Art Hu, global CIO at Lenovo, recognises that leading IT for the Chinese technology giant involves significant challenges, particularly in an age of almost constant change. “We seem to always be in transformation, because there’s always the next mountain that we want to go and conquer,” he says.
Previously a consultant at McKinsey, where he’d offered advice to Lenovo, Hu joined the company in 2009. After developing his awareness of technology-enabled change at an advisory firm, Hu relished the opportunity to put his knowledge into practice as an IT executive at a blue-chip firm.
“It was good to be advising people, but I wanted to have the accountability,” he says. “The consultants advise, but the ultimate ownership resides with the people who are executing. I wanted to be part of the team that was doing the work and owning the results.”
Climbing mountains
The mountain Lenovo was attempting to conquer when Hu joined the firm in 2009 was globalisation. The organisation was eager to avoid separate silos for regional entities, such as the Americas, Europe and Asia, and the business transformation was closely tied to IT change and an attempt to ensure the organisation benefited from globalised systems.
“We wanted to be one company,” he says, referring to the link between business and digital strategy. “And in that sense, it’s something that I’ve always believed, which is that the technology is a manifestation of where the business wants to go, and it’s an embodiment of its strategy.”
Hu says this first slice of technology leadership action was exciting because he hadn’t joined Lenovo to work in the back office, run the systems and keep the lights on. However, shifting from advising companies to running IT was a significant transition.
“It was good to be advising people, but I wanted to have the accountability. The consultants advise, but the ultimate ownership resides with the people who are executing. I wanted to be part of the team that was doing the work and owning the results”
Art Hu, Lenovo
“It probably took me the better part of a year to sink in and develop some muscle memory about what it is like to think and do versus just thinking and saying,” he says. “It was a bit of a rocky transition, but luckily, it did work out, and I was able to rotate through various leadership roles in the team.”
During the subsequent seven years, Hu took on other leadership positions, such as overseeing infrastructure, enterprise architecture, security, development and operations, which allowed him to develop a broader view of IT. As a result of his successful transition across these responsibilities, he became CIO in 2016.
As he moved into the role, Hu helped Lenovo climb its second business transformation mountain – diversification. In addition to its successful PC business, Lenovo was eager to expand into other areas, with the business having acquired Motorola Mobility from Google and IBM’s low-end x86 server business in 2014.
Hu helped ensure a smooth diversification across IT hardware divisions before moving to the third mountain – services. “Increasingly, that’s where our customers want us to be,” he says. “And to meet our customers where they are, we started shifting the company to be more services-led, and that, as a CIO, is where I am today.”
Delivering services
Hu says creating a services-led business is equivalent to creating a new organisation. The systems, processes and talent required for this operation differ significantly from a traditional hardware specialist.
“As a CIO, I’m excited because it’s like starting again,” he says. “You have some things that you can reuse, but those are the minority. And so, fundamentally, it’s a business-building process intersected with an awareness of how to manifest the strategy in the technology architecture.”
Hu suggests the digital leadership magic lies in exploring the delicate balance between designing efficient processes and leveraging cutting-edge technologies. He recognises that this magic has become increasingly important in his attempts to create a services-led business and helps explain why he assumed the additional responsibility of chief delivery and technology officer for Lenovo’s Services & Solutions Group (SSG) in April 2023.
“SSG is Lenovo’s approach to being more services-led,” he says. “We want to take the best of our device, intelligent and infrastructure solutions groups, bring that to customers, and surround that expertise with services. The idea is to take the best of the services I deliver internally as CIO for Lenovo to our customers.”
So, as a digital leader who has developed strong solutions to intractable business challenges during his time with Lenovo, is Hu well placed to lead the sharing of this expertise with his company’s customers? The short answer, he suggests, is yes.
“You have to remember our starting point,” he says. “If we had already had 100,000 people doing services, then maybe it’s not the best fit. But given that we were starting from essentially zero, and we had not built the business before, what we’ve learnt is that internal IT is a good accelerator to create services for our customers.”
Applying AI
Hu’s desire to pass lessons on to Lenovo’s customers will depend on his ongoing attempts to maintain a delicate balance between efficient processes and cutting-edge technologies. Right now, his digitally enabled business transformation internally is focused on artificial intelligence (AI).
“One big area is how do we make the entire company intelligent, and how do we, as IT, serve the company in a very different way, where we are not the only ones who can create technology?” he says. “That power is democratised through AI and now goes into the hands of all of our employees, and we have to govern that change, which takes a lot of effort.”
Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company. But at the same time, the exploration of AI has to be bottom-up, because only the people doing the work have the knowledge of AI and are most likely to find and explore the future Art Hu, Lenovo
Hu says Lenovo wants AI to penetrate all parts of its business. To foster this exploration, the company has created a top-down and bottom-up commitment, where employees are encouraged to explore AI in a tightly governed and secure manner.
“Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company,” he says. “There’s no part of the business where AI should not apply. But at the same time, the exploration of AI has to be bottom-up, because only the people doing the work have the knowledge of AI and are most likely to find and explore the future.”
Hu says there are more than 1,000 registered AI projects running across Lenovo, ranging from explorations to tests and deployments. Key use cases include assisting support specialists via conversation summarisation, refining agents to help with enterprise-grade software engineering, and using generative AI to create effective marketing collateral.
“We have projects across the lifecycle, and that’s really important,” he says. “I take heart from that because I think our bottom-up approach is working. We have more demand than we can review. We’re always getting pressure to review faster, but we love that pressure because it means people are generating ideas.”
Growing services
When Hu turns to priorities during the next few years, he focuses on his desire to grow Lenovo’s SSG business. He says the organisation faces an opportunity to take a new digitally enabled approach to services.
“This is a moment that hasn’t been present in the last 30 or 40 years,” he says. “There’s a chance to introduce a different operating model. The services business has been all about labour arbitrage. Labour has been a huge driver of the IT services industry since modern telecommunications enabled remote work in the 1990s.”
Hu said AI makes it possible to move from labour arbitrage-based services to a capital-based approach. “We’re trying to build a tech-led and labour-light model for serving customers because we believe that it can offer superior experiences for customers and better economics for Lenovo,” he says.
Making that transformational shift relies on the implementation of technology platforms. Hu says Lenovo will invest in technology internally across all its practice areas to build these platforms. This process will involve the creation and integration of digital systems and services.
“We’re very clear-eyed on the fact that you can’t build everything,” he says. “The big trends around being able to take in a lot of data that has been ingested, and predict and be proactive around that, and actually have significantly less human intervention, are just going to continue and compound.”
Hu says growing SSG involves assuming a challenger mindset. The technology investments he’ll make in the next two years will help, and he hopes the changes he makes internally will build momentum externally via a strong set of clients and good business results.
“What we would look for is continued growth with superior profitability as we’re able to create this new model,” he says. “We want to continue to take share as we grow the business using this approach with our customers.”
Changing responsibilities
After more than 15 years at the sharp end of technology delivery, Hu reflects on the scale of change that characterises the CIO position. While the responsibilities associated with digital leadership continue to change, he’s confident that a trusted internal IT adviser is still a crucial executive position.
“I’m very positive about that fact, because digital fluency, and the ability to live comfortably at the intersection of technology and what it means for business and also society, will be at even more of a premium in the future,” he says. “The signal-to-noise ratio is a problem. People who understand and can help chart a path will be highly valuable.”
While digital leadership in some guise will remain, Hu says it’s important not to get hung up on job titles. As digital and AI continue their inexorable rise, more people outside IT will develop a strong understanding of technology. He envisages a situation where digital and AI become part of the business baseline, with a consequential impact on IT leadership positions.
“Maybe we won’t need a CIO in the future,” he says. “But if that change means business leaders pick up the fluency and the dexterity needed to make the most of AI and digital, then that might be a good thing as well.”
At a 7-Eleven convenience store in Taiwan, you can pick up a 4-inch plushie of Miffy, the bunny character from the Netherlands, a mini bento box charm complete with a realistic chicken drumstick, or a tiny plastic rotary phone. Produced by iCash Corporation (a 7-Eleven affiliate), these keychains are more than just trinkets: Each contains a contactless chip that connects it to Taiwan’s elaborate stored-value payment system.
iCash cards, along with those made by competitors like EasyCard and iPASS, can be used to ride the subway and buses, as well as to make purchases at convenience stores and other retailers in Taiwan. The over-the-top branded keychains, which cost anywhere from $10 to over $30, generate modest direct sales. But their real value lies in their marketing power, drawing shoppers deeper into 7-Eleven’s rewards ecosystem and keeping small payments inside its orbit.
Decentralized and Deeply Local
Over the past decade, iCash Corporation and its rivals have turned dozens of everyday products in Taiwan into limited-edition keychains. Many are miniature versions of snacks and household items available at 7-Eleven stores, such as a can of the sports drink Super Supau, a tube of Darlie toothpaste, and a cup of Uni-President’s classic yellow pudding dessert. Those who prefer something weirder can get a teeny package of toilet tissues, or a doll-sized Scotch-Brite kitchen sponge. When I lived in Taipei for a few months last year, I paid for things with a bag of crinkle-cut potato chips.
iCash Corporation has also licensed Sanrio characters like Hello Kitty and Cinnamoroll, as well as Pikachu from Pokémon and Stitch from Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. One of my favorite Taiwanese payment cards isn’t even a keychain at all—it’s a plastic version of Sailor Moon’s wand made by EasyCard, which (naturally) lights up when you complete a transaction.
