The Era Of AI As A Marketing Gimmick Is Over: Says Lenovo’s Ashish Sikka
Ashish Sikka, Executive Director for PC and Smart Devices at Lenovo, says he spends a good part of any given week explaining artificial intelligence to people who have already decided they don’t need to understand it. Not the engineers, not the analysts who track NPU benchmarks down to the decimal, the regular buyer standing in a Lenovo Exclusive Store, weighing whether the “AI” sticker on a laptop is marketing or substance.For years, Sikka admits, it was closer to marketing. “Maybe two years back, AI was more of something which you put on your laptop as a brand,” he says, “and you hope that people will buy it because it has that AI tag.” That era, he insists, is over. What replaced it is a quieter, more ambitious bet: that the next decade of computing won’t be defined by a single device at all, but by how invisibly a constellation of them, i.e., laptop, phone, tablet, can work on a person’s behalf without that person ever noticing the machinery underneath.
Lenovo is calling that bet Qira, and Sikka is willing to stake the company’s next growth phase on the idea that ‘frictionless’ beats ‘fast’ as a sales pitch, coming, fittingly, right after the best year the company has ever had.
That confidence sits on a foundation Lenovo can finally point to with numbers, not adjectives. The company closed its fiscal year, having recorded its highest fourth-quarter revenue growth in five years. Group revenue jumped 27 per cent year-on-year to touch an all-time Q4 high, with the Intelligent Devices Group, the home of PCs, tablets and smartphones, growing 24 per cent even as AI server demand pulled component costs in the opposite direction.
Lenovo crossed the USD 80-billion mark as a worldwide organisation for the first time, and, as Sikka is quick to point out, profitability grew faster than revenue. “2025 was a fabulous year, not only for Lenovo, but for the IT industry overall,” he added, crediting a wave of pandemic-era PCs finally reaching end-of-life, a Windows 11 refresh cycle, and, increasingly, genuine demand for AI-capable hardware rather than AI as a checkbox.
The distinction matters to Sikka because he believes the industry spent the last two years selling the wrong story. Buyers, he says, have stopped asking what’s inside the box. “Most people will not understand the NPU, GPU jargon,” he says, “but what people resonate with is the fact that how AI improves their life.” His go-to examples are deliberately unglamorous, i.e., a laptop’s AI muting background noise on a call without headphones, a camera quietly cleaning up glare in a video frame, a conference-room microphone array that lets everyone in the room be heard.
Small conveniences, repeated often enough, are what convert scepticism into purchase intent, rather than benchmark scores. “People have understood AI much better than maybe what it was a year or two back,” he stated, and that understanding is now translating into what he calls a genuine refresh opportunity across Lenovo’s entire portfolio, at every price point.
Price points are, in fact, where Lenovo’s strategy gets most interesting and most contested. Sikka is candid that the old boundaries between entry-level, mainstream and premium laptops are eroding, with flagship features increasingly trickling down into mid-tier devices like the IdeaPad line that used to be Yoga’s quieter cousin.
He doesn’t pretend this is accidental. “AI will help to blur that,” he added, pointing to how Lenovo’s Qira assistant is meant to work identically whether it’s running on a flagship Yoga or a budget IdeaPad, even as hardware differences in build material, battery life and thickness remain deliberately tiered.
The company’s answer to “who gets AI” is structural: Legion and LOQ for gamers, Yoga and IdeaPad for creators and students, ThinkPad and ThinkBook for SMBs and enterprises, each cohort served a different blend of the same underlying intelligence, calibrated to what that customer is actually willing to pay for.
That calibration is being tested right now by a problem entirely outside Lenovo’s control, i.e., memory. Rising DRAM and SSD prices, driven by AI data-centre demand pulling on global chip supply, have already pushed PC prices upward in 2026, and Sikka doesn’t dress up the outlook. “The prices will continue to increase for some period of time before they stabilise,” he added. Declining to put a number on how much further these prices will climb, since so much depends on AI demand that has nothing to do with India specifically.
