"AI in smartphones? It will have an impact like the internet 30 years ago'

Many things change, starting with the engineering of device hardware. Processors and memories, for instance, must provide far greater performance to ensure a user experience that is in line with consumer expectations. And at the same time, AI-powered interfaces and software features must be rethought.

Will the average user recognise this performance leap forward? And will they be willing to pay the price? .

It is to be expected that the average price of smartphones equipped with artificial intelligence may go up, precisely because the AI available on mobile today is not yet so impactful for the consumer. The trigger will be when the user, thanks to artificial intelligence, will have a unique and hardly replaceable experience, totally different from the past. I take the example of 5G technology: it is not considered a real added value by most users, because with a 4G device you cover the main usage needs and there is no reason to pay for this upgrade. Those who expected to recoup the cost of investment in new networks in smartphone prices and service tariffs have failed to do so, as they have not given the consumer a discernible motivation to spend more. Thanks to generative AI, on the other hand, there will be tasks that the smartphone and the PC will perform automatically. As for the costs of AI development and management, companies like Google and Microsoft are currently absorbing it, and we do not yet know how the new functions, regardless of the number of users who will use them, will impact the final price of the device.

With the ball of Gen AI in the hands of American BigTech, could Chinese manufacturers be penalised in the market?

It's hard to say but I don't think it will happen if we look at the possible scenario globally and not only at the Western world, which is becoming smaller and smaller. If we stop at Italy and Europe, the answer is probably yes, because the consumer will look for the most suitable and balanced AI for his needs. But this technology is liquid and on the other side of the world the expectations of users are different, also in terms of content. And then the Asian market is very big, it is made up of nations - such as China, Russia and India - that make up a good chunk of the global population and have no preconceptions towards Chinese vendors.

Let's switch sides: will a vendor offering both AI-enabled smartphones and PCs have any advantage over the others? Will it be a decisive factor in shaping the market in the future?

In my opinion, yes, because for a company, including SMEs, and for the IT manager in particular, it becomes increasingly important to have a homogeneous and reliable solution that makes up the infrastructure component. In our case, we bring to the table what we inherited from the acquisition of IBM's PC division, which was the business technology vendor par excellence. Lenovo has been able to exploit that credibility, in some respects improving it, and today it is recognised as the first choice by the enterprise market, while in the mobile sphere the majority of professional users work on Android and in this direction Motorola is working well. Different, however, is the approach of the private consumer, who is less sensitive to the opportunity of having devices from a single vendor and looks at other distinctive features of the device such as design, materials or even colours.

Does it still make sense to talk about the perfect smartphone?

If we were to think of the perfect product for the needs of an average user, the smartphone in the EUR 399 price range meets this requirement, because it provides technical and functional features that almost entirely cover the real needs of consumers. I am thinking, for example, of the camera integrated in our Edge 50, which works with an excellent Sony sensor that guarantees quality shots even in less than ideal lighting conditions, and of the fact that only a professional photographer knows how to fully exploit a 100 Megapixel lens on a phone. And the same goes for storage space, which is less important than in the past because almost everyone uses the cloud to store their content, and for screens, where there is a difference from model to model, but it is very common for there to be an Oled display on board. And even AI, today, is not a distinguishing factor because the whole Android world can have Gemini. Having said that, as I said before, in my opinion we are still a long way from what will be the real generative artificial intelligence, the one that will radically change the relationship between device and user, creating a new paradigm at user experience level.

One last question: what is left of the 'old' Motorola, of the Motorola of the StarTac, in the Motorola of today?

In the meantime, we are talking about a company that was a pioneer in the field of mobile telecommunications, with an enormous know-how, which we have inherited without probably having succeeded in completely grounding it, although we have demonstrated that we know how to make product innovation. Some figures still remain of the 'old' Motorola, but the real plus of today's Motorola, which is an integral part of Lenovo, is precisely the fact that it belongs to a Group that has been able to give continuity to the process of innovation, also at a cultural and organisational level. It happened with IBM's PCs and we replicated it in phones, despite the fact that the interlude of Google's ownership objectively slowed us down and kept us out of the market for a while, because priority was given to the development of Android and not to that of devices. However, we started up again, continent by continent, in a slow but progressive manner, leveraging the fusion of two worlds, that of Motorola and that of Lenovo, one with a strongly consumer soul and the other with a distinctly business identity. And a new company was born, very different from its predecessor, Lenovo's Motorola.