Roughly two-and-a-half years ago, Lenovo sat down with Intel to start making its flagship laptops. The mission was to create a unique selling point: if people were already looking at an Intel-powered PC, why not choose Lenovo? After intensive research and development, the “Aura Edition” laptops came to fruition.
Aura Edition exists as the label for Lenovo’s range of laptops equipped with the latest Intel Lunar Lake chips, high-end designs, and exclusive features. As expected of a PC manufacturer in 2025, AI is central to everything.
It’s not yet clear how much of a selling point AI is to general consumers. There are also a lot of different product names and categories to understand, which is likely why some companies are streamlining their device naming, like Dell’s move away from XPS branding.
Laptops are seen as more than just laptops by the people who make them; there are AI PCs, Copilot+ PCs, and – within Lenovo’s ecosystem – Aura Edition PCs. What separates one from another, and how are buyers meant to know the difference?
It’s something that Tom Butler, Lenovo’s Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Portfolio and Product Management, is acutely aware of.
“There’s a lot of confusion – there’s a lot of products out there,” Butler said. “There’s no real need, in my view, to differentiate the nuance of what each of those platforms delivers because you’ve moved into that class (of device).”
Butler asserts that with how quickly the PC space is moving, pretty much everything will be some form of an ‘AI PC’. In an effort to separate the premium-level devices from the rest, Aura Edition is the label Lenovo came up with.
Aura Edition’s extensive user research
A lot of research went into devices like the Aura Edition of Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7i. Lenovo conducted a comprehensive study of more than 10,000 users to identify what they actually want from a laptop.
That wasn’t the full extent of Lenovo’s research; its research and development team also scoured online reviews, including user reviews published via online retailers and communities on Reddit.
Other than physical design elements, like bigger speakers and OLED screens, software usability was a common theme that came up in user feedback. It led to developments like Smart Share, a feature that enables image sharing by tapping a mobile device to the laptop.
But Lenovo saved the most fanfare for its AI-based features, namely the local AI-powered knowledge base called Lenovo AI Now. PC vendors got spooked last year when Microsoft’s flagship Copilot+ PC Recall feature got held back due to security concerns. It seems that Lenovo paid close attention to Microsoft’s misstep.
Attempting to make AI technology secure
Butler mentioned that Recall “wasn’t quite ready for market”, and then pointed to Lenovo’s three-pronged development process: personal, productive, and protected.
“If it can’t pass the logic of that framework, it’s not ready for us to announce and launch,” Butler said, emphasising his company’s approach to security.
He also pointed to the Lenovo AI Now feature receiving a diamond rating – the highest possible score – on UL Solutions’ AI Model Transparency test as evidence of the brand’s AI security credentials. The feature uses a local large language model (LLM) built on Meta’s Llama 3 technology to act as an on-device knowledge repository.
Why Meta’s technology? Performance, according to Gregory Beh, who oversees Lenovo’s premium consumer laptops in the Asia Pacific region.
“Meta Llama 3 is one of the very few large-language models that operates efficiently, with great performance, and on-device,” Beh said. “Many other AI models still require an internet connection.”
Compared to cloud-based technologies like Chat-GPT and Gemini, Lenovo AI Now runs locally, meaning data doesn’t leave your device. One of its major selling points is the use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) processing to verify information.
In theory, RAG lets you add files to an LLM, letting you customise the AI model with specialist information. For example, you can add a PDF and then ask the AI model questions about its content. Lenovo advertises its AI Now tool as an opt-in feature, only referencing documents and files you give it access to.
Interestingly, Butler likened the current AI PC era to the dot-com era in terms of the excitement surrounding AI investment and rampant speculation about the future. Meanwhile, some analysts are linking the AI cycle to the dot-com era for a different reason – the subsequent market crash.
For now, Lenovo – alongside many other tech companies – is bullish on AI’s prospects.
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Chris Button attended an event in Japan as a guest of Lenovo.
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