Enterprise AI Transformation: Lessons and Guidance From an AI Leader

How is AI technology translating into products and solutions that empower global companies? 

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At The Six Five Summit, Enterprise AI Track Opener Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, ISG and Telecom at Dell Technologies, joins host David Nicholson for a to share how Dell, a frontrunner in AI technology for over a decade, leverages its experience to develop products, solutions, and offers that empower global companies in their AI journey.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Dell's Journey to Pioneering AI: Explore Dell Technologies' extensive history as a leading provider in AI technologies, tracing their evolution and continuous innovation over more than a decade.

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🔹The Accelerated Evolution of AI: Gain insights into the rapid and profound evolution of AI over just the last two years, and its far-reaching impact on various industries.

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🔹Crafting AI-Driven Products & Solutions: Delve into the intricate process behind the creation of Dell's cutting-edge AI-driven products and solutions, built on deep industry experience.

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🔹Lessons from AI Transformation Frontlines: Learn invaluable lessons gleaned by Dell Technologies in actively supporting countless companies through their complex AI transformation journeys, offering practical guidance for success.

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Learn more at Dell Technologies.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

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David Nicholson: Welcome to the Six Five Summit, AI Unleashed. I'm Dave Nicholson with Six Five Media, and I'm joined today by Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President Product Marketing in ISG and Telecom at Dell Technologies. For the Enterprise AI Track Opening Keynote on the Enterprise AI Transformation, with lessons and guidance from an AI leader. Welcome, Varun.

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Varun Chhabra: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me.

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David Nicholson: So, let's dive right into this. We've heard a lot about this thing called the Dell AI Factory. What is that? What are you talking about?

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Varun Chhabra: Yeah, it's a great question, Dave. So about a year and a half ago, as we started to look at what's happening with AI, with our enterprise customers, as well as other segments such as CSPs and sovereign entities that are looking to take advantage of AI, the most common feedback we heard was, "Hey, I get that AI is important. I know that it's really, really critical for my business and to stay ahead. What I need help with is, how do I get started? Or if I've already got started, how do I scale? There's so many different corners you need to look around when it comes to AI, simplify all of this for me." And that's really where the idea of the Dell AI Factory was born. The Dell AI Factory is really an end-to-end solution that incorporates our infrastructure. So whether it's compute, storage, networking, cyber resilience capabilities, with an ecosystem, whether it's software or hardware, integrated with our infrastructure. 

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And then also, capabilities and professional services, whether it's consulting early in the cycle on what your AI strategy should be, how you should do stakeholder alignment, how you should think about your data before you get any AI effort started. All the way through to a deployment, guidance, as well as support and guidance with how to scale once you've gone out of the POC area. And really, over the last year, year and a half that we've been talking about Dell AI Factory, we've just seen this message really, really resonate with our customers. At Dell Tech World in Las Vegas that we just concluded a few weeks ago, we actually shared that there are over 3,000 customers now for the Dell AI Factory, and we've had I think over 130 or 140 new releases within the span of a year, year and a half. So tremendous amount of innovation and momentum that we are bringing to our customers on behalf of our ecosystem and our partners. And then also, a lot of momentum in terms of customer adoption.

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David Nicholson: So what are you hearing from customers, in terms of kind of where they are in this process? You could say there was a period of time when fear of missing out sort of ruled the day. Have people come to a place where they can methodically work with you to move forward?

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Varun Chhabra: Yeah, I think so, but I also think as with all things that happen in technology transitions like this one, Dave, there is a spectrum of where customers are. There's really a maturity curve, in terms of where we find customers. I think we really think of this as, if I think about it in the last... When the AI surge really started about two and a half years ago, the early adopters were obviously the cloud service providers, as well as large model trainers. And those are still a large part of the infrastructure conversation today, is they have very unique requirements, they have large scale deployments, they're really at the cutting edge of deploying at scale. Over the last year though, we have started to see a large upswing in adoption from the enterprise, which is really the key trend to watch for. Obviously, the CSP and model trainer momentum has continued and if anything it continues to grow, as I'm sure we're all seeing in the news. But with enterprises, I think there is a spectrum of where customers are. There's a large number of customers that are still in the POC phase, but every day there are more and more customers that we see that are moving from POC to production. And really, what they want from us is whether they're in the POC or they're starting to think about moving from POC to production, or they're in the production phases, help us understand this complex dynamic that's happening.

