To the sorrow of millions of Chinese football fans, their national team will once again not be among the 48 sides taking the field when the World Cup kicks off next week in the US, Mexico, and Canada. But for one leading Chinese technology company, the tournament will still be a make-or-break chance to show whether it has the skills to play for the highest stakes.
Despite its status as the world’s largest PC maker, Lenovo Group has been left largely on the sidelines until now as rival information technology companies like Microsoft have ridden the global fever for artificial intelligence to gargantuan market valuations.
To get back in the game, Lenovo aims to leverage its role as the first “official global technology partner” of FIFA, the World Cup’s organizer, to showcase its AI systems to the planetwide audience of decision-makers, investors, and consumers expected to tune in. If those attending or watching any of the tournament’s 104 matchers over the next five weeks can be persuaded that new technology is elevating the experience, that could help Lenovo to be seen as a provider of AI-powered services and infrastructure rather than just a big PC company.
“The case study is vitally important, because if we can do it for FIFA, we can do it for anybody,” Jeff Shafer, Lenovo’s chief communications officer, told Nikkei Asia from the company’s offices in North Carolina, one of its two global headquarters. Added Arthur Hu, chief information officer, “The whole point is, we want to make solutions.”
