Enabling Australian businesses in their AI journey through outcome-based use cases

As businesses in Australia evaluated how AI can grow their business in 2024, implementing AI in their productivity will be the focus for 2025, says Sumir Bhatia, President ISG for Lenovo Asia Pacific.

When it comes to digital transformation, Australian companies are embracing technology at a much faster pace compared to other nations in the Asia Pacific. A survey by the Australian Industry Group in 2024 revealed that 84% of business leaders in the country are currently adopting new technology into their operations.

Adopting new technologies like AI requires businesses to have the right strategy in implementing them. Despite allocating a sufficient budget for tech investment, failure to have a tech roadmap or digital strategy plan could end up businesses struggling to meet their ROI in the long run.

Statistics also revealed that Australia is paving the way when it comes to building out a new hybrid cloud environment for AI, with 40% of organizations claiming it as the preferred approach to addressing AI infrastructure requirements. Similarly, about 44% of Australian organizations are enthusiastically leveraging cloud vendors to host the AI Infrastructure demands in the region compared to countries like of India whereby only 22% of organizations preferring to do so.

According to Sumir Bhatia, President ISG for Lenovo Asia Pacific, Australia’s AI journey is not much different to other countries in the region. Some businesses in Australia are indeed ahead of the game in terms of adoption but the challenge is actually more toward how they can adapt to the changes around AI.

“It's really about how do you take AI across organizations. How do you actually look at aspects that are going to actually help both organizations, and how do you distribute it across?” said Bhatia.

Bhatia highlighted Lenovo’s 2024 CIO playbook that included feedback from about 900 customers in the Asia Pacific region. The study revealed businesses in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) were on top when it comes to AI usage.

“38% of ANZ leaders believe that AI is a game changer, which came much higher than many of the others. 79% of ANZ organizations also said that they are planning or have already invested in Gen AI, despite this being in the early stages. There’s also an 18% increase in edge investments in the ANZ region. We have worked with customers in edge, especially in the retail space, because they’re looking at bringing edge to the data as opposed to the data to the infrastructure,” said Bhatia.

He added that businesses in Australia were more focused on looking at AI use cases and how it can grow in their business in 2024. In 2025, he expects more businesses to implement AI in their productivity. As more use cases come out, Lenovo will be working with them and with its ISV partners.

Interestingly, Bhatia stated that this also creates another opportunity whereby Lenovo can take all this and share some of these best practices with customers across organizations with those ISVs to take them into specific use cases.

“Is AI going to be more in 2025? Absolutely. In 2025, we will be releasing a new CIO playbook that is going to focus on the outcome and the challenges that they faced. There were some businesses obviously that have benefited to a great extent and also some businesses that had some challenges in implementing it. And these challenges relate to infrastructure as well as the cost of investment. There are also challenges on data management, data security and skill sets,” said Bhatia.

On concerns of increasing cost of AI and making sure organizations can manage their IA budget, Bhatia highlighted how Lenovo Truscale’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model can help customers manage their budget. According to Bhatia, Lenovo’s customers in Australia are leading the adoption of this model.

The foundation models of AI

For Bhatia, there are three aspects of what the foundation models are for businesses. First, there is the public foundation model like ChatGPT that some use to cater to their specific need. However, Bhatia also mentioned that businesses in Australia want to do it in a secure manner by leveraging their own data. This is where the enterprise foundation model comes in and provides a secure environment around the use of a company’s data.

The third foundation model is the personalized AI model which looks at personal data securely. This includes enabling organizations to use specific data which they own to bring value to employees and to improve their productivity.

“Now, Lenovo believes hybrid AI is at the core for public, enterprise and personal AI models. This is the aspect that we’re looking at helping organizations in their journey. AI is not about bulldozing the existing architecture. However, certain workloads may require new architecture to support them. When I talked about the new IT architecture, it's very important as they go to specific areas to look at the infrastructure and the new IT architecture that supports it. And this is where Lenovo brings in our complete end-to-end portfolio to support them,” explained Bhatia.

To ensure they can provide customers the support needed, be it in Australia or any part of the world, Lenovo had announced in 2023 that it will be investing over US$1 billion over three years to expand its infrastructure solutions to accelerate AI adoption for customers.

“It has already given us more than 80 AI-ready platforms which are purpose-built to handle AI workloads. Customers want specific outcomes for their AI investment. So, we’re not just doing something with AI but we’re making sure its outcome-based,” said Bhatia.

Bhatia also pointed out that Lenovo has built an AI innovators program and an innovation center to help its customers. This includes partnering over 50 ISVs globally who have brought in over 165 AI solutions across different verticals.

The partner ecosystem

“Our DNA at Lenovo is all about the partner ecosystem. The new age partner ecosystem comes right from our partners. This includes Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and all the software partners around it, and making sure that when we're building infrastructure, it is working with them to bring the right infrastructure,” said Bhatia.

For system integrations, Bhatia mentioned that Lenovo’s business partners take these solutions to customers and work with them. This includes specific partners like ISVs that take solutions and put them together to bring value to customers.

In Australia, the partner ecosystem is very critical, given the remoteness of some parts in the country. As such, Bhatia said that it's essential to have a partner that can not only offer their right solutions, but also in logistics and such.

The ecosystem is very critical and in Australia, that's considering the remoteness of some parts of Australia, being able to actually cover it across to make sure that they get the right solutions, the logistics around it, the partner ecosystem is very critical.

“I don't believe that the AI journey can be done without a partner ecosystem with one vendor coming and saying that I will do the complete end-to-end. You need to have the partner ecosystem which is very tightly integrated right from infrastructure to services, to also being able to have all the challenges on the ground and put it all together and put it in,” concluded Bhatia.