Dell Tech and Dauntless XR: AI PCs Driving Visualization Innovation - Six Five On The Road

At Dell Tech World 2025, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman speak with Dell Technologies' Jon Siegal, SVP, CSG & Online Marketing, and Lori-Lee Elliott, CEO, Dauntless XR, about how Dauntless XR is leveraging AI and Dell's advanced technology to transform complex datasets into actionable 3D visual insights across industries like aerospace, construction, and space exploration.

Here are the key takeaways:

🔹Transforming Complex Data into 3D Insights: Dauntless XR's innovative approach to converting intricate datasets into intuitive 3D visualizations is revolutionizing how industries understand and interact with information, with AI playing a critical role.

🔹Dell Pro Max Workstations = Innovation Engines: The conversation highlights Dauntless XR's strategic choice of Dell Pro Max workstations for their AI computational needs and the significant impact this technology has had on accelerating their workflow and driving innovation speed.

🔹XR Enhanced by Lightweight AI: Dell’s computational power, paired with Dauntless XR's tools such as Aura XR, which leverages lightweight AI models to deliver enhanced performance on XR headsets, is providing the foundation for this cutting-edge application.

🔹Looking Ahead: The Future of Immersive Data: The discussion explores Dauntless XR's future directions, including expansion into new industries, advancements in AI-driven tools for deskless workers, and continued strategic partnerships to further their impact.

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Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

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Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is back here on Dell TV. It's been a great event so far. We heard the big keynote. We interviewed Michael, talked to him about pretty much big picture AI, how they're implementing it and enabling enterprise to do that. And maybe we talked a little about economics too.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a big morning for Dell Technologies World, Pat, you know, we've had conversations now across services. A lot of customer zero, customer focus. Right. And this really matches a theme that you and I talk a lot about, which is really bringing all this technology talk to life. How is it impacting businesses? How do we account for these investments? And so we've had quite a bit of that Pat and we're just getting started.

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Patrick Moorhead: That's right. And Dell really, excuse me, I mean AI really spans the gamut. And oh, by the way, so does Dell. You're looking at client computing at the endpoint. You're looking at the enterprise edge, you're looking at enterprise data centers and even CSP data centers Dell spans the gamut. But what I want to do is focus on AI and XR. You know, XR took the world by storm probably five years ago. You know, I think people thought that it's one of those technologies that I believe long term is going to be bigger than everybody thinks. But it got a little bit of a slow start here. What was one of the missing ingredients? I believe it was AI.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think that we are going to see a lot of these trends come back to life and they're going to accelerate. And you think XR is one of them, IOT is one of them.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right.

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Daniel Newman: What we needed was this data gravity that we're starting to get now. And then of course, all this computing power that we're figuring out how to put into smaller and smaller envelopes. And I think what's going to happen next is going to be really impressive.

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Patrick Moorhead: Let's bring in Lori-Lee Elliot from Dauntless and Jonathan, great to see you again.

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Jon Siegal: Great to see you guys as well.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the show.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Thanks for having us.

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Patrick Moorhead: Absolutely.

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Daniel Newman: So, Lori-Lee, let's start with a little introduction to Dauntless XR. Let's talk about your cutting edge data. Let's talk about how you're driving innovation into industries. Let's get to those customer use cases and, and then tie it together with a little, a little AI for us.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: A little AI sprinkled on top. Now you said it so well as well that this recent surge of AI has really acted as a catalyst for a lot of these other Industries that kind of went through the hype cycle and it was a little bit unclear where things were going and now it's coming back around again and we're definitely seeing that with XR. So just to give you some background on what we do at Dauntless is we make software for frontline workers that are doing really daunting and ambitious projects.

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Patrick Moorhead: Dauntless, there we go. I see what you're doing there.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: And yeah, so we ended up doing that through two applications and you'll see why as we talk through the use cases. But we developed one application called Aura that handles machine generated data and that creates an immersive digital twin for all different industries, different sectors, and different geographic areas. And then we have Katana for human generated data. And that's where we get to add in some really fun AI that we're working on right now with object recognition. So with Katana, we're doing a lot of, you know, kind of the XR interface for AI and step by step workflows and instructions and delivering data to these frontline workers when they need it most as seamlessly as possible. And your second question was kind of like where we're applying this? We have some really great industrial applications. One of the really interesting ones we did was for Aura, where we created a digital twin, a live digital twin of the inner solar system. So we pulled all of the sensor data from NASA's various satellites that are monitoring the sun and we pulled that in and created an immersive session so you can go in and see what all of these sensors are doing in real time. You know, see things like aurora and the aurora forecast. If we're going to get a solar flare and the sun's very active right now, so if you go in there, you see things, you know, kind of popping off here and there. And you know, that was a really great demonstration of how much data we can pull in and consolidate. There were a lot of challenges behind that too, but maybe we can talk about that later.

