Citi to transition 70% of its workforce to Snapdragon mobile devices

US banking company Citi has announced its intention to transition the majority of its 300,000-strong global workforce to Snapdragon-powered mobile computing devices, citing battery life and AI features as key differentiators.

Speaking onstage at Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii, the company announced that it would be moving more than 70% of its users over to Windows on Snapdragon products such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.

“We heard from our employees about how AI made video calls more engaging by isolating human voices from distracting noises, blurring the background, and really addressing the needs of typical hybrid work environments,” said Patrick Javier, head of end-user computing for Citi. “With Snapdragon's dedicated AI engine optimising these processes, employees rave about how this enhances productivity without sacrificing performance or battery life.”

“Snapdragon also allows offloading of many other critical workloads required by bank IT, such as security, encryption, and communication onto specialised engines that sit directly on the SoC, again freeing precious CPU resources for the user or to further extend battery life.”

Based on the company’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 platform, the X13s is a 13in device with a 1.6kg weight and a thickness of 13.4mm, including 5G and Wi-Fi 6 support, and up to 32GB of RAM. Lenovo also claims the device offers up to 28 hours of battery life, and Javier highlighted this as a key consideration in Citi’s hardware refresh process.

“At Citi, we are committed to sustainable progress and to advancing solutions that address climate change and support our net zero strategy. With Snapdragon-powered PCs, we found that for office productivity and collaboration workloads typical of our employees, that battery can last a full day on one charge,” Javier said.

“Across our global employee base, that means the elimination of thousands of metric tonnes of carbon and accelerating our transition to the low carbon economy.”

Partnerships have been a strong focus of this year’s event for Qualcomm’s Windows on Snapdragon division; the Summit highlighted the deepening of its relationship with Microsoft through bringing additional AI enhancements such as noise cancellation and background blur for video calls to Windows 11, and the launch of the new Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G powered by the co-developed Microsoft SQ 3 Snapdragon processor.

In addition, the company also announced an expanded partnership with Adobe. The software company will continue to create native versions of its Creative Cloud programs for Windows on Snapdragon, with the latest additions being Adobe Fresco and Adobe Acrobat, joining its Photoshop and Lightroom products.