Lenovo had a Search operation many marketers would envy. Years of manual optimisation had produced a highly effective customer-acquisition engine, and performance was steady. But incremental growth was becoming harder to find.
The customers Lenovo wanted to reach were also changing how they searched. Instead of entering a product or brand name, they were asking longer, more conversational questions: What is the best laptop for architecture? Which model is suitable for video editing? What can I buy within a particular budget?
These searches often happen before a customer has settled on a brand, while consideration is still being shaped. Capturing them would require Lenovo to recognise a wider range of intent without compromising the brand standards and customer experience behind its existing success.
Assembly Global, Lenovo’s marketing partners in the Stagwell agency network, saw the pace of change as a reason to act. “The way people search and find answers has fundamentally changed in a relatively short time,” says Claudia Ziegenbein, head of search, Europe, at Assembly. “That forces a level of urgency. You don’t simply want to keep up; you want to get ahead.”
Search queries are becoming customer briefs
As Search becomes more conversational, a query can reveal far more than the product a customer wants. It can describe the task they need to complete, the constraints they face and the trade-offs that will influence their decision.
For Lenovo, these signals represented an opportunity to reach prospective customers earlier. Its established Search campaigns continued to capture demand effectively, but performance was no longer accelerating at the same rate.
“Performance was strong and reliable, but flat,” says Erdem Kosukoglu, business director at Assembly Global. “That’s when most people play it safe and stick with what’s working. Lenovo did the opposite. Instead of protecting what was steady, they asked, ‘What’s next?’ – even though nothing was broken.”
The challenge was to extend a successful Search strategy to interpret more varied expressions of customer need. Lenovo wanted to understand whether AI could uncover commercially valuable intent that its existing setup was not capturing and connect those customers with a more relevant message and destination.
That meant changing the system before poor performance forced the issue.
Testing a new model without surrendering control
Lenovo worked with Assembly and Google to test AI Max for Search. The technology complements an advertiser’s existing keyword strategy by using AI to interpret a wider range of searches, adapt creative and direct customers to the most relevant landing page.
The team used a controlled A/B test to compare AI Max with Lenovo’s existing campaign setup over a five-week period. This allowed the partners to measure whether the new approach generated genuinely incremental results while monitoring budget deployment and customer experience.
For Jennifer Watts, budget and planning manager for EMEA ecommerce at Lenovo, the test had to clear a simple threshold: would it produce a better result for the customer?
“At Lenovo, we always have a customer-first mindset, so any changes we make have to have at the forefront of our mind what the benefit is to the customer,” she says.
Lenovo, Assembly and Google agreed on how the test would operate, the guardrails it would follow and what success should look like. Lenovo continued to set the commercial objectives and control its strategy, tone of voice and customer experience. Within those boundaries, AI could optimise towards the outcomes the company had defined.
That required a shift in how the team worked. Instead of manually determining every element of execution, marketers needed to provide strong inputs, set clear parameters and give the technology room to identify patterns at a scale that would be difficult to manage manually.
“Lenovo is one of the most progressive clients we work with. They don’t wait for certainty; they build it through testing,” says Kosukoglu.
The distinction between strategic control and manual intervention proved especially important. “[Trusting] isn’t the same as losing control,” he adds. “The control doesn’t disappear. It just moves.”
What changed when AI took on the manual work
Incremental gains emerged within the first two weeks. During the test, conversions rose by 24%, conversion value increased by 34% and Lenovo achieved a 15% lift in incremental revenue.1
The results showed that Lenovo could expand its reach while maintaining the efficiency and customer standards expected from its established Search operation. What began as a UK pilot has since expanded across several European markets and is informing broader adoption across the company.
The effect extended beyond campaign performance. Assembly reported spending less time on manual activities such as reviewing search-query reports, updating copy and adjusting bids. That created more capacity for analysing customer behaviour, identifying market opportunities and improving the journey between a customer’s initial question and the product that could answer it.
For marketers, this changes where expertise creates the most value. As Search becomes more AI-powered, advantage will increasingly depend on the quality of the commercial objectives, measurement signals, creative inputs and customer insight provided to the technology.
Lenovo’s experience also offers a way through a common barrier to AI adoption. The company did not need to dismantle a successful Search strategy or hand decision-making over to an opaque system. It used a controlled test to determine where AI could strengthen an operation that was already working.
Customer behaviour will continue to evolve, and the signals that reveal demand will become more varied. Lenovo now has a system designed to recognise valuable intent as it emerges, along with greater confidence in its ability to respond.
The lesson for marketing leaders is to focus control where it creates the greatest value: defining the outcome, setting the boundaries and deciding what the business should do with the demand it discovers. Search is no longer simply where a customer’s existing intention becomes visible. Increasingly, it is where the next source of growth begins.
1 Source: Lenovo EMEA ecommerce A/B test, UK pilot, 2026 vs. previous keyword campaign setup
Lenovo had a Search operation many marketers would envy. Years of manual optimisation had produced a highly effective customer-acquisition engine, and performance was steady. But incremental growth was becoming harder to find.
The customers Lenovo wanted to reach were also changing how they searched. Instead of entering a product or brand name, they were asking longer, more conversational questions: What is the best laptop for architecture? Which model is suitable for video editing? What can I buy within a particular budget?
These searches often happen before a customer has settled on a brand, while consideration is still being shaped. Capturing them would require Lenovo to recognise a wider range of intent without compromising the brand standards and customer experience behind its existing success.
Assembly Global, Lenovo's marketing partners in the Stagwell agency network, saw the pace of change as a reason to act. “The way people search and find answers has fundamentally changed in a relatively short time,” says Claudia Ziegenbein, head of search, Europe, at Assembly. “That forces a level of urgency. You don’t simply want to keep up; you want to get ahead.”
