Last year, the focus at Dell Technologies World was on multi-cloud, with AI receiving just a mention. But this year, Dell took that nascent AI product roadmap and demonstrated that it has gone all-in. AI is now its unifying theme and the driver behind a key concept in the company’s strategy, the Dell AI Factory.
That AI Factory comes in the form of products across the company’s huge portfolio of products and services from the edge to the cloud, together with technologies from strategic partners, too.
“We are unleashing technology that will accelerate scientific discovery and development with the power to transform our organizations, our lives, and our world,” said Dell CEO Michael Dell in the opening keynote address, noting that earlier this month marked 40 years since he started the company building PCs in his college dorm room.
He called this moment with AI a generational opportunity for productivity, innovation and growth and advised customers and partners “to reimagine and reinvent your organizations to harness this hyper intelligence.”
Dell Welcomes CEOs of ServiceNow, Samsung SDS, Nvidia
Acknowledging that AI is a team sport, Dell was joined on stage by the top leaders of several of the company’s strategic partners, also technology giants, including ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, Samsung SDS president and CEO Sungwoo Hwang, and Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
Together, the leaders of these companies shared their collective vision of where AI will take businesses in the future.
“I believe that every company has to become an intelligence company in the era of AI,” said McDermott. “All industries are going to be entirely reinvented and speed will end up being the ultimate competitive advantage.”
McDermott said that the AI revolution is not about 10% incremental improvement year over year.
“It’s about exponential thinking. A complete breakthrough. Take cost out and improve productivity and absolutely empower your people,” he said.
Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang said AI marks a new era.
“For the first time in history, we have the ability to manufacture intelligence,” he said. “The last Industrial Revolution was manufacturing software, previously it was manufacturing electricity, and now we are manufacturing intelligence as industries.”
The Infrastructure Behind AI
AI requires infrastructure, and that comes in the form of servers, data storage and clients. Michael Dell said that 83% of CIOs plan to repatriate some of their workloads from the public cloud back to on-premises in 2024. Partners at the conference told ChannelE2E that they are seeing some customers wanting to move workloads back to on-premises infrastructure as a cost saving measure because cloud costs have increased.
Among Dell’s top announcements at the event was the release of Power Store Prime, the evolution of the company’s Power Store storage product. Power Store Prime combines all flash technology with new customer and partner benefits, Dell said, including up to 66% more performance.
Michael Dell also announced five new AI PCs with Copilot Plus, powered by the most recent Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series processors. He said that more models and options will come later this year. These devices all come with three processors – a CPU, a GPU and an NPU (neural processing unit).
Dell representatives said that all this processing power on the client ensures that Copilot’s AI capabilities will work regardless of whether the PC is connected to the internet. That can be helpful in remote locations that do not have reliable or continuous internet connections.
“We are at the dawn of a new age of cognition – the age of AI,” Michael Dell said. “The possibilities are igniting the spirits of today’s greatest innovators.”
