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Lenovo introduced a suite of AI-powered solutions designed to deliver immediate operational and customer experience value for retailers. The new offerings—Smart Store Services and AI Retail Assistants—are built to reduce downtime, empower frontline employees, and scale AI from pilot to production. Supported by Lenovo Hybrid AI Services, the solutions aim to embed intelligent automation directly into daily retail operations, helping protect revenue and improve service from day one.
Lenovo unveils AI-powered Smart Store Services and AI Retail Assistants at NRF 2026.
Smart Store Services use AI to predict and resolve IT issues, aiming to cut downtime by up to 50%.
AI Retail Assistants include in-store floor assistants and online shopping assistants for guided buying.
Solutions are built on Lenovo's Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA for scalable deployment.
The goal is to move AI from experimentation to repeatable, operational value across physical and digital stores.
Lenovo reports potential for 30-40% lower IT support costs and faster issue resolution for retailers.
A core challenge in retail is unplanned store downtime from POS failures or network issues, which directly impacts revenue. Lenovo's Smart Store Services is an AI-driven solution designed to provide real-time visibility into store health, automate incident prioritization, and connect support teams in a single command center. According to internal Lenovo data, it can reduce downtime by up to 50% and resolve issues 60% faster. By enabling remote resolution and providing frontline staff with guided self-service tools, the solution aims to lower IT support costs by 30-40% and reduce managerial involvement in tech issues by over half.
To directly improve conversion and service, Lenovo introduced two AI Retail Assistants. The Retail Floor Assistant acts as a digital support layer in physical stores, helping customers locate products and handle common queries, allowing associates to focus on high-value interactions. The Online Shopping Assistant provides a conversational, multimodal interface for digital stores, using agentic reasoning to help customers search, compare, and take actions like adding items to a cart. Both assistants connect to live inventory systems to ensure accuracy and help shoppers make confident purchasing decisions.
Recognizing that scaling AI across a distributed retail estate is a major hurdle, Lenovo's Hybrid AI Services provide the underlying framework. These services are designed to help retailers consistently design, deploy, and govern AI solutions across hundreds or thousands of locations. Built on the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA, the architecture ensures reliable performance across edge and cloud environments, transforming AI from a siloed pilot into an embedded, repeatable operational capability.
Lenovo's approach is rooted in delivering measurable ROI by addressing concrete pain points. “Retail leaders don’t invest in AI for experimentation, they invest to keep stores running, protect revenue, and serve customers better,” said Patricia Wilkey, SVP at Lenovo. The solutions are backed by proven use cases, such as a partnership with Shiseido that improved device reliability at scale across eight Asia-Pacific markets. This demonstrates a path to translating AI potential into practical gains in efficiency, resilience, and customer satisfaction.
By combining proactive operational intelligence with embedded customer-facing AI, Lenovo's new portfolio seeks to bridge the gap between AI promise and daily retail reality. The solutions aim to provide retailers with the tools to not only prevent revenue loss from disruptions but also to actively enhance every customer interaction, creating a more agile and intelligent retail operation.
About Lenovo
Lenovo is a US$69 billion revenue global technology powerhouse, ranked #196 in the Fortune Global 500, and serving millions of customers every day in 180 markets. Focused on a bold vision to deliver Smarter Technology for All, Lenovo has built on its success as the world’s largest PC company with a full-stack portfolio of AI-enabled, AI-ready, and AI-optimized devices (PCs, workstations, smartphones, tablets), infrastructure (server, storage, edge, high performance computing and software defined infrastructure), software, solutions, and services. Lenovo’s continued investment in world-changing innovation is building a more equitable, trustworthy, and smarter future for everyone, everywhere.
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