Lenovo’s AI strategy matters more than you think

My chat with the PC giant's head of AI product. Also: My quick jaunt through the CES show floor.

Jan 07, 2026

It’s Tuesday, Jan 6th. Between meetings, I managed to briefly hit the show floor here at CES, where I quickly got my fill of vaporware, strange smells, and cringeworthy marketing for the rest of the year. Keep reading for some photos and more gossip out of CES.

3 things you should know:

Meta added a teleprompter and handwriting feature to its display glasses, which are apparently selling faster than anticipated.
Early reviews of the Samsung TriFold at CES are very positive.
Gwen Stefani is the surprise performer at Lenovo’s big event at the Las Vegas Sphere tonight.

Mentioned in this issue: Jeff Snow, Elon Musk, Anastasios Angelopoulos, Lisa Su, Jensen Huang, Ed Ludlow, Jon Fortt, Peter H. Diamandis

“This space is moving too fast”

While most attention in the AI race is focused on model builders and cloud platforms, Lenovo sits closer to millions of users than most companies. As the world’s top PC maker by volume, Lenovo ships tens of millions of devices every year. What it decides to ship, bundle, and integrate can directly shape how AI shows up in many everyday lives.

That’s what made Lenovo’s announcement today at CES notable. At a flashy event on Tuesday at The Sphere in Las Vegas, it introduced Qira, a system-level, cross-device AI assistant designed to live across Lenovo laptops and Motorola phones. It’s Lenovo’s most ambitious AI effort to date and a rare look at how a hardware giant with global reach is thinking about integrating AI more deeply.

Jeff Snow, Lenovo’s head of AI product, told me how Qira came together, why the company is deliberately avoiding a single exclusive AI partnership, and what he learned from earlier experiments like Moto AI and Microsoft’s Recall debacle.

Qira emerged from a quiet but meaningful internal reorganization less than a year ago, according to Snow. Lenovo pulled AI teams out of individual hardware units such as PCs, tablets, and phones and centralized them into a new software-focused group that works across the entire company.

For a company long optimized around hardware SKUs and supply chains, the move signaled a shift toward putting AI more front and center. “We wanted a built-in cross-device intelligence that works with you throughout the day, learns from your interactions, and can act on your behalf,” Snow said. He mentioned using Qira’s on-device model during his flight to CES to help him workshop how to talk about the news in meetings based on the notes and documents on his PC.

Qira is not built around a single flagship AI model. Instead, it’s modular. Under the hood, it mixes local, on-device models with cloud-based models, anchored by Microsoft and OpenAI infrastructure accessed through Azure. Stability AI’s diffusion model is also integrated, along with tie-ins to app-specific partners like Notion and Perplexity.

“We didn’t want to hard-code ourselves to one model,” Snow said. “This space is moving too fast. Different tasks need different tradeoffs around performance, quality, and cost.”

That stance runs counter to the push from major AI labs, many of which would happily become the exclusive intelligence layer for a company with Lenovo’s reach. Lenovo’s view is that optionality matters more, especially given its control over one of the largest consumer computing distribution channels in the world.

Snow previously worked on Moto AI, Motorola’s assistant, which he said saw high initial engagement. More than half of Motorola users tried it, but retention wasn’t good. He said that too much of the experience felt like prompt-based chat features people could already get elsewhere.

“That pushed us away from competing with chatbots,” Snow said. “Qira is about things chatbots can’t do, like continuity, context, and acting directly on your device.”

Lenovo also paid close attention to the backlash around Microsoft’s Recall feature. Snow said Qira is designed from the outset with opt-in memory, persistent indicators, and clear user controls. Context ingestion is optional. Recording is visible. Nothing is silently collected.

Cost pressures loom over all of this. Memory prices are rising as AI demand strains supply chains, and analysts expect PC prices to follow. Qira does not raise baseline system requirements for PCs, Snow said, but it performs best on higher-end machines with more RAM. Lenovo is working to bring local models down to smaller memory footprints, like 16 gigabytes of RAM, without watering down the experience.

Strategically, Lenovo sees Qira as both a retention play and a hedge against hardware commoditization. In the short term, it hopes that tighter integration between laptops and phones will nudge customers to stay within the Lenovo ecosystem. Over the longer term, Snow framed Qira as a way to differentiate Lenovo devices when specs alone are no longer enough.

Elsewhere:

Two notable AI funding rounds: Elon Musk’s xAI announced its “upsized Series E funding round, exceeding the $15 billion targeted round size, and raised $20 billion.” Nvidia invested again in this latest round, which should signal that there isn’t any true animosity about its push into autonomous vehicles. The press release says that “Grok 5 is currently in training, and we are focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products.” (No mention of upgrades to AI nudification, though.) Anastasios Angelopoulos over at LMArena also announced his $150 million A round. LMArena’s approach to judging models based on unverified accounts is certainly controversial in the AI world, but there’s no denying that it remains the de facto leaderboard for the model race, and this funding will likely further cement that.
A few of my favorite scenes from the CES show floor today:

Sources are saying:

Was Jensen Huang just trying to upstage Lisa Su? That was the chatter among informed guessers on the ground at CES after the Nvidia CEO’s Monday keynote. His presentation was unusually unpolished and beset by technical difficulties, which together made it feel a bit rushed. That may be because it was, and Nvidia made a relatively last-minute decision to hold its own presentation just before AMD CEO Lisa Su’s official opening CES keynote later in the evening…

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