AiThority Interview with Shannon MacKay, General Manager of Worldwide Smart Collaboration Business at Lenovo

Shannon MacKay, GM of Worldwide Smart Collaboration Business at Lenovo in this quick chat, talks about key initiatives driving Lenovo’s growth in the smart collaboration sector, challenges in adopting hybrid collaboration tools, the role of AI-driven solutions, and more about how the Collaboration portfolio enhances customer experience. 

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Shannon, please share your background and what led you to your current role at Lenovo.

My career has generally focused on computers and technology. I studied Environmental Design, and because of that I’ve had a special interest in how people interact with technology in different settings and looking for solutions to make the experience better.

As I progressed in my career, I held roles in marketing and operations with the responsibility of global product launches before managing business teams through all facets of product development, marketing, and sales.

At Lenovo, I lead our Smart Collaboration business, which includes our ThinkSmart portfolio of unified collaboration (UC) solutions that include a broad array of technologies to help enhance communication and collaboration. This is opportunity has been especially meaningful and exciting after the global pandemic accelerated trends in hybrid work. I really feel I’m working on fulfilling Lenovo’s objective of delivering smarter technology for all and making a big difference for our enterprise customers and the people working for them. What could be more fulfilling than helping people collaborate and get things done?

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What are some of the key initiatives you’ve led recently in this domain that you believe are driving Lenovo’s growth in the smart collaboration sector?

Smart collaboration technology continues to advance rapidly with the introduction of AI-enabled features. Lenovo’s customers are looking for more compute power and flexibility to future-proof meeting spaces and take advantages of solutions available now and just over the horizon.

My team just launched the Lenovo ThinkSmart Core Gen 2, one of the first AI-optimized compute devices purpose built to run video conferencing room systems. The integration of AI into collaboration tools presents a transformative opportunity to connect people and improve productivity. Lenovo, the global leader in PCs, is bringing more compute power to collaboration.

The ThinkSmart CoreGen2 is powered by the Intel Core™ Ultra processor with an integrated NPU, making it ready for AI-heavy meeting room workloads to deliver unparalleled performance for intuitive collaboration and enhanced productivity. The unique NPU architecture built on Windows 11 IoT accelerates compute tasks and data transfer, optimizing AI performance and making operations more efficient, reliable, and secure.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve noticed companies face in adopting hybrid collaboration tools? How does Lenovo’s approach help mitigate these hurdles?

AI is the overarching technology driving much of the innovation in meeting room software and devices. With the introduction of the ThinkSmart Core Gen 2, Lenovo is making it easier for customers to use AI to make their meeting spaces smarter. Workplace collaboration is evolving with AI, but unfortunately, up to 60% of employees say their organization lacks a clear plan and vision for implementation.

Because of these market circumstances, Lenovo is focused on delivering smart collaboration solutions that work…

• Everywhere – onsite, at home, and anywhere in between, so we offer a growing portfolio of devices and solutions.
• For Everyone – equal participation and quality of experience for all, every time, regardless of if they are in the conference room or not.
• Every time – it must be easy for all employees to use, including supporting IT staff with end-to-end services for planning, deployment, and maintenance of devices.

What role do AI-driven solutions play in Lenovo’s collaboration offerings?

AI is driving big changes in collaboration. In the future, end users will be empowered by enhanced predictive capabilities that anticipate user needs in UC experiences, and  suggest relevant resources, or actions before they’re requested. This could mean, cameras, microphones and speakers automatically adjusting themselves based on where meeting participants sit, how loud they speak, and ambient noise in the room. These functions would occur while the collaboration platform offers a variety of services from automated transcription, translations, and meeting minutes. In addition, AI-driven analytics will provide real-time feedback on productivity and team dynamics, enabling more informed decision-making and fostering a more agile and responsive work environment.

For IT managers, collaborative AI tools hold the potential for even greater automation, proactive management, and strategic insight. AI is expected to further reduce the manual workload by automating more complex maintenance tasks, predictive monitoring, and security measures, allowing IT teams to focus on innovation rather than routine operations.

As these AI-enabled collaboration tools evolve, they will increasingly become essential resources in daily tasks for meeting participants while helping reduce complexity and workloads for IT managers.

What are the top strategies you employ when leading teams through product commercialization and market expansion?

Lenovo offers one of the world’s most comprehensive portfolios of AI-ready devices, AI-enabled solutions, and AI-optimized experiences. We are able to deliver this offering because as a global innovator of computing solutions, Lenovo sits in a sweet spot between an ecosystem of the world’s leading software developers, components manufacturers, and chipmakers on one side, and enterprise IT customers on the other. The formula for success for my team, and other product teams at Lenovo, is staying extremely close to these two groups so we can understand emerging technology capabilities and shifting customer needs to deliver the right product at the right.

Easier said than done. But as the largest PC maker in the world and supplier to a large portion of F500 companies, we have the institutional relationships, market insights, and technical prowess to achieve higher speeds to solutions.

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How does Lenovo’s smart collaboration portfolio enhance the customer experience, especially in hybrid work environments? Can you highlight any customer feedback that influenced your product strategies?

Customer feedback is highly valued. What we heard from customers heavily influenced our focus on the “working everywhere, for everyone, every time” approach to our product portfolio.

UC is all about UX. I like the saying “collaboration is multiplication” because it means great teamwork is a force multiplier for any organization. Being competitive and winning are the results of collaboration, and there are few business challenges more important than maintaining great teams.

Unfortunately, enabling teams to collaborate and win can be challenging when a 50 or 500-person company of highly talented knowledge workers is spread across a nation, continent, or even the world. It is estimated that less than 8 percent of the 90 million conference rooms worldwide are video-enabled. This is a staggering mismatch between resources, capabilities, and expectations for many workers. This is especially true when you consider that even with video conferencing up to one in five meeting participants worry about not feeling heard in hybrid meetings and nearly 50% don’t speak at all.

Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in the smart collaboration space, and how do you think they will shape the future of work?

The AI revolution in business and its impact on corporations’ meeting cultures couldn’t be happening at a better time. According to Harvard Business Review, meetings have more than doubled in length and frequency over the past 50 years. Executives now spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.

With conference calls and then video conferencing, technology has enabled more meetings and greater connectivity as enterprises grew globally. But those too often were not efficient.  Now technology is not just making more meetings possible, it’s making them better. And it’s enabling workers to make smarter decisions about attending meetings. Got a schedule conflict or just too busy with other pressing tasks? No problem. Meetings are now recorded, and you can quickly read high-quality auto-generated transcripts.

Working closely with our strategic partners and customers, Lenovo will continue to deliver on its promise of smarter technology for all and make meetings better for our customers by delivering the hardware and computing power to get the most out of cutting-edge AI applications.

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