Discover how Lenovo helped 30,000 employees build practical AI skills with scenario‑driven training to streamline daily tasks, strengthen communication, and achieve meaningful, measurable outcomes.
Listed by Forbes as the world’s largest PC company, Lenovo is taking AI out of the abstract and delivering its power to people around the world through a full-stack portfolio of AI-enabled devices, infrastructure, and software. Lenovo’s vision of delivering smarter technology for all includes its own employees and processes. This goal informed its decision to deploy and adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft Copilot Studio across the entire company.
Empowering innovation and efficiency
Lenovo aimed to establish enterprise leadership in AI, using it to enhance productivity and accelerate business processes across key functions, including research and development (R&D), marketing, and human resources (HR). The company did this by deploying Copilot Chat to its global workforce of over 75,000 employees. The initial onboarding target was more manageable but still ambitious: 30,000 employees in China—about 40% of its workforce.
The primary challenge was not just the scale of deployment but also the need to ensure adoption. It was vital that employees could move beyond basic usage to effectively integrate these advanced AI tools into their specific, daily work scenarios to drive tangible business value. Lenovo recognized that success hinged on helping employees build confidence, understand real-world applications, and adopt an AI‑first mindset.
Copilot Chat has fundamentally changed how we manage our daily workflow. What used to take hours now happens in minutes. It not only saves us time but also enhances the quality of our communication and strategic thinking.
—Dan Zhao, Operations Management Professional, Lenovo China
Laying the groundwork
To achieve such massive upskilling at scale, Lenovo worked with Digital China Cloud Technology Limited, a leading digital transformation partner whose many services include helping enterprise-level clients establish future-oriented core capabilities.
Together they created a training strategy to help employees move from casual interaction with AI tools to meaningful, scenario‑driven usage. The two-phased training combined targeted learning pathways, interactive workshops, and department-specific problem-solving. By embedding training into employees’ existing digital workflows, Lenovo helped to ensure minimal friction and maximum relevance.
Phase one: Foundation building
The first phase focused on delivering broad-based AI literacy across the targeted workforce so that every employee, regardless of technical background, could start implementing AI tools to streamline their work. Lenovo introduced an “Introduction to Prompt Engineering” course designed to teach employees how to interact effectively with AI systems. This core training provided:
- Essential AI concepts.
- Practical prompting skills.
- Confidence-building exercises.
- Foundational habits for high‑quality AI interaction.
Phase two: Role‑based integration
The second phase moved beyond generic training to deep, scenario-specific workshops for key departments. It focused on using Copilot Chat for complex querying and analysis and on working with Copilot Studio, a platform for designing and building custom agents to automate and execute specific business processes.
“The key innovation,” Digital China Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) Yan Yan explains, “was our scenario-first and agent-centric learning methodology. Instead of teaching features, we focused on real-world business problems.”
This mapped training directly to real needs rather than abstract hypothetical use cases.
Phase two included:
- Customized agent development workshops tailored to unique departmental challenges, like automating HR inquiries and generating marketing content.
- Workflow‑embedded scenario training, designed around actual daily tasks, like meeting summaries, data analysis, strategic document drafting, and more.
Measurable business impact
Lenovo achieved significant results from its program, including:
- Accelerated core business processes. Teams across R&D, marketing, and HR saw faster project cycles—from accelerated code development and quicker market analysis to more streamlined employee onboarding.
- Higher productivity and efficiency. Employees showed major gains in handling complex tasks, such as data synthesis and content creation, reducing time spent on routine work.
- A more engaged workforce. The program boosted employee confidence and helped cultivate a culture of innovation and AI-first thinking.
- Transformational impact on customer-facing teams. Sales teams experienced dramatic improvements in communication quality, speed, and strategic preparation, reducing timelines from hours to minutes.
Realizing significant gains with a practical approach
Lenovo’s AI adoption journey demonstrates what’s possible when an organization pairs visionary goals with a practical, scenario‑driven implementation strategy. By empowering employees with foundational skills and then guiding them through real‑world applications, Lenovo achieved widespread adoption, substantial efficiency gains, and a more empowered global workforce.
This project not only accelerated Lenovo’s internal transformation but also positioned the company as a leader in enterprise‑wide AI enablement.
Explore AI skilling opportunities for all your teams—technical and non-technical alike—on Microsoft Learn for Organizations. For more inspiration, read AI and human potential: Advancing skills, innovation, and outcomes.
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