How Lenovo wants to unlock AI for all at the edge | Kirk Skaugen interview

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It makes a lot of sense to put AI as far out on the edge of the network as possible, as it can solve problems for people like first responders and reduce the amount of useless storage sent to the cloud.

Lenovo demonstrated a bunch of these solutions at the recent Mobile World Congress 24 show in Barcelona, Spain. The big company unveiled its “AI for All” vision with telco customer solutions that will accelerate global AI deployment.

Kirk Skaugen, EVP and president of infrastructure solutions group at Lenovo, spoke with me about the plans deploy public safety AI applications at the edge and reduce power consumption of cloud services by 25%. The company has partnered with the likes of Telefonica, Orange Business, Intel and Rakuten to propel innovation and savings across industries with integrated solutions for mass deployment of AI at the edge.

The goal is to help enterprises harness vast bodies of data at the far edge for transformative AI applications at scale while reducing energy consumption. The innovations are part of a comprehensive pocket-to-cloud portfolio of Lenovo Hybrid AI solutions designed to simplify the path to intelligent transformation for all industries and are attracting new customer collaborations with industry leaders, like Telefonica, that unlock the power of AI anywhere data.

As the telecom industry continues its dramatic evolution to enable the rollout of 5G and an AI-powered future, innovations in IoT networks, cloud infrastructure and edge computing are critical to connecting today’s digital economy. Edge computing allows businesses to analyze data in real-time, enabling faster actionable insights for more efficient operations and services.

Combined with AI-optimized servers its ecosystem of partners, Lenovo’s comprehensive range of far edge to cloud solutions are enabling key service providers to quickly deploy an entire network of high-power computing to drive revolutionary efficiency and intelligence for their own customers and beyond.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Kirk Skaugen: I just got back from Barcelona Supercomputing. We’re now running the largest Intel-only supercomputer in the world, non-GPU. We’re number 19 on the top 500, but just CPUs. All water-cooled.

VentureBeat: I remember that place because I read about it in a Dan Brown book, Origin.

Skaugen: That’s right! I got a signed copy from Mateo Valero. They were very excited that Dan was inspired when he went and took a tour. I’m still waiting for the next Tom Cruise movie where he comes down from the ceiling into the middle of the data center.

VentureBeat: What are the big topics on your mind?

Skaugen: I had a briefing last night from the people that run MWC. It’s almost back to the highest–we’ll see what the final count is, but it’s almost back to pre-COVID attendance. We have our pocket to cloud strategy. Edge, AI, and sustainability are our core messages here. We have tons of devices. We have software stacks validated for management orchestration. We have cool hardware. We’re leading beyond Intel now into AMD at the edge. We have good carrier relationships.

You may remember, we’re powering the smart city of Barcelona now in the street kiosks with our edge servers. We can do things like, if there’s an accident in the night, it can automatically call the police, detect if an ambulance is needed, call more first responders. Those are more traditional AI use cases at the edge.

We’re also doing things like helping the visually impaired walk the streets of Barcelona. Not just coming up to a street corner, but “Hey, there’s a bicyclist coming up behind you, be careful.” If you think about five years from now, you can get a professional shopper with AR glasses. Get on your notebook, send them to the market, and have them taste the olives. If he likes them as a professional olive taster, you can get them sent to your apartment.

What we announced this week, with Telefonica we’re doing the city of Madrid as well. We’re using Moto for push to talk on their 5G network. We’re using the city cameras, and even putting drones in the air, to detect fire and smoke for faster police response. I thought that was a little crazy at first. How many fires do you have here? But they’re running drones and using AI algorithms to detect smoke and fire. If there’s a big multi-building fire they can put the drone up and decide how to deploy the response more effectively. That’s a cool one.

