Businesses small and large have many questions about adopting generative AI, from where to start to more specific concerns about power and cooling.
Dell Technologies Vice Chairman and COO Jeff Clarke wants any company considering its path into AI and GenAI to know the way forward may be clearer than expected. The AI space has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last year, and it’s easy to see how some businesses could fear being left behind.
But like Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, who took to the DTW main stage Monday, Jeff is optimistic about the trends shaping AI adoption. The capabilities AI brings to users are within reach.
“It’s a pretty reasonable discipline that everyone in this room is capable of, or has probably already done inside their organizations,” Jeff told an audience of thousands during a keynote at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas Tuesday. And they can take comfort in the fact that Dell’s own GenAI journey is no different than theirs.
In customer meetings, Jeff hears some familiar questions: Where do I start? Where is our data and is it AI-ready? How do I choose a use case? What’s the ROI? Can I afford AI? Do I have the space, power and cooling? Is this just another IT rabbit hole?
Dell was no different when it began its AI journey two years ago, Jeff said. After getting over the shock of realizing Dell had more than 900 GenAI projects in process with data governance that was not as tight as it should’ve been and a lack of strategy and architecture to support it, the company got to work quickly.
With the right data, governance and architecture in place and a chief AI officer, the company could roll out the strategy and operating framework that became an early form of the Dell AI Factory.
To illustrate the point, Jeff highlighted Dell’s effort to extract value from a handful of services organization datasets at one time. This massive quantity of data was spread across many on-prem tools, and AI techniques like machine and deep learning, GenAI with a combination of RAG, prompt engineering and LLMs allowed the company to build a support assistant and make the most of that disparate service data, increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.
“This didn’t require the latest models, the latest GPUs, nor did it require significant resources,” Jeff said. “This GenAI use case is deployed on-prem where the data resides and is protected and secured by our data protection products. We moved GenAI to the data. This data is stored on Dell ECS storage in our standard data center… in a single rack, no additional power, no additional cooling was needed, and the ROI was less than three months.”
This support assistant example is one of six primary use cases that have emerged to help businesses capitalize on GenAI. The others are content creation and management; natural language search; design and data creation; code generation and document automation.
Every business, small and large, has those needs, Jeff said. “It’s time to get busy. This is the most disruptive technology I’ve seen in my career. Speed matters. Your competition is moving fast.”
CoreWeave Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo joined Jeff on stage for a discussion about what Jeff called “Big AI.” CoreWeave’s hyperscale capabilities are powered by Dell Technologies, and Jeff took the opportunity to ask Brian about the future of AI.
“There’s not going to be a killer app,” Brian said. “There’s going to be a subtle impact to peoples’ lives. It’s not going to be that one application you’re interacting with throughout the day. It’s going to be nuanced. The market and the world has to understand that we have to invest in the infrastructure.”
After sharing his perspective on the coming of agentic AI, Jeff introduced Arthur Lewis, president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, who said Dell’s goal is to help customers turn data into intelligence and complexity into clarity.
Arthur Introduced the Dell AI Data Platform, including Project Lightning, which is designed for agentic AI workloads, and a partnership with Google to bring Gemini models on-prem exclusively for Dell customers, and Cohere to simplify the deployment of agentic AI technology on-prem.
Arthur welcomed Cohere Co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez to talk about the integration of the Cohere North agentic AI platform with Dell’s infrastructure. The Cohere North platform makes it easy for teams to deploy AI agents securely and with strict control over data, they detailed.
Arthur discussed new PowerStore, as well as PowerProtect Data Domain products, as well as Dell’s PowerFlex 5.0 and the Dell Private Cloud, which is designed to make deploying and managing private cloud environments easy through validated designs for industry leading cloud systems.
Sam Burd, president of Dell’s Client Solutions Group, took the stage to encourage customers to imagine what they could do with AI models that put big goals within reach. AI PCs, Sam said, are the tools that make those models work by bringing AI power to customers’ data at the edge. Investing in AI PCs now is critical for future success, Sam said.
“The first step on this incredible journey is investing in PCs to future proof your journey,” Sam said. Sam welcomed Rob Johnson, USAA assistant vice president of information security, to the stage to discuss how the financial services company is using AI now and how it plans to use it in the future.
Speaking of the future, Sam teased the Dell Pro Max Workstation, which will launch later this year with a Qualcomm AI100 PC inference card. Sam said the system is the industry’s first enterprise workstation with an enterprise-grade discrete NPU capable of running inference on a 109 billion parameter model.
“The question is no longer whether AI belongs on the endpoint,” Sam said. “Instead, it is what will you do with server-grade compute power folded into your laptop. That choice is the new frontier.”
Jeff boiled the keynote down into a few closing words: “AI has taken off like a rocket ship. We have innovated at an unmatched pace with our Dell AI Factory. We are in the early innings for enterprise AI, and Dell Technologies understands the enterprise better than anyone. We have the right solutions and architecture and strongest ecosystem of partners. We are on the forefront of showcasing agentic AI at work at Dell and with our customers. We are here to help accelerate you on your journey.”