What Lenovo can control, he argues, is how the pain gets distributed, longer EMI tenures stretched out to 18 months from the earlier 6-and 12-month options, and a “Device as a Service” model called TruScale for enterprise buyers who’d rather pay monthly than absorb a price spike upfront.
He also leans on a quieter advantage, that is, Lenovo’s Pondicherry manufacturing plant and nearly two decades of operating inside India’s Production Linked Incentive and Make in India schemes, which he credits with insulating the company from the worst of recent supply disruptions.
We enquired about new Lenovo products in the pipeline, including the RTX Spark laptop, codenamed as Nvidia N1x at the time of the interview. The product roadmap he was allowed to discuss is, by his own framing, the easy half of the conversation. Lenovo’s Gen 11 lineup includes the Yoga 7i 2-in-1, a 360-degree convertible with pen support, available in both Intel and AMD versions, alongside the ultra-light, sub-kilogram Yoga Slim 7 and the IdeaPad 5i 2-in-1, plus a Yoga 7 Aura Edition co-engineered with Intel that Sikka name-checks with evident pride.
However, pressed on whether he would comment on the laptops reportedly being built around Nvidia’s new N1x chip, the silicon at the heart of the RTX Spark platform, Sikka shut the door politely but firmly: “No comments”, he said.
It’s a position every OEM sharing the Computex stage with Jensen Huang in June was likely told to take before pricing and launch timing are locked down, but the silence is itself a signal.
At Computex 2026, Nvidia named Lenovo among the launch partners building RTX Spark machines for a fall 2026 release, putting an Nvidia-designed Arm chip, not Intel or AMD silicon, at the centre of some of Lenovo’s most premium future laptops for the first time.
A few days later, we saw Huang mention Lenovo during his keynote at the Nvidia GTC Taipei.
Security is the other conversation Sikka treats as inseparable from the AI pitch, not bolted onto it. Lenovo’s approach starts upstream, with a global supply-chain security programme meant to guarantee devices aren’t tampered with before they ever reach a customer, and continues through ThinkShield, the company’s enterprise security framework built in partnership with Microsoft, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
Asked whether AI’s growing presence on devices also expands the attack surface, Sikka doesn’t dodge the premise. “AI can work both ways, the good and the bad,” he added, framing Lenovo’s job as making sure each new generation of AI-enabled hardware ships more secure than the one before it, not just smarter.
All of this circles back to the question Sikka clearly enjoys most: whether Lenovo, or anyone, actually has a moat in an AI-PC market where, by his own admission, “every OEM is offering more or less the same concoction of features.” His answer avoids hardware entirely. The moat, he argues, isn’t a chip or a camera trick; it is task continuity: starting a document on a ThinkPad, picking up a Motorola phone, and having the work simply continue without a file search, a re-login, or a re-explanation of context.
He describes Qira, Lenovo’s “personal AI twin,” as the mechanism meant to make that real, ambient rather than invocation-based, present in the background across a laptop, tablet and phone, surfacing a calendar conflict before you notice it yourself, or pulling together three scattered data sources into one coherent presentation without being asked twice.
“You should not feel the need to reach out to that technology,” he says. “It should be ever-present.” Qira began rolling out to early-access customers this year, with broader device availability expected from the second quarter onward.
Democratising AI, in his telling, isn’t a slogan for the premium buyer; it’s explicitly about reaching customers who don’t speak English fluently, who’ve never owned a PC, who are one well-timed EMI scheme away from their first laptop. He reaches for India’s UPI payments network as his proof of concept, unprompted: technology, he argues, has a track record of closing economic gaps when it’s designed to be invisible rather than impressive.
As a conversation ender, we asked Sikka what headline he would want describing Lenovo’s consumer business a year from now, and he did not ask for a record quarter or a groundbreaking achievement. He asks for a headline that says that “smarter technology for all” wasn’t just the company’s tagline, but that it actually reached the street vendor as readily as the boardroom. Whether Nvidia’s silicon, Lenovo’s own AI roadmap, or some combination of the two ends up being the vehicle, that’s the metric Sikka says he’s actually chasing.
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