Lenovo is approaching the burgeoning AI opportunity with its Smarter AI for All strategy.
“We came up with this manta as a result of customers asking us what Lenovo is doing with AI,” says Yugen Naidoo, GM: Lenovo Southern Africa. “We realised we needed to democratise the product and the solution, to make it accessible to everyone. All citizens need to get these products into their hands without breaking the bank.”
Lenovo ensures that the products it brings to market are affordable and offer great value for money. And, importantly, the company is able to reach users across the country – not only in the big cities.
This ties into Lenovo’s strong philanthropy drive, which aims to give children access to technology, helping them learn to code or to help them be IT-literate when they enter the workplace.
An example of this is Lenovo’s ‘Love On’ Global Month of Service, when employees are encouraged to spend time away from their day jobs engaging in various projects within their communities.
These initiatives vary from market to market but are bound by one thread; they all aim to help support underrepresented communities and foster positive change.
Another initiative is the RoboGirl project, in partnership with the Durban University of Technology (DUT), which aims to close the gender gap in STEM fields by providing girls with hands-on training in robotics, coding, and other technologies.
In South Africa, Lenovo takes the democratisation of technology a step further.
“We realised that teachers need to be educated before they can teach,” Naidoo says. “We did a study in the Western Cape, finding that fewer than 15% of educators know how to use technology themselves. So, we decided to get involved and to focus on educators.”
The first intervention saw 40 teachers from schools across the spectrum brought into a training session. “Whether they were from underprivileged schools or private schools, all of the teachers took something out of that training,” Naidoo says.
Lenovo is also partnering with Microsoft on helping teachers to become more knowledgeable, comfortable, and confident with technology.
There’s a huge need for intervention programmes that will help to upskill both children and teachers and improve education outcomes as well as future prospects for the next generation.
Naidoo believes the IT industry as a whole needs to be working together. “We cannot do this by ourselves; we need to partner with the people who swim in the same ocean with us, so we can help more citizens.
“The whole industry needs to come to the party: We need to put our heads together and find a way to bring the country forward.”