Making the IT mindset shift from simply offering a technical service to offering an outcome can be a challenge. It’s the difference between offering a customer a laptop and offering them the tools to create a workplace environment that empowers productivity, says Art Hu, Lenovo’s senior vice president and global chief information officer. Once IT teams make this change to focus on business language and outcomes, they can move in the direction of business value delivery and scalability.

Creating a culture of curiosity that values this shift requires a commitment to a long-term journey that prioritizes research and development (R&D) and finding the right business processes to unleash creativity among employees.

“As you know, innovation starts smaller,” says Hu. “It's not possible that everything immediately is something that's billions of dollars and thousands of employees and dozens of countries around the world. You have to seed these things.”

Effectively manufacturing new innovations, especially those that involve emerging technologies like AI and the industrial metaverse, is underpinned by this strong focus on R&D, says Hu.

“There is no place,” says Hu, “if you think about logistics, planning, production, scheduling, shipping, where we didn't find AI and metaverse use cases that were able to significantly enhance the way we run our operations.”

Hu sees the continued potential of AI, how digital transformation will affect and contribute to the recent adoptions of hybrid work, and the continued adoption of as a service to improve agility within enterprises.