Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang has committed to ambitious new targets for R&D hiring and achieving net zero emissions. Credit: IDG UK Lenovo has committed to hiring 12,000 new research and development (R&D) professionals over the next three years. The announcement was made during Lenovo’s annual company kick-off, where chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang set out the company’s vision for the year ahead. Alongside the hiring commitment, Yang also said that R&D investment will be doubled during the 2022/23 financial year, as the company looks to stay ahead of new and emerging IT architectures. Last year, the Chinese-American tech giant hired 5,000 R&D workers to support research into what it calls “Client-Edge-Cloud-Network-Intelligence”. The newly announced hires will work on new hardware and software to help customers stay ahead of emerging technology trends, such as edge computing and the metaverse. “Our intention is to optimize between technology with quick market returns and foundational research, and between continuous improvement and breakthrough innovation,” Yang said. Yang also outlined Lenovo’s ongoing pledge to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, in line with the company’s Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) commitments. While Yang didn’t speak specifically about diversity and inclusion at today’s event, in Lenovo’s 2020/21 Environmental, Social, and Governance Report from earlier this year the company showed that it had managed to broaden its recruiting efforts and improve its onboarding process to hire tech workers from a wider variety of backgrounds. Related content news Adobe introduces AI assistant to help enterprises exploit data held in PDFs Rather than read through long documents, workers will be able to ask questions of them using Adobe’s new Acrobat AI Assistant for enterprise. By Sascha Brodsky May 14, 2024 5 mins Generative AI Productivity Software news Google: Project Starline 3D meeting platform arrives next year Google partnered with HP to commercialize 3D video meeting technology designed to replicate the feeling of face-to-face conversations for remote workers. By Matthew Finnegan May 14, 2024 3 mins Google HP Collaboration Software news OpenAI rival Anthropic launches Claude chatbot in Europe The announcement comes a day after OpenAI announced a new desktop version of ChatGPT and an upgraded user interface called GPT-4o. By Prasanth Aby Thomas May 14, 2024 3 mins Generative AI news analysis OpenAI announces new multimodal desktop GPT with new voice and vision capabilities OpenAI announced what it says is a vastly superior large language model capable of interacting with human-like speeds using text, voice, and visual prompts. But at least one analyst said the company is just playing catch-up with competitors at this p By Lucas Mearian May 13, 2024 7 mins Generative AI Emerging Technology Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe