Lenovo is turning its PCs and Motorola phones into something closer to a single, roaming intelligence with Qira, a new AI assistant that’s meant to follow you across devices, remember what you’re doing, and quietly take care of busywork in the background.​

The pitch sounds familiar at first: one assistant that lives everywhere you use technology. But Lenovo is trying to do something more ambitious than just slapping another chatbot on your taskbar. Qira is designed as a “personal ambient intelligence system” that’s built into the operating system layer of Lenovo laptops, desktops, and Motorola phones, rather than bolted on as yet another app. Instead of you opening a window and typing in a prompt, the idea is that Qira already knows what you’re working on, where you left off, and what needs to happen next – and can act on your behalf when you give it the green light.​

Inside Lenovo, getting to this point meant a pretty big culture shift. Historically, this is a company optimized for hardware: SKUs, supply chains, and ever-so-slightly better spec sheets than last quarter’s notebook. Less than a year ago, Lenovo pulled AI teams out of individual product lines like PCs, tablets, and phones and merged them into a central software-focused group, with a mandate to build one cross-device intelligence that works across everything the company sells, not a dozen scattered “AI features” that never quite talk to each other. That reorg is what birthed Qira – not as a feature of any single ThinkPad or Moto phone, but as a company-wide bet that software intelligence will matter more than raw specs in the next wave of devices.​

From the user’s side, Lenovo wants Qira to feel like a presence that’s always there, but not always in your face. There’s a wake phrase (“Hey, Qira”), a dedicated key on some PCs, and a persistent on-screen control you can tap, but the assistant is meant to stand back until it has something genuinely useful to offer. Think: your laptop notices you’ve just joined a call and quietly turns on real-time transcription and translation, or your phone recognizes that you just landed for a work trip and lines up hotel details, meeting locations, and a “catch me up” overview of project updates you missed while you were on the plane. Instead of being a floating chatbot, Qira’s core loop is “presence, actions, perception”: it knows you’re there, understands the context, and can take concrete actions in your apps and across your devices.​

This “can act on your behalf” bit is where things get interesting – and potentially scary – for everyday users. Lenovo is leaning into the idea of agentic AI: not just answering questions, but actually doing things on your machine, like drafting follow-up emails, moving files between devices, or progressing a workflow in the background. During internal testing, Lenovo’s head of AI product, Jeff Snow, used Qira’s on-device model mid-flight to help him workshop how to talk about the Qira launch itself, pulling from the documents and notes already on his PC. That’s the flavor of interaction Lenovo is chasing – not a clever conversation, but a system that already knows your context and can help you move work forward with fewer steps.​

Under the hood, Qira is deliberately not married to one giant model. Instead, Lenovo built it as a modular stack that mixes local, on-device models with cloud-based models from Microsoft and OpenAI via Azure, plus specialized systems like Stability AI’s diffusion models for image generation and integrations with tools like Notion, Perplexity, and Expedia. The idea is that different tasks get routed to different brains: quick, private stuff stays on your device; heavier or more open-ended work can go to the cloud, with Qira orchestrating which model to use when. In a world where every big AI lab would love to be “the” brain on hundreds of millions of PCs, Lenovo’s stance is basically: this space moves too fast to be locked into one partner.​

That’s also where Lenovo’s hardware DNA gives it a real angle. If you’re the world’s top PC maker by volume, shipping tens of millions of machines a year, you don’t have to own the model to control the experience – you own the distribution. Lenovo clearly sees Qira as both a loyalty play and a hedge against hardware commoditization: if your ThinkPad and your Motorola phone feel like pieces of one ambient intelligence that remembers your life, it’s a lot harder to justify switching to some random competitor with the same RAM and SSD but none of your history. Qira is the glue that’s supposed to turn a loose assortment of devices into a sticky ecosystem.​

On paper, the cross-device promise is simple: one intelligence, all your screens. In practice, Lenovo is trying to solve the very real “context gap” between your laptop and your phone. You might be reviewing a deck on your PC, then rushing out the door; Qira should let you pick up the same context on your Motorola device, complete with your notes, history, and relevant messages, without you emailing yourself files or hunting through apps. Features like “Catch Me Up” and “Pay Attention” are designed for that continuity: Qira can summarize what happened in your apps and conversations while you were away, transcribe meetings in real time, highlight decisions, and then surface all of that back to you wherever you happen to be working next.​

