CNME Editor Mark Forker spoke to Patricia Wilkey, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo Solutions and Services Group, in a bid to learn more on their Hybrid AI Advantage offering, the need to validate AI use-cases – and the rise of Agentic AI.
Patricia Wilkey has enjoyed a thoroughly impressive career in IT.
She began her career as a financial analyst, and was the Chief Financial Officer at EDS Personal Communications Corp, before pivoting into strategy and sales at EDS Corporation.
Wilkey has worked for global technology players such as HP and DXC Technology, prior to joining Lenovo in 2024.
She is regarded by many of her peers to be one of the best sales leaders in the industry.
During LEAP 2025 in Riyadh, CNME were afforded the opportunity to sit down with Wilkey, to try and better understand how Lenovo is helping their customers leverage the most from AI.
GAIN AN ‘ADVANTAGE’
Lenovo’s Hybrid AI Advantage portfolio is empowering organisations to turn data and intelligence into business outcomes much quicker.
Wilkey outlined how Lenovo’s adopts a consultative approach in order to understand customer pain points, and select the AI use-case that is really going to have the impact they desire.
She acknowledged business leaders are under pressure to adopt AI, and stressed the need to validate AI use-cases.
“Over the last few months, we have spent a lot of time with our customers in terms of how we can help them transition from pocket-to-cloud. We want to determine how do we help them take advantage of AI by deploying the right model. We are taking that technology piece into play, but we’re also incorporating the human factor, which is essential. Our strategy straddles a lot of different elements, such as, speed, having the right execution, and having that ease of use. Ultimately, we want to ensure that we can take these solutions, and use-cases, and validate them for our customers. We have designed a model that within 90 days allows our customers to test, validate, and see a proof of value on that use-case that we are bringing forward. We are sitting down with our customers, and we’re asking them what is the concept, where do you think we can have the best impact, and then we design that, and we look to validate that use-case within 90 days. We want them to get to a validation point, so they don’t have to re-design everything for production,” said Wilkey.
Wilkey added that Lenovo is also intensely focused on simplifying AI for their customers.
“A very important component in this AI development, is the need to validate the security framework, we bring the security, whether it is built into our device, or we use a Microsoft tool, but that is key. It is also very important for us to introduce our partner ecosystem, to determine what are they going to need to have for the compute environment. Data is the killer area for applications. We want to make sure that the general population, or the designer know that this is what it is all about. How does the application manipulate the data, and now with AI and agents the question becomes how do you make it simpler,” said Wilkey.
THE LIBRARY
Wilkey stated that educating customer on AI is a huge priority for them, but conceded that in the AI race, patience is not a virtue you tend to see first-hand.
However, Lenovo’s creation of an AI library has enabled people to have conversations much quicker, as they have leveraged AI to fast-track the traditionally protracted process of creating an NDA.
“A big focus for us in this first phase of AI is the education of our customers – and to help us with that, we have created what we call the AI Library. Many of our customers have their own IP, but they need another tool, or framework to really gain traction. When you go and speak to a customer one of the first things that your legal team will say is that we need a NDA, you can’t have this conversation without one. However, this takes time, so what we did was have all our experts in AI work closely with our legal team to determine how we can have a framework around the best elements that is needed in an NDA agreement. It has all been approved now, and if anyone of our thousands of sellers globally need to have that conversation then they just need to go into the AI library, submit the details, and they’ll get the approved documentation that they need to go forward with that conversation. It saves weeks, initially it was reduced from a fortnight to around 3-4 days, but now you can get the approved document within an hour. We’ve taken our AI library to our customers, and they can now leverage the capabilities provided by this use-case. We also have an incubation model with different ISVs, and service providers in terms of what they are creating and how we can link that into our incubation AI team,” said Wilkey.
TAKE IT ON ‘BOARD’
Wilkey conceded that many business leaders are under pressure to come back to their board with a clear AI strategy, and likened the current AI climate to the cloud era.
“Lenovo is in 180 different markets in the world, and each one of them is at a different level when it comes to AI, some of them are more educated on the technology than others, and that’s just the state of play. When we speak to our customers we always look at the industry, what industry does this customer operate in. For example, I recently was with an insurance CIO, who admitted there were cautious about adopting AI because of fears over compliance. We spoke, and we looked at where they were having the most pain, and then we looked at developing solutions that are going to address that very specific problem in the most effective and efficient way possible. The first thing that some of these business leaders say to us is ‘it’s kind of like the cloud era’. Boards are now asking them what is this AI thing, what is our strategy and plan. They are asking us for help. It can be hard to stay on top of AI because it is changing so quickly, but it’s our job to educate them, then advise them based on the industry they operate in what the best course of action is. If we don’t have that industry expertise, then that’s when we leverage our channel and partner to bring that knowledge to the industry,” said Wilkey.
AGENTS OF CHANGE
A big feature and theme at LEAP, was the role of Agentic AI.
Many analysts are predicting that the year of 2025, will be remembered as the year of Agentic AI.
“Agentic AI is taking the data, understanding it, and create process improvement around the AI play. These agentic models are learning from themselves and cutting out some of the complex processes that used to hinder coders and developers. As you pull these units together then it’s already recognising what people might have had to pull together manually. There is still a lot of compute power needed to make this all happen. We’re working closely with NVIDIA, and others in relation to what it all means, and we’re looking at how we bring these solutions to fruition, what is the compute power required to validate, test, and go into a production load with these agentic AI models? However, it is expensive, so we’re looking at how we can adopt a consumption strategy around the design of these agentic AI models. We want to make it easier for our customers to embrace Agentic AI, and there is a lot of tools out there, but how do you simplify all of that, and use these Agentic AI models to enable what the piece of the process is in order to reduce the time, and make the whole process easier for the non-developer to be able to experiment and use,” said Wilkey.
STAY ‘TRU’
Wilkey concluded a superb exchange, by highlighted the role and impact played by Lenovo’s TruScale platform.
“We help our customers get access to the environment that they need. Many of our customers are concerned about their security and their intellectual capital, how they maintain, and manage that in their environment. TruScale is designed in a way that addresses these concerns. In some cases, they want to use a public cloud, but in other cases they want to keep it on-prem, whether they are a public sector organisation, or a financial institution, or healthcare provide, it doesn’t matter the data is key, and their IP is core to them. They want to have the same experience as if they are in a public cloud. In many instances customers don’t have all the capital to be able to put upfront, and that’s an impact on their ROI. Lenovo helps them financially to have the right compute, the design of what they need in that environment, but have it in a financial model that makes sense to them, and enable them to turn it up and turn it down, the flexibility is critical,” concluded Wilkey.