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 How do I think about my data, for example? That's a big bottleneck that we often hear from customers wherever they are. They could be in their POC and they're starting to think about that, or they're moving from POC to production, as well, I have so much data that's sitting across so many different locations. Could be on-premises in your data center, in their data centers. It could be with a cloud service provider in the public cloud. It could be in a private cloud environment with a company like CoreWeave. It could be out increasingly at the edge. How do I make sense of all of this data? What is the right amount of data? What's good data look like? How do I think about bringing all of this together? How do I manage all of this? So we've got capabilities not just from a product perspective, but also from a services, professional services perspective to really help people with that. That's one area that we definitely run into a lot, and then we'll talk a little bit more about our own experiences at Dell and how implementing AI within our organization, how that's really, really, really helped us be, I think a strong strategic advisor for our customers as well.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, I definitely want to hear about how Dell is drinking its own champagne, as we say. But first, you mentioned a term that's one of my favorites, one of my favorite words, ecosystem. How the heck does Dell manage that ecosystem? Because you have to be Switzerland for your customers. What has that looked like over the last year and a half? What does it like working with partners?

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Varun Chhabra: I think, Dave, it's definitely a very dynamic space, but the one thing I always talk about when we are with customers is that Dell is no stranger to being Switzerland, right? We have across different transitions, whether it's in the laptops and client space, servers, storage, etc, we have a long history of working with a multi-dimensional ecosystem to really build an open ecosystem on our customer's behalf, and that's what we're doing with AI. I really love this line because I think it goes to the heart of what we're trying to do here is that we're really trying to build this open ecosystem on our customer's behalf for AI. And it is a unique challenge, as you're implying, with AI. And what customers are seeing is, and what we're seeing is the pace of change is so rapid. We are very much at the early innings of AI adoption and AI maturity in the industry. So you're seeing all the classic signs of an early stage disruption, where there's a lot of new vendors that are coming into the fray, a lot of different partners to work, with evolving business models. And quite frankly, the pace of change with AI is warp speed compared to what we've seen. Right? So there's all these dynamics to work with, work through and work with. That actually is a huge opportunity for us at Dell to serve our customers better and drive more value.

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So recently at Dell Tech World as an example, or even before at GTC with NVIDIA, and with what we're doing with other vendors as well, you'll see that we are, over the last two years, we have been at the forefront of announcing partnerships with partners up and down the stack. And our key focus has been through all of these things has been, how do we make this simple? How do we make this turnkey? So I'll give you a few examples. We've got a special flavor of our AI factory, which is the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. We've got an incredibly strong relationship with NVIDIA. We've driven a lot of joint customer value in the last two years. In fact, two years ago, I was just telling my team this, it's hard to believe it's been two years now, but at Dell Tech World two years ago, NVIDIA and us were on stage talking about this thing called Project Helix, which was really, this is I think maybe four or five months after ChatGPT 3.5 came out, and we all had that massive aha-moment that we're still digesting. We started with Project Helix, and at that point in time, I remember talking to customers, talking to analysts, talking to the press. There was just a lot of questions of, how is this going to look? Is this just a flash in the pan, etc, etc? Helix basically became the AI Factory Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, and it is whatever the opposite of a flash in the pan is. It has been so wildly successful and we've had such a pace of innovation and joint value that we've delivered to customers.

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And we're doing the same thing with other silicon providers and GPU providers as well. We've got strong relationships with the AMD, strong relationship with Intel. We are now on our fourth iteration of the AI platform with the AMD. We just announced at DTW, the AI platform with Intel that takes advantage of the innovation that Intel is bringing true in the GPU space. So very, very excited to work with all of these partners. And really, that's only the beginning of the ecosystem here. We're just scratching the surface. These NVIDIA, Intel, AMD are so important, but what we're seeing another dimension of the innovation is really in the model space, in the framework space. And there, I really think we've been leading the industry on integration and partnerships with folks that are in the software stack, if you will, or in the model or framework space.

This year at DTW in May, we just announced partnerships with Glean, with Mistral, with Google, with Cohere, with... We've been talking about our partnership with Meta for a really long time as well, to bring Llama on premises. And in many of these cases, whether it's Llama, whether it's Google, whether it's Cohere, we have been at the time of announcement, the first on-prem vendor that they've been working with. 