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Patrick Moorhead: This must be an exciting addition to this. I mean, you've got the full PC portfolio. That's right. Interesting addition for sure.

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Jon Siegal: Yeah. Look, I mean, first of all, I want to thank Lori-Lee and Dauntless for the partnership. This journey that we've been on together is incredible. And now the timing just seems to really be perfect in terms of the emergence of AI, the emergence of what we've been building with the Dell Pro Max portfolio, which I know you've been using. And really the goal of Dell Pro Max is really to help customers like Dauntless to really develop AI more simply and faster.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Right.

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Jon Siegal: And so the frames per second that were needed is something that we could provide. The simplicity and also the fact that you're using AI on device to develop this is really interesting too. It's the data gravity, if you will. Right. Having the data and the models co-located with the compute gives you advantages from privacy and security perspective as well as from a lower latency perspective in performance. So I just, it's warming to see the technology and what. And the use cases now that it's able to bring.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, certainly not a lot more exciting than PowerPoint. Yeah, seriously. So AI PCs, the first ones were actually announced about a year and a half ago and then about a year ago PCs with really giant AI NPUs on them came out. There are a lot of different brands to choose from out there. Lori-Lee, we're sitting here on the Dell stage. I'm assuming you chose Dell here. Why did you choose them and how's the experience been?

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Lori-Lee Elliott: At Dauntless, we're definitely an engineering driven organization. So quite simply, when it came time to go out and start buying hardware for our engineers, I asked them, I was like, what do you need? What do you want? And their first choice was Dell. So there we go. We went out there, we did a nice job.

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Jon Siegal: Yeah, yeah, I think it was a good match. Like I said, I think it was meeting the use case with the right technology at the right time.

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Daniel Newman: It's always great when the customer sort of helps you. And Dell obviously generally sits at the top in terms of demand and of course in commercial has been on an incredible run. But Lori-Lee, I'm kind of interested in how you're thinking about incorporating because we hear a lot about on-device LLMs. Right. And so this is one of those applications where you're sort of bringing it to life. It's about power efficiency, it's about being able to put small models on, it's about using the NPU. How are you incorporating these lightweight models into Dauntless and kind of how are you thinking about really making these models yours and unique? Because that's the other thing too is going off the shelf is not going to differentiate for long. So you have to be kind of thinking about how you're cutting these up and making them special to take the daunt out of all the work that you're helping support.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Yes, remove the daunt.

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Daniel Newman: That’s going to be a recurring theme.

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Patrick Moorhead: Always good for one of those a day.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Yeah, he gets a quota. Yeah. I think what's a little bit different about what we're doing with AI versus a lot of other companies is we aren't primarily working with a language learning model. We're using image segmentation, which we use for object recognition. So when you have a headset on, we're using the forward facing cameras to look at what you're looking at and then provide you data based on that. So one of the things you can actually do tomorrow on the floor is you can use our headset and our Katana app to identify some LEGO bricks and it will give you instructions on which bricks to select to build a little model that we did just for Dell and we are using that use case in a lot of industrial applications as well. Sadly, there's not a lot of big enterprises out there putting together LEGO models, but, you know, so to do that.

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Jon Siegal: We have a model.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I got you. It took me a while, but I got there.

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Jon Siegal: Just helping you.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: So the AI we're using for that is image segmentation and computer vision, which we then roll into what you experience is object recognition from the user side. And to do that, we have to train the model which we are using the Dell Pro Max to do, which has been such a great experience. To do that training, we're using real data, so real images, but we're also using synthetic data because you need a lot of images to train the model, make it really accurate, increase those accuracy ratings as high as we can get. So that's one of the ways we're integrating AI with our Katana app. And then we're doing some kind of more conventional content generation with Aura to make synthetic training environments. So being able to prompt, you know, hey, I need the environment to look like this. Can you spin that up in a 3D immersive space? And, you know, that's kind of coming in the future, but that's a little bit more of a conventional use of the AI that we have available today.

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Daniel Newman: So let's jump to the future, talk a little bit about kind of where this all goes. I think we're in early days. I have the feeling that, you know, first of all, it's really good. And Jon, thanks for sort of helping bring this to the forefront, because I know, Pat, we always like to sort of look at, you know, we hear so much about language. Everything right now is language. And then we've sort of gotten into, you know, a little bit of kind of video creation, but there's so many different ways that we can practically bring AI into the world. How are you sort of thinking about, you know, scaling this and, and Jon, maybe once she gives me that answer, you could talk a little bit about where Dell helps companies like Dauntless in their journey.

