The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) has announced the opening of global applications for the 2026 SAIL Award (Super AI Leader), its most prestigious honor. Transphere Consulting has been designated as the official international recruitment partner, responsible for managing overseas nominations and supporting AI teams worldwide throughout the application process.

As artificial intelligence moves beyond experimental phases into large-scale industrial use, the SAIL Award highlights initiatives that combine advanced technological capability with proven real-world scalability across industries such as manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and urban infrastructure.

For 2026, the award offers a total prize pool exceeding USD $280,000. In addition to monetary recognition, winners benefit from:

Since its launch in 2018, the SAIL Award has received more than 4,500 submissions from over 20 countries and regions. Previous recipients include Siemens, MindRank, Insilico Medicine, and Ant Group.

WAIC 2025 attracted over 1,500 participants from more than 70 countries and regions, featuring 12 Turing Award and Nobel Prize laureates, over 80 academicians, and upwards of 200 industry leaders—underscoring its position as a leading global forum for AI innovation and governance.

Evaluation Criteria
Submissions are evaluated based on four key pillars:

Unlike many awards that prioritize theoretical performance or model benchmarks, the SAIL Award focuses on practical deployment and ecosystem integration, setting a standard for AI solutions operating in complex, real-world environments.

Application Process
Applications are now open to AI startups, research organizations, and enterprises globally. To maintain high standards, Transphere Consulting will conduct an initial screening process. Shortlisted applicants will receive an exclusive invitation code to access the official SAIL submission portal.

Pre-screening Form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/MwyMSqCCpt
Inquiries: shanghai@transphereconsulting.com

At the NVIDIA GTC event held in San Jose, California, in March, Lenovo brought together a diverse group of industry leaders to explore how they're leveraging Lenovo’s hybrid AI technologies in partnership with NVIDIA. These innovations are driving transformation across sectors such as customer service, hospitality, retail, automotive, healthcare, and manufacturing.

As artificial intelligence reshapes industries, spending on AI is projected to nearly triple by 2025 compared to last year. This growth reflects both the promise and the pressure facing organizations: as investments rise, so do expectations for measurable results. IT leaders are now tasked with navigating the complexities of AI while maximizing returns and implementing scalable solutions across hybrid infrastructure.

To support these leaders, Lenovo is introducing its Hybrid AI Advantage—developed with NVIDIA—into enterprise environments. These new offerings enable rapid deployment of agentic AI, tailored to different scales of business. They convert enterprise data into actionable AI insights, improving productivity and reducing operational costs within a short timeframe.

Scalability and increasing technical debt often hinder AI adoption. Lenovo addresses these challenges with its newly developed AI use-case solutions, built on a next-generation agentic AI platform powered by NVIDIA. This platform offers an integrated approach combining hardware, software, and services to simplify the deployment and maintenance of AI workloads. In addition, Lenovo and NVIDIA are collaborating on standardized, validated hybrid AI factories that improve operational efficiency and reduce overall business expenses.

Empowering AI with NVIDIA Blackwell
AI applications are rapidly expanding to include areas like content creation, customer engagement, data management, design, and productivity. To meet these growing demands, companies require high-performance computing capabilities. The evolving complexity of AI models and the need for real-time processing are straining traditional data centers.

By integrating Lenovo’s Hybrid AI Advantage with the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, businesses can fully tap into AI capabilities within their data infrastructures. This includes accelerating simulations, analyzing data, and enabling real-time design and visualization. The Blackwell platform enhances AI training, data processing, and engineering simulations at scale.
In Germany, Lenovo partnered with the Technical University of Darmstadt to launch the first NVIDIA GB200 project. This initiative features Lenovo’s energy-efficient ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune systems, powered by advanced liquid-cooling technologies and designed to support large-scale scientific research. The project enhances the university’s Lichtenberg NHR-Stage 1 supercomputer with cutting-edge Grace-Blackwell technology.

Unveiled at GTC, the SC777 V4 Neptune server supports AI models with trillions of parameters using a compact, fully liquid-cooled design. This innovative system minimizes energy use by eliminating traditional cooling fans, reducing power consumption by up to 40%. It marks a major step toward more efficient, high-density data centers in the AI era.

AI Advancements in Healthcare
Lenovo is also helping healthcare providers apply AI for better patient outcomes. In Mexico, the healthcare software firm AISHA—a spin-off from the country’s largest private hospital network—implemented Lenovo and NVIDIA’s hybrid AI solution to enhance MRI analysis. With AI running on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and NVIDIA GPUs, AISHA dramatically reduced MRI scan analysis time to just 30 minutes, a process that previously took hours. This rapid analysis supports timely, high-quality care across their growing hospital network.

Smarter Manufacturing with AI Vision
At GTC, Lenovo presented an AI-powered quality control system for manufacturers. Developed with Trifork, a leader in vision-based AI, the solution uses Lenovo’s infrastructure to automate defect detection. It can identify flaws like broken or discolored candy and provides real-time analytics through an interactive dashboard. This significantly cuts inspection costs and boosts operational efficiency.

Together, Trifork and Lenovo are advancing predictive maintenance, performance monitoring, and seamless integration between IT and operational systems to speed up time-to-market and ensure quality standards.

Key benefits of the solution include:

Transforming Data Management with AI
Lenovo, NVIDIA, and partners like Centific are revolutionizing how enterprises manage data. At GTC, they launched the AI Data Foundry—a solution powered by Lenovo’s Hybrid AI factory and optimized with NVIDIA architecture. This system helps businesses streamline data preparation, training, tuning, and deployment of AI models.

Centific brings full-stack AI development capabilities to the table, enabling rapid creation and scaling of solutions that handle everything from real-time video analytics to behavior tracking in public safety and retail environments. The offering is tailored to various deployment sizes and includes powerful Lenovo servers, NVIDIA GPUs, and advanced networking.

Use cases range from large-scale multimodal AI (including LLMs and visual language models) to computer vision in sectors like hospitality and retail. Through Lenovo’s AI Innovators program, businesses can seamlessly integrate these technologies with their existing infrastructure.

AI-Driven Hospitality Experiences
To illustrate the potential of AI in hospitality, Lenovo and Centific demonstrated an avatar-powered concierge service at GTC. This interactive assistant offered real-time updates, guest preferences, and delay notifications. A separate visualization tool mapped guest movement to help optimize crowd flow, while additional systems monitored maintenance and energy use in real time to uncover cost-saving opportunities.

A Pivotal Moment for Hybrid AI
As AI continues to scale, enterprises require smarter, more streamlined methods to translate AI potential into practical outcomes. Lenovo and NVIDIA are leading this transition by co-developing advanced hybrid AI systems that convert data into impact across sectors. From customer service to backend operations, their integrated approach is helping organizations around the world unlock the value of AI at speed and scale.

Click here to explore how Lenovo is powering the future of AI and delivering transformative solutions.