We have a new AMD edge server. We’ve tested this thing with Orange. We’re getting 25% lower power in cloud. We also have something that’s 50% higher in CPU performance, three times the number of GPUs, half the power. We have this tested with some telcos. We get 46-52% lower power for the ORAN network and 50% for the acoustics. What we mean by that is, when you’re in someone’s retail edge locations, the limiter has been the fans. We won a large retailer in Australia because our competition didn’t meet the safety spec. The server was spinning with the GPUs. People were on conference calls and they couldn’t meet the acoustic spec. We created some patented technology around how we’re using the dual rotor fans and how the screws go through the chassis, so they don’t create turbulence. That product is incredible. Every big telco is talking about finally deploying their open radio access network. There’s such a focus over here on sustainability. When you say you’re 46-52% lower power, they’re definitely listening.

We created this thing called Letopia, a virtual city. We have 7 million urban subscribers, 3 million rural subscribers. We have all the connectivity. We use the best assumptions from the telcos. You look at Letopia now and you can see how you can run your ORAN at 50% lower power. That was a takeaway for pretty much every major telco. We also validated–Intel has the new Intel Edge Compute Platform. All the folks that came over from VMware created this edge orchestration. We won T Systems global data centers in Barcelona. Now you have one server in 10,000 locations instead of 10,000 servers in one location. You can go into a fast food chain, authenticate with your Motorola phone, and it’ll tell you if there’s a drive-through or a kiosk. Maybe you’re in an airport, so you don’t need the drive-through automation software. It’ll download everything from firmware, BIOS, all the way up to the containers. Then we hand it to the Intel Edge Compute Platform and they do all the application optimization. We did it with both Intel and with Rakuten. I think they’re the largest ORAN software company in the world.

They were giving me an overview. Close to 50% of the people that come to MWC are not in tech anymore. They’re verticals, business managers. If you went back to 1999 most of the audience would have been the carriers, the chip makers, the software providers, the systems manufacturers. More and more people are going because it’s becoming so multifaceted. It’s becoming a kind of combination of CES and the old 3GPP and Davos. Everything cooked together.

I can be so productive here, it’s unbelievable. You can meet Intel, AMD, Nvidia, VMware. I ran into the CEO of Deutsche Telekom. He met us, and then he was off to the Intel booth. The chip goes to the system, the system goes to Deutsche Telekom, and then you have the end user, who might be a car company, and they’re here too. You have all the layers of the ecosystem here, from chips to software to systems to telcos to end users. We’re all just rotating around each other’s booths.

VentureBeat: I wanted to drill in a bit on the smart cities. How widespread is this now? You have Barcelona and you’re moving to Madrid. Do you see that coming on strong?

Skaugen: Definitely. We’ve done Bogota, Colombia, for example. They were having a lot of car thefts. If they do a very simple algorithm that matches a license plate with a color and type of car, they can detect if someone’s swapped license plates. That cut down dramatically on car thefts. We’re doing every Kroger in the U.S. now, which isn’t smart city, but–for a long time these things were proofs of concept. You might do it in a couple stores. But now we’re in every single Kroger self-checkout. We took the same solution to every K-Mart in Australia. Their ROI was a month and a half. Theft went down 75% in the self-checkouts. These ROIs are compelling enough now that you’re starting to see widespread adoption.

We did this AI innovator program. Three years ago we invested $1.2 billion in AI, and we just invested another $1 billion. We had four global AI innovation centers. The problem these people have, you’d think they have massive IT departments, but really they might have five people to work on AI. There are 16,000 AI startups out there. We found 50 or so, the best ISVs. Sometimes we’d invested in the company. Then we’ve created 165 solutions. With Kroger and K-Mart it’s Everseen.

VentureBeat: For those grocery applications, self-checkout, what kind of knowledge do they get back?

Skaugen: They can’t really go to the cloud, because within 15 seconds the person will be outside the store. Of course, 85% of it is just mis-scans. That’s pretty easy. The camera that’s sitting above the self-checkout–the scales are 20 years old sometimes. People are getting sophisticated at stealing. They know exactly how much a can of Kool-Aid weighs. They’ll peel that label off and put it on a $55 cut of meat that weighs the same. The scale says it’s right, the Kool-Aid says it’s right, but the camera sees it’s meat. They can immediately detect that.

Then they have what they call “friending.” You’re scanning