With three decades of experience under his belt, Ian Jeffs is a confirmed veteran of the IT and data centre industry. Currently serving as UK and Ireland Country General Manager at Lenovo ISG, he can recall a time when businesses’ IT strategy merely consisted of selecting the right PC. Today’s CIOs, by contrast, are tasked with addressing tangible business problems and finding new revenue streams. In Jeffs’ view, this change has only accelerated since the emergence of generative AI.
This chimes with a recent study, ‘It’s Time for AI-nomics,’ conducted by Lenovo in partnership with IDC. The report, which examines the perspective of more than 620 IT and business leaders across the EMEA region, found that businesses remain broadly optimistic about AI. Investment is expected to more than double over the year ahead, while the proportion of IT budgets allocated to AI will grow from 13% to 20%. Despite this, concerns about data quality ahead of product deployments persisted among respondents, with many feeling unclear on how to scale their initiatives past the pilot stage.
In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Ian Jeffs explains why UK businesses are ready to move into enterprise-wide implementation, and how Lenovo is positioning itself to help.
You’ve worked in the IT and data centre industry since 1995. What kind of changes have you noticed over that time?
It has changed in many different ways. Automation has changed. The way we go to market has changed. Communications have changed, hugely. How we get messages out, how we talk to people, the scale and complexity of the industry – all that has changed massively. And the impact that we have on society is much greater as well.
Earlier in my career, it was much more of a PC conversation, and clients were always looking for business innovation or efficiency. It was about the satisfaction of having the very best product in your hands and making it as efficient as it can be. Now, it’s about helping people save money or be more competitive in the marketplace. That’s something we saw in our AI study – clients are mostly interested in how they can find new markets and take advantage of new revenue streams.
In terms of pace, I think it’s similar – we’re always going 100 miles an hour. It’s always about the next quarter, the next six months, that kind of thing. But I love the difference that we’re making now. And AI, especially in the last 12 to 18 months, has really started to make an impact.
In 2020, you returned to Lenovo after 12 years elsewhere. What inspired your decision to rejoin the company?
I am the general manager UK and Ireland for the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), so which spans everything from strategy to selling. I work on crafting our overall strategy and creating the right go-to-market conversations. I spend a lot of time working with the whole ecosystem of people, whether they’re clients, business partners or the internal team. It’s about making sure we’re supplying products and advice to our customers in the very best way. That’s really how you learn the most, how you get the most traction, how you get, in my opinion, the most satisfaction.
It’s the role I wanted when I left. I started my career on the switchboard at IBM and spent the next 12 years doing PCs. I came to Lenovo in 2005 when Lenovo bought the IBM PC business and had a great three years there, with experiences in channel relationships and customer engagement. But I really wanted to go down the data centre route, so I returned to IBM, followed by Arrow Electronics and Tech Data, where I spent 12 years learning about channels and enterprise.
Then I got this job, and it was the highlight of my career. Everything came together at once in this role – it offered a good combination of things I’d done more recently. I love the feel of company. I love the innovation in the product portfolio. I love coming to work, and I think that’s got to be something that everybody aspires to. I’ve always got a smile on my face.
What kinds of attitudes is Lenovo encountering among British businesses when it comes to AI adoption?
Our study involved 620 CIOs across EMEA who have given some real feedback as to where they’re at. And it’s pretty consistent. You know, 12% of organisations in EMEA have implemented Gen AI use cases so far, but that’s going to go up to 44% in the next 12 months. In the UK, spending on AI has increased by 84% since 2024.
So, everybody knows they need it. There aren’t many people sitting there who just aren’t doing AI. But obviously, there are challenges along the way, and they want to do it right. They want to do it securely, they want to do that due diligence first. And that’s part of the services conversation that we have with our customers.
Where are their primary challenges, reservations and roadblocks?
The key thing that emerged from our AI study is that everybody is on different parts of that journey. While a lot of people are very early in the journey, that’s changing. About 10% of respondents in the UK would say they’re much more mature in their implementation of an AI solution. But around 50% expect to have reached this point by the end of 2025. In 2024, just 12% of organisations implemented GenAI use cases in EMEA – however this number is expected to increase to 44% by the end of 2025.
For instance, AI-powered PCs are one of those things that are being talked about a lot. In our survey, 15% of people in the UK said they were already using AI-powered PCs extensively. But everyone we interviewed in the UK said they were going to implement AI-PC during this year. So increasingly, AI is everywhere.
The key thing people have got to do is get that return on investment quickly. There have been a lot of pilots in the last 12 months, and I can see pilots rolling out in the next six to 12 months as well. What they need to do now is make that enterprise-ready. This will be the year of moving from proof of concepts toward real implementation of enterprise-wide AI.
What are some of the key AI use cases you’re seeing among your clients?
Every industry has its own AI use cases. It could be security in the retail industry or quality on the manufacturing line. It could be efficiency in decision-making; it could be HR. We’re creating a legal AI portfolio as well, which will help people make legal decisions more efficiently. While the core of what we sell is hardware, we work across a plethora of different software portfolios. We’ve got something called the AI Innovators programme, which involves working with AI-type platforms to fix business problems.
But it all starts with the data platforms. If you’re going to take advantage of your data, you’ve
got to be able to put it in a platform, which means you can pull out the insights and do something with them. So it’s about having the data in the right format, making sure it’s secure, and then building the right set of processes to make sure it can be rolled out across your businesses. We want to help our customers build solutions that can take advantage of the full hybrid cloud, including public cloud, private cloud, and enterprise cloud.
We help customers do the study of where they’re at with AI. We find out what their challenges are and where they are in that journey. Then we help them build a platform, roll out the proof of concept, roll out the full solution, and monitor as we go. The idea is that they’ll be able to take advantage of data more efficiently and get to market more quickly.
Can you comment on any other trends you’re noticing at the moment, in terms of what businesses are looking for in their AI solutions?
A lot of people are thinking about moving data to AI. So there’s a lot of public cloud usage, and there always will be. However, we are seeing a lot of use cases with some degree of repatriation [moving from the public to the private cloud], often with a view to getting the speed or the platform right for their data. So we are seeing that as a little bit of a trend.
I’m also getting used to talking to people from different industries and understanding their industry-specific use cases and challenges. That’s not something that would have been done quite so much in the past from a platform point of view. But people are starting to look at their businesses that way. They’re working within an ecosystem, whether that be an individual ecosystem with their own software portfolio, or taking advantage of the different companies’ ecosystems that are out there.
What are your predictions for the next few years on how the AI boom will play out for organisations?
The boom in generative AI will continue. But I think it will involve a lot more use of generative AI within an enterprise environment. We’ll see more usage of smaller Gen AI models that can be rolled out more quickly and efficiently. That was echoed in the study, where we found a lot of people wanting to take advantage of their data more quickly.
Our study made a really big statement around how important people find AI, and what they want to gain from it. But it always comes back to needing to reduce the risk, to make sure security is there, and to make sure they get that ROI in a relatively quick manner.
Read more: Look for long-term value with generative AI and not short-term fixes, says Deutsche Bank’s Christoph Rabenseifner
