Lenovo expands Qira AI to 16GB PCs, wearables and third-party apps
Lenovo has announced a significant expansion of its Lenovo & Motorola Qira personal AI, extending support to PCs with 16GB of memory, the moto watch ultra wearable, and a range of third-party productivity applications including Gmail, Slack and Microsoft Outlook. The announcements were made at Lenovo Innovation World during IFA 2026 in Berlin.
Since the platform's initial rollout in March, Lenovo says Qira has shipped on millions of devices globally, spanning ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion and IdeaPad PCs, Lenovo tablets and select Motorola edge smartphones, with support across six languages.
Expanding the device footprint
The most commercially significant update is the lowering of the minimum memory threshold. Previously limited to higher-memory configurations, Qira will now run on eligible PCs with 16GB of RAM, a specification that covers a substantially larger portion of Lenovo's installed base and the broader mid-market commercial PC fleet.
Motorola devices will also gain access as they receive the Android 17 upgrade, with the rollout described as gradual and varying by device and market. Lenovo noted that devices currently running the moto ai assistant will transition to Motorola Qira with the Android 17 update. The moto watch ultra becomes the first wearable to support the platform, allowing users to invoke Qira with a wrist raise or a "Hey Qira" voice command.
Dan Dery, Vice President of AI Ecosystem at Lenovo, said: "Personal AI should not be another app waiting for a prompt. It should understand what matters to you, move with you across devices and help orchestrate the next step across the agents, applications and services you choose."
App integrations and market context
The more strategically interesting development is the tie-up with enterprise automation platform Workato, which provides the connective tissue between Qira and a suite of productivity tools including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Slack, Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar. The integration allows users to complete actions via natural-language requests within the Qira interface, rather than switching between applications. Lenovo has also added a Notion integration and expanded an existing Perplexity partnership to support deep-research queries.
This positions Qira in a crowded field of ambient AI assistants that seek to sit above the application layer. Apple Intelligence, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are each pursuing a similar cross-app orchestration model on their respective hardware and software platforms. Lenovo's differentiation is the cross-brand continuity between its PC and Motorola smartphone lines, a breadth few pure-software vendors can replicate. Whether that hardware-level continuity translates into meaningful user retention will depend on how reliably the cross-device context-sharing performs at scale.
The personal AI category also carries an evolving regulatory dimension. On-device processing, which Lenovo emphasises as a core architectural choice under "local model optimisation," is increasingly favoured by enterprise buyers navigating GDPR in Europe and data-residency requirements in markets such as the UAE, where this announcement originated. Lenovo's privacy-first framing aligns with that pressure, though the company has not published independent audit results or detailed its data-handling practices for the Workato-connected app integrations, where data necessarily leaves the device.
Lenovo said further device families, including additional wearables, are expected to receive Qira support before the end of 2026. The company has not disclosed the total number of active Qira users or provided engagement metrics beyond the shipped-device figure.