Lenovo’s Qira announcement at CES 2026 is not just another assistant launch. With Qira, Lenovo stakes a claim for where personal computing is headed: away from app-hopping and prompt repetition, toward an ambient layer of intelligence that persists across devices, carries context, and takes action.
Lenovo describes Qira as a “Personal Ambient Intelligence” that shows up as Lenovo Qira on PCs and Motorola Qira on phones, embedded at the system level and designed to be “always present” with user permission (see the Lenovo press release: Introducing Lenovo and Motorola Qira).
What Qira is trying to become
The most interesting part of the Qira framing is that it is presented as a cross-device intelligence rather than a single application. Lenovo anchors the experience in three attributes mapped to tangible moments:
- Presence
- Actions
- Perception
Think of behaviors like Next Move (proactive suggestions), Write For Me (inline drafting), Live Interaction (screen/camera multimodal collaboration), Catch Me Up (summaries after stepping away), and Pay Attention (transcription, translation, summaries).
Those may be familiar AI use cases, but they haven’t been presented in this way before. Lenovo understands that AI needs to evolve from “chat about anything” to “do something real.” To facilitate that evolution, Qira’s design language is explicitly agentic: it orchestrates work across apps and devices, coordinates specialized capabilities, and reduces the amount of human-mediated stitching required to maintain context.
Why the idea of Qira matters more than its features list
Qira looks like a product, but it behaves like a hypothesis: the operating system is becoming less important than the intelligence layer running above it. That idea shows up in my analysis of the agentic operating system, the shift from files and apps to intent and orchestration as the primary interface.
For context, my deeper take on how agentic layers can turn Windows, macOS, and Linux into compatibility shells is here: The Agentic Operating System on SeriousInsights.net and Why Windows Just Became Disruptible in the Agentic OS Era on techspective.
Qira also hints at something I have been tracking since the announcement of the AI PC: the AI PC cannot be defined by a neural processing unit (NPU) alone. The real question is what an AI-first experience does when it is allowed to stitch together voice, vision, documents, and workflows—and when it can carry that stitching across a laptop and a phone without falling apart.
That question has been on the Serious Insights radar since early “AI PC” conversations: Thinking Out Loud: What Should an AI PC Do?.
Rather than throwing their arms up as Dell did recently, in PC Gamer (Dell’s CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I’ve had in maybe 5 years), on the AI PC because the hardware is out in front of the consumer, Lenovo has doubled down to deploy meaningful features that even Microsoft is leaving on the table.
Hybrid AI, but with a partner-shaped ecosystem
Lenovo is clear that Qira is hybrid. On-device processing is positioned as the default for privacy and latency, with cloud services extending capabilities when needed. That architecture matters because it is where economics, governance, and trust collide.
Lenovo also telegraphed where it wants the ecosystem to go by naming partners: Microsoft for local-to-cloud coordination, Stability AI for on-device image generation in Creator Zone, Notion for reasoning over a workspace, Perplexity for sourced research, and Expedia/Vrbo for intent-to-booking travel flows.
While this is a practical lineup: productivity substrate, creation, knowledge store, research, and services, it isn’t exhaustive. For Lenovo to move buyers toward a meaningful AI-experience transition, they will need to ensure that their AI offerings integrate across all the popular apps, services and utilities.
The partner list also exposes a core design tension. A personal ambient agent needs a unified memory to feel coherent. A unified memory needs access to the very data that enterprises spend fortunes trying to govern. When those worlds meet, identity, consent, retention policies, and auditability become product features, not compliance afterthoughts.
The hidden cost is still the work
Qira is positioned as continuity: fewer broken threads from re-entering prompts and device switching. That is exactly the kind of promise that helps mitigate the AI Tax, alleviation of extra effort spent prepping, verifying, correcting, and integrating outputs.
An overview of the AI Tax can be found here: The AI Tax.
Ambient intelligence reduces friction when it works. It also makes mistakes feel more invasive because the system is present everywhere. When an agent is empowered to take action, the failure modes shift from “wrong answer” to “wrong move.” That is why agent safety is no longer just a research paper topic; it’s a product requirement.
A practical list of how agents fail in real deployments can be found here: How Agents Can Go Wrong.
From an enterprise perspective, readiness is not measured by how many copilots are deployed. Readiness is measured by whether an organization can operationalize consent, identity, knowledge hygiene, and continuous measurement without turning every workflow into a compliance effort.
As Qira rolls out, Lenovo needs to keep all of this in mind.
Ambient AI still runs on watts and politics
It is easy to talk about personal AI as if it exists in a frictionless cloud. It does not. The hybrid architecture Lenovo describes is a response to two constraints: the need for privacy and responsiveness, and the reality that compute is expensive, energy-hungry, and increasingly geopolitical.
I discuss the issues of governance, energy, and geopolitics during my Foxit interview: “The Future of AI Isn’t What You Think” (Foxit interview).
The practical implication is that Qira’s success depends on the messy middle: what can be done locally, what requires cloud acceleration, and what needs to reach out to third-party models, and how those decisions map to corporate policy and regional regulation. Product teams need to treat “where intelligence runs” as a design parameter, not just an implementation detail.
What to watch as Qira rolls out
Lenovo says Qira will roll out on select Lenovo devices in Q1 2026, then expand to supported Motorola smartphones afterward, with over-the-air upgrades for existing Lenovo AI Now users. The rollout strategy matters because cross-device agents only feel real when they are consistently present, and consistency in AI is hard at scale.
Three things will determine whether Qira becomes a defining layer or a clever CES moment:
- Trust mechanics: clear, legible controls for what Qira remembers, where it stores it, and how it uses it—across consumer and enterprise identities.
- Action boundaries: visible guardrails and reversibility for agent actions, especially when Qira orchestrates across third-party services.
- Knowledge quality: fewer hallucinations and more provenance as Qira pulls from personal data, workspaces, and web research.
If Lenovo gets those right, Qira becomes less about competing with a chatbot and more about changing expectations for what a device ecosystem can do, for how we work in the future.
His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, NASA Ask, and dozens of other magazines and websites. His analysis on the future of work can be found at SeriousInsights.net. He is also the author of Understanding Artificial Intelligence, Cyberlife, Rethinking Smart Objects, and Empower Business with Generative AI.
Rasmus regularly speaks on the future of work at events such as Comic-Con International, Wondercon, Impact, Enterprise AI World, Worktech, CLO Symposium, KMWorld, AAAI, Computers in Libraries, Microsoft’s Building the Future, Educause, Expo Capital Humano, Devlearn, Internet Librarian, CAMEX, EduComm, and Sourcing Summit Europe.
As an Affiliate Instructor, Rasmus teaches scenario planning at the University of Washington and is an Associate Adjunct Professor at Bellevue College.