I have been obsessed with these keychains and novelty toys since I began reporting on Taiwan several years ago. They’re the most delightful side effect of the island’s move toward cashless payments, and they demonstrate just how different Taiwan’s digital infrastructure is from China’s. Nearly every consumer transaction in China happens through either Alibaba or Tencent, two tech giants that have a near monopoly on payments. Whether you’re buying a bowl of noodles at a street stall or a designer purse in a Shanghai boutique, you will almost always find both an Alipay and WeChat Pay QR code.
In contrast, Taiwan has developed a pluralistic network of NFC cards and mobile wallets layered atop its dense transit system and network of convenience stores. The result is a cashless framework that is tactile, decentralized, and deeply local. In Taipei, people often “tap” to pay, while in Beijing, they “scan.” At least in some ways, Taiwan’s technology is arguably just as sophisticated as China’s. In fact, Alibaba followed the island’s lead last year and launched its own tap payment method.
On Thursday, Disney and OpenAI announced a deal that might have seemed unthinkable not so long ago. Starting next year, OpenAI will be able to use Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Ariel, and Yoda in its Sora video-generation model. Disney will take a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, and its employees will get access to the firm’s APIs and ChatGPT. None of this makes much sense—unless Disney was fighting a battle it couldn’t win.
Disney has always been a notoriously aggressive litigant around its intellectual property. Alongside fellow IP powerhouse Universal, it sued Midjourney in June over outputs that allegedly infringed on classic film and TV characters. The night before the OpenAI deal was announced, Disney reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google alleging copyright infractions on a “massive scale.”
On the surface, there appears to be some dissonance with Disney embracing OpenAI while poking its rivals. But it’s more than likely that Hollywood is embarking down a similar path as media publishers when it comes to AI, signing licensing agreements where it can and using litigation when it can’t. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which inked a deal with OpenAI in August 2024.)
“I think that AI companies and copyright holders are beginning to understand and become reconciled to the fact that neither side is going to score an absolute victory,” says Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University. While many of these cases are still working their way through the courts, so far it seems like model inputs—the training data that these models learn from—are covered by fair use. But this deal is about outputs—what the model returns based on your prompt—where IP owners like Disney have a much stronger case
Coming to an output agreement resolves a host of messy, potentially unsolvable issues. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at a Wendy’s drive-through, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway—or a user might be able to prompt their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. It’s a tension that legal scholars call the “Snoopy problem,” but in this case you might as well call it the Disney problem.
“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to think about licensing arrangements,” says Sag.
Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding startup, is launching a new feature that lets people design the look and feel of web applications with AI. The tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a vibe-coding product for designers, giving them access to the same fine-grained controls they’d expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool lets them request edits from Cursor’s AI agent using natural language.
Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but with Visual Editor, the startup wants to capture other parts of the software creation process. “The core that we care about, professional developers, never changes,” Cursor’s head of design, Ryo Lu, tells WIRED. “But in reality, developers are not by themselves. They work with a lot of people, and anyone making software should be able to find something useful out of Cursor.”
Cursor is one of the fastest growing AI startups of all time. Since its 2023 debut, the company says it has surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and counts tens of thousands of companies, including Nvidia, Salesforce, and PwC, as customers. In November, the startup closed a $2.3 billion funding round that brought its valuation to nearly $30 billion.
Cursor was an early leader in the AI coding market, but it’s now facing more pressure than ever from larger competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The startup has historically licensed AI models from these companies, but now its rivals are investing heavily in AI coding products of their own. Anthropic’s Claude Code, for example, grew even faster than Cursor, reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue just six months after launch. In response, Cursor has started developing and deploying its own AI models.
Traditionally, building software applications has required many different teams working together across a wide range of products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into its coding environment, Cursor wants to show that it can bring these functions together into a single platform.
“Before, designers used to live in their own world of pixels and frames, and they don’t really translate to code. So teams had to build processes to hand off tasks back and forth between developers and designers, but there was a lot of friction,” says Lu. “We kind of melded the design world and the coding world together into one interface with one AI agent.”
AI-Powered Web Design
In a demo at WIRED’s San Francisco headquarters, Cursor’s product engineering lead Jason Ginsberg showcased how Visual Editor could modify the aesthetics of a webpage.
A traditional design panel on the right lets users adjust fonts, add buttons, create menus, or change backgrounds. On the left, a chat interface accepts natural-language requests, such as “make this button’s background color red.” Cursor’s agent then applies those changes directly into the code base.
Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that works directly within its coding environment. The company argues the browser creates a better feedback loop when developing products, allowing engineers and designers to view requests from real users and access Chrome-style developer tools.
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