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Jon Siegal: Absolutely, yeah.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: No, I think one of the things we're definitely going to do going forward that we hadn't been doing as much is reaching out to the different partners with the enabling technologies to work with them more. We have been very in our lane, blinders on and when we finally put our heads up to look around we're like, oh, there's so many people here that want to help us build all of this great tech. So we'll definitely be doing more of that in the future. And then as far as what we're looking at with the technology, we really see XR as one of the primary interfaces that people will use to interact with AI. If we think about right now, how most people interact with their eyes, it's through this little chat window. Like we're going back to like 2002 chat rooms and you know, it's one of the most revolutionary technologies of our generation and we're kind of in a, we're in a time machine. So we really see XR and the lightweight XR glasses that are coming out to be potentially one of the ways that you interact with AI each day. So we're really building out the Katana application to support that. And you know, we're focusing, like we said, on serving those frontline workers and industrial sectors first. But we do hope to go into more consumer facing verticals as well. And then as far as what we're doing with Aura, like I mentioned, we want to bring in that synthetic environment generation because we think that could be it. Really expand and scale who can use the application and make the Digital Twin product a little bit more self service. Because right now a lot of digital twins, even the non immersive ones, are basically expensive consulting. Right? Like you're going to be paying lots and lots of money to keep that thing updated and running. But the way we're kind of building out Aura, you will be able to plug in new data sources and add in, if you have an AI model for running a simulation, you'll be able to layer that in or plug it in pretty seamlessly without needing to, you know, dial a developer and pay for more engineering. So that's kind of where we're heading with those two products. And like I said, working more with our partners now.

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Jon Siegal: That's fantastic. I mean, one of the things we've been really focused on is the Dell Pro AI studio, which is really about helping companies of all sizes, not just enterprises, but small medium businesses, you know, that we've been hearing from today. We heard from Dauntless, we heard from Norby earlier in the keynote. And it's really about helping, you know, smaller businesses get started in building AI applications. You know, on devices. It can be pretty daunting. Sorry.

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Daniel Newman: All right, that's three.

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Jon Siegal: All right, we hit that quota. It can be pretty challenging in terms of all the different models that you have to contend with, all the different run times and tool sets and silicon. And so what we're trying to do is help companies like Dauntless XR to really help figure out how to actually get started, pick the right model and make sure it can be easily deployed and managed going forward on a fleet of AI PCs and then from there. You know, a lot of our announcements this week have actually been about Dell Pro Max, coincidentally, or maybe not. And it really is. How can we take it to another level in terms of AI AI developers as well as AI inferencing from an AI developer perspective. We recently announced. You guys were at Nvidia. Yes, GTC. We introduced the Dell Pro Max with Nvidia's GB10, which is essentially a desktop workstation that can fit in the palm of your hand, literally. And it actually supports a petaflop. Right. 1000 tops.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right.

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Jon Siegal: Which is great for developers that want to get started at the desk side, you know, and reap the benefits of having AI on device and the security and privacy and performance advantages of that at the same time. Actually tomorrow. But I think it's okay. I can preview it now. We're also going to be announcing the first mobile workstation that's going to have an enterprise grade discrete NPU. Yes, you guys were asking about that earlier. That one's going to come from Qualcomm and that's really about supercharging, inferencing at the edge and doing it for really large models.

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Patrick Moorhead: Right.

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Jon Siegal: We're talking models that are, you know, like 109 billion parameters, which is insane for  a workstation. So it's really, I think, game changing in terms of taking these, these large models and allowing them to be run portably at the edge and who knows, the use cases are endless from there.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So Lori-Lee, I want to put you on the spot here a little bit. So with the CEOs that we talk to, either through advisory or interviewing as part of the Six Five Live, we talk a lot about employees getting benefit from AI. And obviously you're using AI, it's integral to your product that you're selling to other people. What other areas of AI value are you experiencing inside of your company?

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Inside of the company?

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Patrick Moorhead: Yes.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: We definitely have seen benefits in, in software development, like being able to engineer faster, with help. And then on more of the business side, we've been able to produce and do so much more in house as far as marketing, content creation, you know, even basic things like refreshing our website. It really takes a lot of the cognitive load off and you know, we always put a human touch on everything at the end. And I'm sure if you speak to our CEO, he will reiterate that no code goes out the door, without human eyeballs on it at this point. And it's really helped us, you know, do quite a lot with a very small team. So that's kind of where we've seen it internally. Does that answer your question?

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Patrick Moorhead: Oh, absolutely. You nailed it. Thank you.

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Daniel Newman: You're going faster, you're moving the business forward. You're doing it for the customers, you're doing it for yourselves. You're doing it with Dell. Jon, Lori-Lee, want to thank you both so much for making the time of a great Dell Technologies World. Thanks for joining The Six Five and being part of Dell TV.

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Jon Siegal: It's a pleasure.

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Lori-Lee Elliott: Yeah, thanks for having us.

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Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for joining us for this session. We're going to take a little break. We'll see you all in a little bit.

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