AI’s tech integration includes hardware, software, and everything else

AI’s increasing ubiquity requires a measured approach to adoption, tech industry leaders told us at this year’s CES.

For companies like Lenovo—positioning itself as a major player in the space by partnering with AI giants like Nvidia and AMD—an AI future could be bright. CIO Arthur Hu told IT Brew that he sees the company’s investments in AI engineering paying off with “meaningful, double-digit increases in end-to-end productivity.”

Reaching that goal will take work and commitment that requires thinking of AI as one tool in a very large toolbox.

“We’ve invested heavily in onboarding AI engineering, and, naturally, we have a lot of software engineers who are working on everything from firmware to software to appliances to integration,” Hu said.

Get connected. The more successful that integration, Hu added, the more we can expect to see the technology in industrial contexts. It’s an example of how engineering and AI are starting to merge on the hardware side, what he called “physical AI.”

“At the end of the day, if you are an AI-enabled developer, it doesn’t matter if you’re in IT or in operations technology or in engineering—you’re just working with code and agents to build capabilities,” Hu said. “Some of it is instantiated virtually, some of it’s instantiated physically.”

There are security considerations when it comes to physical AI, said Deral Heiland, an IoT researcher with Rapid7. More AI added to hardware and physical applications leads to an increase in data creation and usage; this allows attackers a way to slip undetected into systems to steal data or gain control.

“If I have access to the data, I can see what the data is, I can control the data on these devices without impacting functionality,” Heiland said. “It still functions exactly the way it’s supposed to, but I can give extra commands.”

Keep it secure. Challenges aside, the experts we interviewed at CES think AI will continue to propel the industry forward. Silicon Labs CEO Matt Johnson, whose company uses the technology in its hardware solutions, told IT Brew that he is still bullish on the future of AI in the physical and virtual worlds alike.

With “endless” use cases, the AI revolution is still in its early days, Johnson said, including the hardware side.

“When IoT started way back you had all these weird applications that people [didn’t even know they needed],” Johnson said, adding that AI’s potential means that as the industry works it out, “customers are working to become savvy enough to take advantage of it.”