Art Hu, Global Chief Information Officer, Lenovoacknowledges that IT leadership poses significant challenges for the Chinese tech giant, especially in an era of near-constant change. “We always seem to be in the process of transformation because there is always the next mountain we want to conquer,” he says.
Hu previously worked as a consultant at McKinsey, where he advised Lenovo, and joined the company in 2009. After developing his knowledge of technological change at a consulting firm, Hu relished the opportunity to put his knowledge into practice as an IT executive at a prestigious firm.
“It was nice to give people advice, but I wanted to be responsible,” he says. “Consultants give advice, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the people who carry it out. I wanted to be part of a team that got the job done and monitored the results.”
Climbing mountains
The mountain Lenovo was trying to conquer when Hu joined the company in 2009 was globalization. The organization sought to avoid the separation of separate regional divisions such as the Americas, Europe and Asia, and the business transformation was closely linked to changes in IT and an attempt to ensure the organization has benefited from globalized systems.
“We wanted to be one company,” he says, referring to the connection between business and digital strategy. “And in that sense, I've always believed that technology is a manifestation of where a business wants to go and the embodiment of its strategy.”
Hu says this first phase of technology leadership was exciting because he didn't join Lenovo to work in the back office, managing systems and keeping the lights on. However, moving from consulting companies to managing IT was a significant transition.
“It was good to advise people, but I wanted to be responsible. Consultants give advice, but the ultimate responsibility belongs to the people who do the work. I wanted to be part of a team that did the work and controlled the results.”
Art Hu, Lenovo
“It probably took me the better part of a year to realize and develop the muscle memory of what it means to think and do, rather than just think and talk,” he says. “The transition was a bit difficult, but fortunately it worked and I was able to rotate through different leadership roles within the team.”
Over the next seven years, Hu held other leadership positions, such as overseeing infrastructure, enterprise architecture, safetydevelopment and operations, which allowed him to develop a broader view of IT. As a result of his successful transition to these responsibilities, he became Chief Information Officer in 2016.
Since taking this role, Hu has helped Lenovo achieve the second pinnacle of business transformation: diversification. In addition to its successful PC business, Lenovo has sought to expand in other areas: in 2014, the company acquired Motorola Mobility from Google and the low-cost x86 server business from IBM.
Hu helped ensure the smooth diversification of the IT hardware divisions before moving into the third mountain – services. “Increasingly, this is what our clients want us to be,” he says. “And to meet our customers where they are, we started transitioning the company to be more service orientedand that’s what I do as CIO today.”
Provision of services
Hu says creating a service-oriented business is equivalent to creating a new organization. The systems, processes and talent required for this operation differ significantly from traditional hardware specialists.
“As a CIO, I'm excited because it's like starting over,” he says. “You have some things that you can reuse, but they're in the minority. So, essentially, it's the process of building a business intersecting with understanding how to implement strategy in the technology architecture.”
Hu suggests that the magic of digital leadership lies in finding the delicate balance between developing efficient processes and leveraging cutting-edge technology. He acknowledges that this magic has become increasingly important in his efforts to build a services-based business, and helps explain why he took on the additional responsibility of director of supply chain and technology in Lenovo's Services and Solutions Group (SSG) in April 2023.
“SSG is Lenovo's approach to being more service-oriented,” he says. “We want to take the best from our device, intelligent and infrastructure solutions groups, bring this to customers and surround this experience with services. The idea is to bring the best of the services I provide as Lenovo CIO to our customers.”
So, as a digital leader who has developed powerful solutions to intractable business problems during his time at Lenovo, is Hu well positioned to take the lead in sharing those experiences with his company's customers? The short answer, he suggests, is yes.
“You have to remember our starting point,” he says. “If we already had 100,000 people delivering services, it might not be the best option. But given that we were starting from virtually nothing and had not built a business before, we realized that internal IT was a good accelerator for creating services for our customers.”
Application of AI
Hu's desire to pass on lessons to Lenovo's customers will depend on his ongoing efforts to maintain the delicate balance between efficient processes and cutting-edge technology. He is currently transforming his business internally through digital technologies. focused on artificial intelligence (AI).
“One big area is how do we make the entire company intelligent and how do we as IT people serve the company in a completely different way when we're not the only ones who can create technology?” he says. “That power is being democratized by AI and is now in the hands of all of our employees, and we have to manage that change, which takes a lot of effort.”
Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company. But at the same time, AI research must come from the bottom up, because only the people doing the work have knowledge about AI and are most likely to find and explore the future.
Art Hu, Lenovo
Hu says Lenovo wants AI to permeate every aspect of its business. To facilitate this research, the company has created top-down and bottom-up commitments where employees are encouraged to explore AI in a highly regulated and safe manner.
“Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company,” he says. “There's no part of the business where AI can't be applied. But at the same time, AI research has to come from the bottom up, because only the people doing the work have knowledge about AI and are most likely to find and explore the future.”
Hu says Lenovo has more than 1,000 registered AI projects, ranging from research to testing and deployment. Key use cases include helping support agents by summarizing conversations, enhancing agents to help develop enterprise-grade software, and using generative AI to create effective marketing collateral.
“We have lifecycle projects, and that's really important,” he says. “I'm encouraged by this because I think our bottom-up approach is working. We have more requirements than we can handle. We're always being pushed to review faster, but we like that pressure because it means people are generating ideas.”
Growing services
As Hu turns to his priorities for the next few years, he is focusing on his desire to grow Lenovo's SSG business. He says there is an opportunity for the organization to take a new digital approach to services.
“This is a moment that hasn’t happened in the last 30 or 40 years,” he says. “There is a chance to introduce a different operating model. The services business was built on labor arbitrage. Labor has been a huge driving force in the IT services industry since modern telecommunications enabled remote work in the 1990s.”
Hu said AI is enabling a shift from labor arbitrage-based services to a capital-based approach. “We're trying to create a high-tech, simplified customer service model because we believe it can offer a superior customer experience and better economics for Lenovo,” he says.
Achieving this transformational shift depends on the adoption of technology platforms. Hu says Lenovo will invest in proprietary technology across all areas of its business to build these platforms. This process will include the creation and integration of digital systems and services.
“We are clear that it is impossible to build everything,” he says. “The big trends around being able to take a lot of data and predict and be proactive about it, and actually have significantly less human intervention, will continue and get worse.”
Hu says developing SSG involves adopting an aggressive mindset. The technology investments he will make over the next two years will help, and he hopes the changes he makes internally will provide a boost to the outside world with a strong base of clients and good business results.
“We will look to continue to grow with superior profitability as we build this new model,” he says. “We want to continue to gain share as the business grows by taking this approach to our customers.”
Changing Responsibilities
After more than 15 years at the forefront of technology adoption, Hu reflects on the scope of change that characterizes the CIO position. While the responsibilities associated with digital leadership continue to change, he believes that a trusted internal IT consultant remains an important leadership position.
“I feel very positive about this fact because digital fluency and the ability to live comfortably at the intersection of technology and its implications for business and society will be even more important in the future,” he says. “Signal-to-noise ratio is an issue. People who understand and can help lead the way will be very valuable.”
While digital leadership will continue in some form, Hu says it's important not to get too hung up on job titles. As digital technology and artificial intelligence continue their inexorable development, more people outside of IT will have a clear understanding of technology. He foresees a situation where digital technology and artificial intelligence become part of the core of business, with a corresponding impact on IT leadership positions.
“We may not need a CIO in the future,” he says. “But if this change means business leaders gain the fluency and agility needed to make the most of artificial intelligence and digital technologies, then that could be a good thing, too.”