Lenovo also wants Qira to be more than just reactive. The assistant can coordinate “actions” across applications – think moving a workflow through multiple steps, not just doing a single task in isolation. For creators, there’s a Creator Zone on PCs where Qira helps manage visual workflows with on-device image generation powered by Stable Diffusion 3.5 Flash, so you can iterate on visuals and photos locally without bouncing between different tools or sending everything to the cloud. For travelers, integrations with Expedia mean Qira can help you not just search for a hotel, but handle the booking flow and keep trip details aligned with your calendar and documents, lightly nudging you rather than forcing you to manage everything manually.​

Of course, “ambient” assistants that watch what you’re doing have a rough history. Microsoft’s Recall feature became a cautionary tale almost overnight, after users and security researchers raised alarms about a system that silently logged and screenshot nearly everything on a Windows PC. Lenovo watched that unfold and is now going out of its way to stress that Qira is opt-in, with visible indicators when context is being captured, and clear controls over what gets remembered. The company says that Qira “prioritizes” on-device processing, only collects data with permission, and is designed to be secure and accountable by default – in other words, nothing is supposed to be silently scraped in the background while you’re not aware.​

But privacy isn’t just about where the model runs; it’s about how much memory you’re comfortable giving an assistant that lives on all your devices. Lenovo’s answer is that users will explicitly choose the kinds of context Qira can ingest – documents, apps, meeting content, and so on – and can trim or reset that memory as needed. For enterprise buyers, that pitch is going to be critical: Qira has to walk the line between being helpful enough to justify its existence and constrained enough that CISOs don’t freak out at the idea of a system-level agent that can observe and act across fleets of machines.​

There’s also a very practical constraint: cost. Running serious AI locally is not free, and Lenovo is blunt that Qira performs best on higher-end machines with more RAM, even if the baseline system requirements technically don’t change. Memory prices are climbing as AI workloads suck up supply, and analysts already expect PC prices to creep upward as vendors ship devices tuned for on-device inference rather than just web browsing. Lenovo says it is pushing its local models down to smaller footprints, targeting configs around 16GB of RAM without watering down the experience, but the reality is that the “best” Qira experience will likely live on the more expensive SKUs.​

If this all sounds a bit like “we’ve seen assistants before,” Lenovo’s own data backs that skepticism. Moto AI, Motorola’s previous-gen assistant, saw strong initial engagement – more than half of users tried it – but retention fell off once the novelty faded. The lesson Snow’s team took from that: if it feels like another chatbot bolted onto your home screen, people will play with it for a week and then forget it exists. Qira, then, is explicitly framed as “about things chatbots can’t do” – not clever answers, but continuity, context, and direct control over the device.​

Zoom out, and Qira is Lenovo’s answer to the AI agent land grab happening across the industry. Microsoft has Copilot embedded in Windows and Office; Google has Gemini reaching across Android and Workspace; Apple is building its own flavor of on-device intelligence wrapped in that familiar privacy-first story. Lenovo doesn’t control the OS at the same depth as those platform owners, but it does control the hardware and, critically, the preinstall experience on millions of machines – that ever-controversial but very powerful layer where tools like Qira can pop up first. If Qira works as promised, Lenovo doesn’t just ship boxes anymore; it ships an ambient AI layer that quietly competes with Copilot and Gemini every time you wake your laptop.​

The big open question is whether users actually want an assistant that can act on their behalf, not just answer them. Trusting Qira means trusting it with your documents, your meeting transcripts, your cross-device habits – and then trusting it to do the right thing when it takes initiative. Lenovo is betting that if it gets that balance right – with visible controls, heavy on-device processing, and genuinely useful cross-device actions – Qira can become less of a feature and more of an expectation, in the same way that notifications or copy-paste across devices quietly became table stakes. If it misses, Qira risks joining a long list of well-intentioned assistants that promised to do everything for you and ended up being just another icon you eventually learn to ignore.