Dell Enters ‘Era of AI’ on Its 40th Anniversary

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — Dell Technologies wants to create an “easy button” to help customers leverage artificial intelligence (AI).

CEO Michael Dell was speaking at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas Monday. The global customer and partner get-together this year marks 40 years since Dell launched the company. The event this week has been dubbed the "AI Edition," marking a new era for the tech firm.

AI is “a generational opportunity for productivity, innovation and growth,” said Dell.

The CEO pointed to the newly launched Dell AI Factory, which encompasses the Dell AI portfolio of data center hardware, PCs, systems, software and services.

“We’re moving from computation toward cognition into the age of AI,” said Dell. “I’m more excited and more confident than ever in the opportunity than any other time in my life. We are unleashing technology that will accelerate scientific discovery and development with the power to transform our organizations, our lives and our world.”

Dell AI Factory with Nvidia

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Michael Dell to talk about partnering on the Dell AI Factory with its AI Enterprise software platform. The platform is underpinned by Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs, Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking fabric and Nvidia Bluefield DPUs.

He noted how Dell created an “easy button” when he launched the original PC business. Now, Huang said, Dell and Nvidia are doing the same with AI.

Customers can buy integrated capabilities tailored to their needs, or prevalidated, full-stack solutions. These can get them started on AI use cases that require accelerated performance like RAG, model training and inferencing.

“We’re making it easy for customers to create an easy button for AI for enterprise customers from the data center, the PC, accelerated systems, software services and solutions,” he said.

“We’re going to take this to a whole new level … these are giant supercomputers that we are going to build at scale, deliver at scale, and help you set it up at scale. So what appears to be incredibly complicated technology, [we can] make it easy for you guys to enjoy the accelerated computing part of it, the tricky part of it.”

Enterprise 'a Mess,' Says ServiceNow CEO

Elsewhere, Michael Dell was joined on stage by ServiceNow’s Bill McDermott, who shared his vision for the workflow-management software company to become “the AI and operating system for the enterprise.”

ServiceNow's Bill McDermott (left) with Michael Dell at Dell Technologies World 2024 in Las Vegas, May 20.

“The enterprise is a mess,” he said. “When you have people ‘slow-chairing’ among 17 applications a day, [it's] no wonder why they don’t want to come back to the office. What we do is we put a clean pane of glass on the mess. We become the AI platform for business transformation. It enables you to access all the repositories all the systems. It lets you apply intelligence to those systems, and it automates for you the next best action.”