Thibault Dousson, Director, Services and Solutions Group, META at Lenovo, outlines to CNME Editor Mark Forker how their Gen AI-powered ‘Care of One’ platform is empowering workforces to be more effective and efficient through the use of artificial intelligence.
Thibault Dousson is a seasoned veteran in the IT industry, and is recognised by many of his peers to be one of the most prominent thought leaders in the channel ecosystem across the Middle East and Africa.
Dousson made his name at HP, before joining Lenovo in 2016.
In 2022, he was appointed as Director of Services and Solutions Group for the META region at Lenovo, and under his tutelage the company has enjoyed continued growth.
Last month during LEAP 2025 in Riyadh, CNME Editor Mark Forker sat down with Dousson to learn more about their Gen AI-powered Care of One platform that delivers Lenovo’s Digital Workspace solutions.
Dousson claimed that Lenovo’s Care of One platform illustrates how effective Gen AI can be in terms of transforming processes within an organisation, and also highlighted its plug-and-play simplicity for users.
“Our Care of One platform is the perfect example of what AI can do for a company. It is a plug-and-play platform that ultimately enables you to support your workforce to be much more efficient in their day-to-day roles. It gives them intelligence and helps them make better decision faster. The AI behind our Care of One platform is quite powerful, and that is evidenced by the fact that it can plug in up to 500 applications. Ultimately, the primary objective of the platform is to foster an environment that supports employees to be more efficient through the use of AI. We often hear that AI can be complex, and whilst that remains true in many cases, the same accusation can’t be aimed at Lenovo’s Care of One platform, as it is engineered with simplicity at its core when it comes to ease of use and adoption,” said Dousson.
Despite the advances made when it comes to technology, there are still some business processes that remain mundane and clunky, and in need of transformation.
These business processes are often described as ‘pain points’.
Another key feature of Lenovo’s Care of One platform is the visibility it provides, which he argues allows agents to streamline sticky processes.
“Lenovo’s Care of One platform has incredible intelligence powering it, and it can give agents greater visibility in terms of whether people are using the right level of security, it can flag potential issues that may arise with their hardware, and so on. However, essentially it enables agents to streamline processes in a much more effective and efficient way, which also saves a huge amount of time and money for organisations. If you want to show an ROI on an AI deployment, then saving time and money is a good starting point,” said Dousson.
The appetite and demand for transformation across the Middle East region, but particularly in Saudi Arabia is incredible.
Lenovo has rubberstamped its role in the future transformation of the Kingdom following the announcement of a $2bn megadeal with Alat.
Dousson believes the sheer depth and breadth of their product portfolio gives Lenovo a big advantage in the Saudi marketplace.
He did admit that a recurring question from customers, is how can Lenovo help them harness the capabilities of AI.
“It’s not easy to serve that demand, the expectations are high that’s for sure, but what helps us is the fact that we do have products from the pocket to the cloud – and we have solutions and services that are anchored on top of all of that. That gives us a really strong foundational block to build on when it comes to serving that appetite and demand for transformation across the Middle East. When I speak to customers, basically they are all asking the same thing, and that is what can AI do for me, and how can I digitalise my business? My question back to them is always the same, where is your data sitting? How easy is it to access, how digitised is your business, and ultimately most of important of all, where do you want to go? These are the types of things that you need to determine very early on in your conversation with customers. We can do a lot of things, but I don’t think we are trying to do everything for everyone either,” said Dousson.
There has been a lot of failure with AI over the last 12-18 months.
Many analysts believe that the pressure being applied from leaders in the boardroom who wanted their companies to become major players in the AI space has led to some costly mistake being made.
Some have likened the current environment to that of the cloud era.
However, whilst there has been failure, there is a general consensus that AI use-cases must be validated, and again, this is an area where Lenovo has an advantage thanks to their AI library.
As Dousson pointed out, customer don’t need to fall into the trap of trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to AI use-cases.
Instead, as he points out, they can leverage their library of use-cases to make inroads in the AI game.
“We try to help businesses realise where the potential is, and we get them to look at the processes within their organisation that give them pain, and we look at how we can infuse AI into those processes to help them overcome that problem. We have to identify what that process is, that is the key, AI is great, but without a purpose it won’t work, and it’s also important to validate that AI use-case quickly. At Lenovo, we have a library of AI use-cases that have all been pre-approved, so we can say to customers look you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to validating use-cases, they can use our AI Library. It makes sense as you save so much time, and most importantly of all, it is validated, and we know it works,” said Dousson.
