While most of the attention in the AI race focuses on model builders and cloud platforms, Lenovo is closer to millions of users than most companies. like the world Top PC manufacturers by volumeLenovo ships millions of devices every year. What it decides to ship, bundle, and integrate can directly shape how AI appears in many everyday lives.
That’s what made Lenovo’s announcement at CES today so remarkable. At a glitzy event Tuesday at The Sphere in Las Vegas, it introduced Cura, a system-level, cross-device AI assistant designed to work on Lenovo laptops and Motorola phones. It’s Lenovo’s most ambitious AI effort to date and it’s a rare look at how a hardware giant with global reach is thinking about integrating AI more deeply.
Jeff Snow, Lenovo’s head of AI product, tells me how Cura came together, why the company is deliberately avoiding a single exclusive AI partnership, and what they learned from earlier experiments like Moto AI and Microsoft’s recall debacle.
According to Snow, Cura emerged from a quiet but meaningful internal restructuring less than a year ago. Lenovo took AI teams out of individual hardware units like PCs, tablets and phones and centralized them into a new software-focused group that works across the entire company.
For a company long optimized around hardware SKUs and supply chains, the move signaled a shift toward putting AI more front and center. “We wanted a built-in cross-device intelligence that works with you throughout your day, learning from your conversations and taking actions on your behalf,” Snow said. He mentioned using Cura’s on-device model during his flight to CES to help him talk about news in meetings based on notes and documents on his PC.
“We wanted a built-in cross-device intelligence that could… learn from your conversations and act on your behalf.”
Qira is not built around any one flagship AI model. Instead, it is modular. Under the hood, it blends a local, on-device model with a cloud-based model, anchored by Microsoft and OpenAI infrastructure accessed through Azure. Sustainability AI’s diffusion models have also been integrated, as well as tie-ins with app-specific partners like Notion and Perplexity.
“We didn’t want to hard-code ourselves into a model,” Snow said. “This space is moving very quickly. Different functions require different tradeoffs based on performance, quality and cost.”
This stance runs contrary to pressure from major AI labs, many of which would happily create specific intelligence layers for a company with access to Lenovo. Lenovo’s view is that optionality makes more sense, especially given its control of one of the world’s largest consumer computing distribution channels.
Snow previously worked on Motorola’s subsidiary Moto AI, which he said saw high initial participation. More than half of Motorola users tried it, but retention was not good. He said much of the experience felt like prompt-based chat features people might already find elsewhere.
“It took us away from competing with chatbots,” Snow said. “Qira is about the things chatbots can’t do, like consistency, context, and acting directly on your device.”
Cost pressures are looming over all this.
Lenovo also paid close attention to the feedback regarding Microsoft’s recall feature. Snow said Qira has been designed from the ground up with opt-in memory, persistent indicators, and clear user controls. Context ingestion is optional. The recording is visible. Nothing is collected silently.
Cost pressures are looming over all this. Memory prices are rising as AI demand puts pressure on the supply chain, and analysts expect PC prices to rise similarly. Cura doesn’t exceed the baseline system requirements for PCs, Snow said, but it performs best on higher-end machines with more RAM. Lenovo is working to bring local models to smaller memory footprints, like 16 gigabytes of RAM, without diminishing the experience.
Strategically, Lenovo sees Cura as a retention play and a hedge against hardware commoditization. In the short term, he hopes tighter integration between laptops and phones will motivate customers to remain within the Lenovo ecosystem. In the long term, Snow devised Cura as a way to differentiate Lenovo devices when specifications alone were no longer enough.