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And the reason why I think they like to work with us, these vendors like to work with us, is that we've got a very clear perspective on making things simple. Right? We've got a marketplace on Hugging Face that's specifically for Dell Enterprise customers. Customers can go and choose the right models that they want for the right Dell hardware all filtered in for them, and then they can take advantage of automated scripting to really deploy these models and run them, and then we've done the testing and validation in the past. And then we're working with folks like Red Hat as well, to deploy their approaches to AI. So I know I've rambled on a little bit, but it's really important to talk about just the work that's happening at all aspects of the ecosystem. And then we continue, we've also announced with GSIs like Accenture, Deloitte, and many, many more, the work that we're doing to really bring AI higher up the cycle earlier in the customer conversations with them as well. So you're right, the ecosystem is a really, really vibrant space. There's a lot of different dynamics going on, but we're doing a lot in this space. And then one thing I forget to mention is, obviously this is not just the infrastructure space, this is also in the PC space. We're doing a lot of work with Microsoft, with NVIDIA, with Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD, to bring the latest and greatest AI innovation to our AI PCs as well.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, yeah, and Varun, I wouldn't call it rambling. I would call it a Herculean attempt at sharing the narrative and trying to impress upon people that this balancing act that you're doing at Dell, that includes agility and choice with being prescriptive enough because frankly, choice sounds really good until you're completely confused and you're a customer and you have no idea what to do. And of course, let's be honest, this stuff is changing so quickly, that that agility, you'll be working with partners a year from now probably that maybe today we don't think are necessarily vital because of the shift.

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Varun Chhabra: Absolutely.

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David Nicholson: We hear about moving from 80% training towards and 20% inference, to a complete flip of that. The AI PC, all of these things, as you said. So yeah, don't call it rambling. I feel for you, you guys are doing a good job at juggling.

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Varun Chhabra: I think it's a huge part of the AI factory value proposition is really the open ecosystem. And you're absolutely right. There's usually a trade-off between choice and simplicity. What we're trying to do is thread that needle and make it easy for all of our customers to adopt these partner-driven solutions on top of Dell infrastructure on-prem, because we genuinely believe that's the right thing for our customers.

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David Nicholson: Yeah. Well, give me an example of some of the things that you're doing within Dell. We used to say, "Eat your own dog food," and someone came up with, "No, no, no, no, drink your own champagne." So tell us about some of the champagne you're drinking, some of the things that you're doing that demonstrate to the market that not only is Dell willing to sell these solutions, but they're not afraid to implement them.

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Varun Chhabra: Yeah, there's definitely an aspect of leading into this to eat your own long food or drink your own champagne. I'd say it's even more basic. The value of this is even more basic. I cannot tell you the number of conversations I've had over the last year with customers where the conversation is not so much about selling, it's actually about helping customers understand, hey, out of the, I don't know, hundreds of use cases that stakeholders within a company are telling IT teams that they want support on, how do you prioritize? How do you really decide what the right value is, where the right value is? And internally at Dell, we've been very aggressive with rolling out AI for a variety of different use cases. And I think what really stands out are a few salient principles that I think customers find very, very helpful.

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The first one is, it's very, very important to really prioritize your use cases. Like I said at Dell, and Jeff Clark talked about this on stage as well at DTW. When we started out at Dell, we had, I don't know, I think it was like 700 or 800 different use cases internally that were being considered at various stages. Some were just ideas, some were actually being trialed out, some were kind of on the way to POC, there was a wide variety of use cases. Well, that's not really a scalable way to really deploy AI, right? Chances are that if you split your resources and approaches across so many different use cases, you're just not going to get the right value. So, we have our own internal methodology where we look at what's an axis of ROI versus feasibility? We split things up and look at it from that perspective. And that really helped us be methodical and really, really thoughtful about what we're going to focus on, the few projects we're going to focus on first.

