People don’t work in one place; they carry work with them. They capture a thought on mobile, deepen it on a laptop, and return to it later somewhere else. 

Imagine a tool that can learn your rhythms well enough to stay a step ahead, anticipating what you’ll need, teeing up the right context, and carrying work forward proactively. You can return after time away and instantly see what you missed, walk out of a meeting with a crisp summary of decisions and next steps, and get a timely nudge on what to do next — without having to reconstruct everything from scratch.

This is the promise of personal ambient AI, a model connected to an individual user in real time, serving as a personal assistant that writes, acts, and a proxy that reasons like the person they’re connected to, and can also communicate and handle various tasks on their behalf. In some cases, the technology can also produce a visual or voice replica of an individual, enabling them to scale their presence in ways previously unimaginable. 

Unlike familiar generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, which are already popular in the workplace, a personal AI model showcases a new way to use the technology that previous generations have only dreamed about.  

Ayanda Soares, a salon owner and AI educator, began experimenting with AI twinning last year, using it as a visual stand-in for her social media marketing. Soares, who oversees an 800-member community where she teaches students how to create AI twins, says members are using the technology to create content and faceless marketing that doesn’t require the creator’s physical presence, name, or identity for their online and small businesses. This can include avatar creation, scripts for coaching, and video generation.

Soares uses AI to create strategy plans for other salon owners she coaches, tapping personal AI to act as her own customized knowledge base or “second brain.” 

“I can generate an entire strategy that would easily have taken me about four hours after having a coaching session with someone,” she says. “I’m able to use my mental capacity and my time in other areas of my business or my personal life.”

Overall, Soares estimates AI saves her 10–20 hours a week across her salon business, coaching work, and AI education community. She sees the technology as more than just a productivity enabler — it’s a wealth creator.

“I realized that actually it’s not just about the convenience,” she says. “It’s actually about generating wealth that could be entirely faceless in industries that I might have not really had a voice in or been able to access before.” 

Value for Gen Z

For always-on digital creators like Soares, workplace burnout is at an all-time high, especially among Gen Z workers–eight in 10 of them experience it. Nearly half of Gen Z say it’s because they don’t have enough time to tackle their current workload or enough resources to do their job effectively. A personal ambient AI could be used to lighten the load eventually, whether it’s attending meetings in their place or concepting pitches and creating the presentation decks.

“Ideally, this intelligence frees you up to spend more time on the work that matters most and potentially makes it easier to step away,” says Jeff Snow, Head of Product, AI Ecosystem at Motorola. “The more the system understands what matters to you, the less time you spend managing tools and the more time you spend actually doing the work.”

In fact, in a recent survey, 70% of HR leaders said their organizations planned to invest in digital employee twins. A separate Harvard Business Review article refers to personal AI twins as “digital doppelgangers,” saying they might not be mainstream for a few years, but that some organizations are already exploring using AI twins to help high-performing employees with their daily tasks. One day a founder or creator could give a virtual talk or conference speech, sending a twin in their place, not as a physical replica, but a voice replica that represents their ideas and thinking. 

Gen Z is already fluent in juggling information across multiple apps and devices, switching contexts constantly without thinking twice. But it also means they deal with a lot of fragmentation. As personal AI evolves, we also could see both creatives and professionals using twins to create work presentations on their behalf, personalize outreach communications to new clients and potential investors, or to share their knowledge with colleagues as they hand off a project or move into a new role. 

With access to their personal intelligence anywhere and anytime, Gen Z and other workers can shift their time from rote tasks to meaningful, creative work that advances their career satisfaction and gives them more time to be who they are.

The next wave of AI at work

Unveiled earlier this year, Lenovo Qira delivers context-aware personal AI, creating one intelligence that moves with you across devices rather than living inside one experience. It uses a hybrid approach — some intelligence can run on-device and some in the cloud depending on the experience, and enables users to access personal intelligence and tackle work from anywhere — without having to switch between applications. Rather than an app-based AI confined to a specific device, Lenovo Qira understands what you’re doing at any given moment and aids your work. 

“Without shared context, you’re constantly reorienting yourself. You’re reopening things, trying to remember where you left off,” says Snow. “This is about saving time and effort repeatedly.”

Lenovo Qira operates across PCs, tablets, smartphones, wearables, and instead of restarting, it remembers where you left off, helping you in the moment wherever you are. It learns your intent and behaviors over time, delivering proactive, contextual suggestions and a more tailored, natural experience the more you use it.

You’re in the driver’s seat

The concept of digital twinning is something that large companies such as Boeing and Siemens have been using for several years. It helps virtually replicate physical assets, like factories and equipment for training purposes. But a personal AI twin is based just on you.

Kim Carson, an AI futurist and ethics expert and a strategic advisor to startups, says unlike typical AI models that are trained on large public datasets, a personal AI twin is trained on an individual’s data. 

“We’re going to take all of the data that there is about you, or all the data you’ve created as a content creator, and we’re going to feed the model with that data,” Carson explains. “So, what we should get is a representation of you and only you.”

One of the advantages of using a personal AI connected to your own devices is the layers of security that can be built in. Lenovo Qira processes data locally on a user’s device, which not only allows for a personalized experience, but also strengthens security using secure cloud services that provide an additional layer of controls. It never collects personal data without a user’s permission. Users are provided with clear settings to manage capabilities, control how information is used, and adjust preferences over time. 

“We see personalization less as a set of knobs to tune and more as a living understanding,” says Snow. “With permission, Lenovo Qira learns your patterns over time – how you work, what matters to you, and what information is truly relevant in the moment, but always bound by user control and ongoing consent.”

Future uses for digital doppelgangers

As the technology evolves, experts agree that organizations and individuals need guardrails. Nichol Bradford, an expert on AI in the workplace, says personal ambient AI shouldn’t be used in conflict, commitments, or crisis. Creative conflicts involve dispute management in the workplace and commitments involve deals between multiple people. Crises, such as large business or external disruptions, should be resolved human-to-human, with AI only acting as an assistant. 

“Companies and society are groups of humans solving problems together. If you have a misunderstanding with another human, do not send your AI agent to talk to that person,” Bradford says. 

Personal AI twins could reimagine work as we know it and privacy-forward personal AI tools are emerging that could give creators and other workers access to powerful capabilities. This can look like a hybrid approach where much of the intelligence runs on-device and some in the cloud, depending on the experience. But the biggest principle is that the user stays in charge. 

“It’s not about piling on one more app or one more AI–it’s about making the tools and devices you already rely on connect into a single, seamless experience,” says Snow. 

“But it’s still early. Getting the balance right between autonomy and user control is going to be critical as this evolves.”