Using its own global support organization as a proving ground, Lenovo developed AI agents that prevent device disruption, automate repair and provide conversational support—often resolving issues before customers notice a problem.
When customer support works at its best, the customer may never need to ask for help.
That idea is reshaping support at Lenovo. The company handles more than 500 million support tickets each year through a global operation spanning more than 75 contact centers, 23,000 technicians and 180 markets. At that scale, even routine issues can create significant cost and complexity.
Human experts remain essential when a problem requires judgment and experience. But with a typical human-led resolution costing $30 to $50, applying the same model to simple, commonly encountered issues can delay resolution, consume expert capacity and create unnecessary work for employees.
Moving support earlier
Through Lenovo Powers Lenovo, the company applied its own technology and expertise within its global support operation to pursue a clear goal: resolve more issues earlier in the support journey—before they escalated and, wherever possible, before customers experienced disruption. This “shift-left” strategy moved routine resolution from later, human-led stages toward earlier, AI-enabled intervention.
To make that possible, Lenovo first brought together support knowledge and device-context data through a unified knowledge management platform. The goal was not simply to give AI access to more information. The agents also needed to identify which knowledge was trusted, relevant and applicable to each situation.
Three agents, one connected support journey
The result is not a single chatbot, but a connected support model designed to intervene at the most effective point.
Lenovo Machines Fix Machines Agent monitors device health, identifies emerging issues and automatically resolves them wherever possible. Today, it addresses 23% of potential support issues before human intervention is required—often before customers realize anything is wrong.
When a problem requires repair, Lenovo Smart Repair Agent processes the request, diagnoses the issue and can automatically create tickets, generate work orders and dispatch them to field-service teams. Half of repair orders are now completely touchless, contributing to a more than 90% reduction in time to repair.
If conversational support is still needed, Lenovo Intelligent Voice Agent collects information, answers questions and troubleshoots through natural-sounding voice interaction. When human expertise is required, it transfers the customer and relevant case context to the appropriate specialist, helping avoid a frustrating restart. Learning what enterprise AI takes
Building the agents was only part of the transformation. Over more than two years, Lenovo had to learn how to deploy and operate them responsibly across a complex global support environment.
Support teams helped design and refine workflows, employees learned how to work alongside AI, and processes were redesigned to preserve human oversight for complex cases. Lenovo also established the privacy, data-governance and supplier controls required for customer-facing AI across markets.
The connected agents now support more than 98% of incoming requests and have contributed to a 75% reduction in human-assisted support volume. Customer issues are resolved 25% faster, while customer satisfaction has improved by 10% and support costs have fallen by 10%.
By becoming customer zero for these agents, Lenovo learned what it takes to move agentic AI beyond a promising concept and into day-to-day enterprise operations. Lenovo has since turned the internally proven capabilities into service-led solutions for customers, including Lenovo Machines Fix Machines Agent, Lenovo Smart Repair Agent and Lenovo Intelligent Voice Agent.
The agents are available through the Lenovo AI Library and form part of Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage. More importantly, they carry forward lessons Lenovo gained by designing, governing and operating connected AI agents within its own business.
“From business consulting workshops and solution design to AI operations, we’ve learned what it takes to deploy and govern multi-agent AI solutions at enterprise scale,” says Richard CA Gao, Director, ISS CoE at Lenovo. “We now bring that experience to every customer engagement.”