At CES 2026, Lenovo showcased an exciting new AI innovation called QIRA, redefining what personalized technology can offer. This powerful, system-level feature works seamlessly across devices and platforms, enhancing user experience like never before, and it’s now being rolled out on select Lenovo devices.
In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Jeff Snow, the Head of Product and AI Ecosystem at Lenovo. We explored the inspiring vision behind QIRA, its capabilities, and how Lenovo is uniquely positioned to offer such an experience. Join us as we dive into how QIRA gathers insights, develops its extensive knowledge base, maintains synchronization across devices, and implements robust measures to protect user privacy and security.
Index:
00:00 - Intro
02:00 - Guest intro (Jeff Snow, VP & Head of Product & AI Ecosystem)
02:50 - What is QIRA - Cross-device, local-first personal intelligence
03:42 - The vision of QIRA - Uniform "Lenovo AI Experience" across devices
05:13 - Organizationally, one team is working on QIRA, implemented on all Lenovo devices
06:12 - Examples of what it can do today: Catch me up - Summarize what happened across devices, Pay attention - Summarize meetings, and make it part of the knowledge base across devices, more
08:17 - QIRA learns from experiences - Implicitly and explicitly (with user permission), gathers and personal knowledge & insights
09:59 - It is more than an OTT app - App interface, but tightly integrated into the machine, even connecting with the OS, utilizes local AI models, and can be surfaced in any other apps
12:29 - The inputs to QIRA - Multimodal, text, images, voice, additional context (emails, chats, etc.), system health and telemetry, cross-device artifacts (e.g. notifications)
14:00 - Explicit user permission is required before saving any inputs, and it can be revoked at any time. "Humans are always in the loop"
15:06 - ALL the data generated by the device is stored locally on that specific device, the vectorized and encrypted data is shared across devices to keep all the devices in sync
18:16 - The "learning" happens and is stored in the individual device, and synced across devices
20:10 - Hybrid and agile model selection: mix of local, cloud, own, and third-party, with always a local-first approach
21:56 - User option "Local-only" or "Hybrid." Even in local-only mode, sync across devices can be enabled
23:56 - Most QIRA actions are user-initiated or part of an experience or workflow.
23:27 - It can surface suggestions, but not directly take action without direct user intervention
28:49 - QIRA can be the primary AI assistant interface on your Lenovo device
32:20 - Lenovo is exploiting its unique position, with pocket-to-cloud offerings, to provide a more personalized and well-rounded AI experience to its users
32:49 - Key challenges Lenovo faced in bringing QIRA to market: changing the mindset of the team to be software-focused, and moving quickly
34:99 - Defenses against accessing QIRA-related data when the device is stolen
36:17 - Ability to migrate personal knowledge base from old to new device
37:20 - No QIRA knowledge base vector data cloud back-up
38:30 - Different peer product in China, QIRA is for the rest of the world
39:33 - Evolution of QIRA: More devices, third-party devices, even richer knowledge base & orchestration, enterprise solution
39:48 - Portability of QIRA vector database
41:20 - Closing
