Global technology company Lenovo, one of the world’s largest PC and device makers, embedded an AI agent, called iChain, at the core of its global supply chain last year to continuously monitor demand, supplier constraints and transport flows. The agent — built into Lenovo’s AI supply chain suite that it started developing nearly a decade ago — predicts disruptions and dynamically re-optimizes shipments, coordinating across manufacturing, inventory and logistics in real time. This shift improved shipment accuracy by 30%, increased delivery predictability and sustainability at scale, had a ripple effect on the thousands of vendors the Beijing-based company works with, improved customer experience and satisfaction and added to the company’s top line.
“It has been game changing,” Robert Daigle, Lenovo’s Global Head of Enterprise AI, Infrastructure Solutions Group, said in an interview with The Innovator. iChain is just one of the many ways that Lenovo has been using AI to transform its organization. Co-developing software code with agentic AI is helping the company generate 5x to 10x more code; using AI for customer service applications has netted Lenovo over $10 million in operational cost avoidance, a 26% improvement in first-time-right repair rates and a 20% reduction in contact center handle times. And using the technology for marketing content automation is 90% faster and is slashing the cost of product launches by 70%.
“Across core use cases we are seeing an average 60% productivity improvement from the use of AI, which is huge,” he says. The company was so impressed with the results that it turned iChain and some of the other internal AI applications it has developed into services it sells to its customers. “We see AI transforming our own business, inside and out, and having a profound impact across organizations,” says Daigle. “Some of the use cases are for manufacturing, while many of the others are relevant across every industry: all companies can benefit from using AI to optimize their marketing and communication strategy and content creation, fixing customer support challenges, and many can leverage AI for software development in their organizations.”
Lenovo is one of 25 companies transforming their business with AI showcased in a recent white paper published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Accenture. Drawing on the Forum’s AI Transformation of Industries Community, comprising more than 450 leading adopters advancing AI at scale across industries, the white paper synthesizes the organizational changes observed among successful enterprises. Read on to get some of the white paper’s key insights.
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