that internal IT is a good accelerator to create services for our customers.”
The Democratization of AI
Currently, Lenovo’s internal digital transformation is heavily focused on artificial intelligence (AI). Hu envisions a future where AI is deeply embedded across the entire organization, empowering employees and democratizing technology creation. “One big area is how do we make the entire company intelligent, and how do we, as IT, serve the company in a very different way, where we are not the only ones who can create technology?” he asks. “That power is democratised through AI and now goes into the hands of all of our employees, and we have to govern that change, which takes a lot of effort.”
Lenovo is fostering AI exploration through a “top-down and bottom-up” approach, encouraging employees to experiment with AI within a secure and governed framework. “Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company,” Hu clarifies. “There’s no part of the business where AI should not apply. But at the same time, the exploration of AI has to be bottom-up, because only the people doing the work have the knowledge of AI and are most likely to find and explore the future.”
Currently, over 1,000 AI projects are underway at Lenovo, spanning various stages from exploration to deployment. These projects include using conversation summarisation to assist support specialists, refining agents for software engineering, and leveraging generative AI for marketing content creation. “We have projects across the lifecycle, and that’s really important,” Hu says. “I take heart from that because I think our bottom-up approach is working. We have more demand than we can review. We’re always getting pressure to review faster, but we love that pressure because it means people are generating ideas.”
A Tech-Led Future for Services and Beyond
Looking ahead, Hu’s priority is to grow Lenovo’s SSG business by embracing a digitally enabled services model. He believes the industry is at a pivotal moment, with an opportunity to move beyond traditional labour arbitrage. “This is a moment that hasn’t been present in the last 30 or 40 years,” he says. “There’s a chance to introduce a different operating model. The services business has been all about labour arbitrage. Labour has been a huge driver of the IT services industry since modern telecommunications enabled remote work in the 1990s.”
AI, Hu argues, enables a shift towards a “tech-led and labour-light” model, offering superior customer experiences and improved economics. This requires significant investment in technology platforms across all practice areas, involving the creation and integration of digital systems and services. “We’re very clear-eyed on the fact that you can’t build everything,” he says. “The big trends around being able to take in a lot of data that has been ingested, and predict and be proactive around that, and actually have significantly less human intervention, are just going to continue and compound.”
Hu emphasizes the need for a “challenger mindset” and expects to see continued growth and profitability as Lenovo’s new model gains traction. “What we would look for is continued growth with superior profitability as we’re able to create this new model,” he says. “We want to continue to take share as we grow the business using this approach with our customers.”
The Evolving Role of the CIO
After 15 years at the forefront of technology delivery, Hu reflects on the evolving responsibilities of the CIO. While the role continues to change, he remains confident in the enduring value of a trusted internal IT advisor. “I’m very positive about that fact, because digital fluency, and the ability to live comfortably at the intersection of technology and what it means for business and also society, will be at even more of a premium in the future,” he says. “The signal-to-noise ratio is a problem. People who understand and can help chart a path will be highly valuable.”
However, Hu also acknowledges the possibility that the traditional CIO role may eventually become obsolete as digital and AI literacy spreads throughout organizations. “Maybe we won’t need a CIO in the future,” he concedes. “But if that change means business leaders pick up the fluency and the dexterity needed to make the most of AI and digital, then that might be a good thing as well.”