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And then also, the other thing I talk to IT leaders about is that IT leaders actually have a unique vantage point in AI and a unique, almost a responsibility to actually drive leadership alignment on what these use cases need to be, because there's no one else other than IT that is able to see left and right on what are the different use cases that are being proposed. So this is, we always talk about, and Dave, and I'm sure you've had these conversations and you continue to have these conversations about. How do we go, how does IT go from being seen in some companies still as a cost center, to a real difference maker? AI is a really, really interesting opportunity to do that, is because IT is being asked to go solve for these things and say, "Hey," most of the conversations I have with IT leaders, the first question I get is like, "I've got so many people asking me for help. How do I sort this out?" And I usually tell them, "It's actually not your responsibility to sort this out. What your responsibility is, is to create a forum and bring your leaders together, your C-suite together." And actually, you can step in and drive a framework and some strategic thinking around helping your leaders and the C-suite actually have that conversation, creating a forum where you can then actually drive prioritization, because that's when the real value comes.

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So you were probably looking for an answer on how we're using our own technology to drive this, and of course we are. We've got most of the partnerships that we announced and the capabilities that we have around that we are trialing them or actually are in production with many of them. And it's not just us, right? At Dell Tech World, Jensen Huang and Michael Dell were talking and they talked about how our respective companies are using the AI factory within NVIDIA internally for our various efforts. So it's definitely happening across our partners as well. But the real value actually that I've found in customer conversations, and then many of our sellers find when we're talking to, or our executives find when we're talking to customers, is sharing our experiences about them that are not about products, that are actually about processes and alignment opportunities that you can do before you start actually deploying technology. And that's really how we want to show up in Dell as a strategic advisor or trusted advisor to our customers.

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I mean, Jeff said this in slightly more colorful language at Dell Tech World, if you take AI and you apply it to a crappy process, you basically get crappy results at a much faster pace. Right? So while it's easy for us to go and say, "Hey, you should use this server or this storage for..." We are being very thoughtful about having the right conversation upfront because that's really going to drive the right conversation or right outcomes for us and for our customers in the long term. And that's, I think why you see so much momentum for us with counter customers is that we're taking a differentiated approach and being thoughtful about asking customers to pause and really think about what they're trying to do before they start deploying our technology and our partner's technology.

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David Nicholson: Yeah, I think it's a really good point that you raise, about the position that it has in this AI revolution. Any MBA would tell you, "First, figure out what the business problem is that you want to solve, or the innovation you want to create, the disruption you want to prevent. First, figure that out, then talk about technology." I would argue that that doesn't work in AI the way that maybe it did in the past as much. You have to have someone like Dell in working with IT, because if you've never seen these tools before, your imagination will be stifled. And that's what I have seen with Dell, working with its partners, with IT, to help business understand what the capabilities are. If you've only seen a shovel and you've never seen a bulldozer, your imagination for what you might do with a plot of land is very, very different. So it is, it's definitely a balancing act. So, what's the call to action from your perspective? I mean, what's the best way? I'm going to be giving a talk in a little while about what a CEO's first move should be in AI. Let's say there's somebody out there hypothetically that has not made that first move at all, and let's say hypothetically they haven't talked to Dell yet. What's a good first step?

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Varun Chhabra: Well, they should definitely talk to Dell, I think that's a great first step. But jokes aside, I think what I encourage customers to do is really, really think about, where are they on the use case selection? Do they have a prioritized list? Then, do they have stakeholder alignment for that prioritized list at the highest level? And the step after that is for those, let's just say they land on three or four or five use cases. Before they even talk about automation or simplification through AI tools or AI infrastructure, have they really standardized and simplified their processes? Right? Only then do you really start thinking about what's the right tool? What's the right framework? Do I go open source, closed source? Do I build my own model? Do I just take an off the shelf model, etc, etc? But really, I think it's thinking about those dimensions of, what are the right use cases that I want to prioritize? Are my most senior stakeholders in the organization, are they aligned, these are the prioritized use cases that we're going to devote resources to? And then third, are the processes that accompany these use cases, simple, simplified, and standardized across the company? And then you start looking at technology.

And I think across all of this, what you've got to ask yourself is, do I have the right partner that's supporting me in this conversation, or is the vendor I'm talking to just interested in selling me their gear or their agent or their software? Right? And I think it's pretty clear when you start having those conversations, who's what. I think that lens is going to be really, really helpful.

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David Nicholson: Great advice, Varun. Excellent advice. Well, we've heard a lot about Dell's AI Factory. I'd like to thank you for joining us for this Enterprise AI Track Opening Keynote at the Six Five Summit. Stay connected with us on social and explore more conversations at sixfivemedia.com/summit. On behalf of Six Five Media, I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining us.

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Disclaimer: The Six Five Summit 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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