Lenovo has unveiled new research highlighting a major shift in the manufacturing industry across EMEA, with companies set to increase their spending on AI developments by 106% over the next 12 months.
The findings, part of Lenovo’s CIO Playbook 2025, reveal that 79% of manufacturing AI projects implemented in the past year met or exceeded expectations—the highest success rate of any sector, these insights underscore Lenovo’s leadership in AI-driven transformation.
Manufacturing Sector Leading AI developments
The manufacturing industry distinguishes itself from other verticals with its increased investment in AI, split between Interpretive (44%) and Generative (44%) AI tools, as the industry looks to meet its top business priorities for 2025 by enhancing decision-making, improving customer experience, and increasing profit growth.
To reach those goals, 67% are using on-premises, private, and/or hybrid AI, as their primary infrastructure to approach AI workloads.
Three Key Factors in Successful AI Implementation:
- Ease of Integration – how easily AI can be integrated with existing systems
- Computational Power – Having enough hybrid computing and storage resources
- Funding – securing the right budget along with committed leadership.
However, manufacturers still face major challenges, including high infrastructure and network costs, difficulties in scaling AI across the business, and a lack of affordable AI expertise.
A historical lack of software technology investment prioritisation in manufacturing is behind many firms’ integration challenges, especially with legacy systems and struggles with scaling AI initiatives across global operations,” said Jonathan Wu, Chief Technology Officer of Smart Manufacturing, Lenovo.
Lenovo Hybrid AI Solutions
Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solutions is designed to help accelerate AI adoption and boost business productivity by fast-tracking agentic AI that can reason, plan, and take action to reach goals faster.
Importantly their full-stack AI solutions enable manufacturers to quickly build and deploy AI agents for a broad range of high-demand use cases, increasing productivity, agility, and trust while accelerating the next wave of AI reasoning for the new era of agentic AI.
Lenovo has developed a range of AI-powered services for the manufacturing industry, including:
- LeForecast – LeForecast unveils a time series foundation model pre-trained on extensive data from various domains. With its multimodal capabilities and agentic sensing system, LeForecast autonomously generates precise forecasts and insightful guidance reports, empowering businesses to make timely and informed decisions.
- Lenovo’s Supply Chain Intelligence – continuously analyses supply chain data to identify potential issues and resolve them in real time through process automation and AI modelling.
- Lenovo’s ESG Navigator – provides 30+ AI models in energy efficiency and energy conservation scenarios, enhancing energy awareness to support progress towards sustainability goals.
- Lenovo Robotic Inspection– a digital inspection platform that boasts a range of AI capabilities and employs digital twin technologies to observe, monitor, document and analyse the condition and quality of equipment, processes and environment, provide real-time alarm/warning, and generate insightful inspection reports.
Demonstrating smart manufacturing innovations for business impact
At Hannover Messe, Lenovo’s recently unveiled Lenovo AI Knowledge Assistant, a digital human assistant that engages in real-time conversation has been showcased. Powered by the Lenovo agentic AI platform, the solution enables organisations to rapidly customise Lenovo AI Library use cases and operationalise new AI agents and assistants within weeks.
The demo was customised using the digital human NVIDIA AI Blueprint and NVIDIA NIM™ microservices running on a Lenovo PX ThinkStation.
