Name: Helen O'Sullivan, Dell Technologies & Tim Wood, Intel
Uploaded: 2026-09-29T18:05:00.000Z
Duration: 10 min 43 s

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More from Dell Technologies AI Leadership Symposium 2026

Helen O'Sullivan

AI Business Development Manager - Solutions Specialist

Dell Technologies

Tim Wood

Sales Director, Northwest Region

Intel

play_circle_outline Resurgence of CPUs alongside GPUs in AI architectures

play_circle_outline Open-source models, edge and on-device AI power cost-effective, outcome-focused enterprise intelligence

play_circle_outline POCs, sandboxes, and using existing infrastructure for trials

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Helen O'Sullivan, Dell Technologies & Tim Wood, Intel

Helen O'Sullivan

AI Business Development Manager - Solutions Specialist Dell Technologies

Tim Wood

Sales Director, Northwest Region Intel

John Furrier

>> Hi, I'm John Furrier, host of TheCUBE. We are here in Silicon Valley for the Dell Technologies Symposium in the Bay Area. Of course, we have the event happening in New York City coming up in October, October 12th and 13th in Manhattan. Different makeup. You got the innovation on the West Coast, you got the financial services and industry on the East Coast coming together. We got a wrap-up here. We got Helen O'Sullivan, AI Business Development Manager, Solutions Specialist at Dell. Good to see you, great job on stage

Helen O'Sullivan

>> today.Thank you,

John Furrier

>> John.Tim Wood, Sales Director, Northwest Region for Intel. Guys, great talk you had. I had a little talk on sovereignty, maybe a little bit forward thinking, but great job up there.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Awesome.Thank you.

Tim Wood

>> you.Yeah, appreciate

John Furrier

>> it.So it went well.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah, it was a great

John Furrier

>> day.People were engaged, there's a big party going on now. What was the big takeaway? And I noticed that people resonated with a lot of the observations you guys had One on the token maxing, what customers are doing. And then on the compute side, we're seeing tons of agentic discussions where compute is now, not that it ever left, but now center

Tim Wood

>> stage.Back in the mainstream.

John Furrier

>> It's not the GPU anymore, it's everything around the system. Helen, we'll start with you. What's your

Helen O'Sullivan

>> take?Yes, yeah, so great discussions today, great conversation. I loved your session, especially on sovereign AI. That was the one thing I was like, maybe I won't cover on my

John Furrier

>> session.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> It's Which is, yeah, it's a much broader discussion. But yeah, right now center stage with trends and conversations, especially today around tokenomics and token maxing. So a lot of our customers I support in the Bay Area, they're dealing with this, real immediate struggle of running through their token budget in a matter of weeks that they had allotted for months and, 6 months to a year. And so that's one thing our team is really stepping up and taking the bull by the horns and helping our customers with this problem of what, those workloads in the cloud could look like on-prem. And you still use those frontier models, but you use, the open source and infrastructure on-prem to at least eliminate some of the token stress and token maxing going on right now.

John Furrier

>> I highlighted, the AI Factory with Dell and I kind of highlighted the business performance because look at this, just the stock price. Yeah, it's phenomenal. The AI Factory, good bet. There's a lot of demand there. Tim, on the industry side, if you look at the semiconductors, everyone's moving up the stack, but they're still doing a lot of work. There's a shift to a systems game.

Tim Wood

>> Right.

John Furrier

>> That's not just, hey, IT data center, it's, this is an intelligence factory concept where it's not just, hey, one vendor, heterogeneous, open. CPUs are back in the game, it's still the same, but the architecture's different, it's evolving fast.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> You got a unique perspective there.

Tim Wood

>> We love the fact that the CPU is in demand again and customers, they want outcomes. They're looking for business outcomes, not just give me the latest technology. I think that resonated with our audience in the room today where they're sharing a lot of the same concerns and issues. They all want to get to the spot where they're using AI and Agentic AI efficiently and securely and cost-effectively. And they're seeking partners like ourselves to learn how to do that.

John Furrier

>> Well, I thought it was a great mix and I was a little nervous about the sovereignty piece because it's a little bit forward thinking, kind of bleeding-edge moves on the semi side. Okay, so maybe it's a North Star, maybe it's the continent to sail to for the customer. Yeah, the reality that you guys are faced with every day with customers there, that's the destination. They're on the path, but they're dealing with things today.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So you got to protect the future, bring in the present and not be slowed down or have any drag. What is the customer orientation now? Where's their heads at? because you can say, hey, we're all going to have AI in the future. It's all going to look great. Yeah, sovereignty will be in there. Hopefully get figured out. It probably will. But at the end of the day, they're dealing with things now. We got huge demand. The costs are skyrocketing. Architectures are shifting. Applications are going headless. And the whole world has evolved.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah. Now we have agentic wars.

John Furrier

>> Agentic wars. My

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Gmail—That's my favorite thing about

John Furrier

>> today.—has calendar items on it. Bam, Audible, renew. You're like, what am I renewing? Verify your payment. What? Right. So I gave access to the agents. Now they're in there. What are they doing in there? What are they doing when I'm sleeping?

Tim Wood

>> The whole point of having an agent is that it is autonomous and does things for you. Ideally, the things that you want when you are sleeping and allows you to free up your time.

John Furrier

>> What are the customers thinking now when you talk to them every day? Give us a slice of life in a day-to-day. What's in your meetings? What's on the whiteboard? What's going on around the table? What are people talking about?

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Great. I'll go first. So, really across Silicon Valley, the territory of customers I cover, it's all across the board. And we have customers that I mentioned on stage today sharing the story of a year ago, we were creating their AI strategy. And it's truly all lines of business, C-suite down and then bottom up and organizing that. But customers that, like this one, we've been working over a year on their AI strategy and getting something done, and it's taken way longer because they want to be on the perfect, reaching perfection. They don't want to mess up. So there's that side of the coin. And then other customers that are building out full AI factories like Deepgram, what we shared on stage today, and they understand the data foundation that needs to be created, the AI storage that Dell provides, as well as, of course, the GPU layer. And a lot of our customers, just see the GPU and potentially the use case on top. But it's a holistic point of view, which the Dell ecosystem partnered with Intel does a fantastic job on.

John Furrier

>> Can you talk about your conversations? Because the supply chain, everyone talks about that. But the other discussion that no one's really talking about is that a lot of enterprises have existing stuff. Yeah. And also open weights are opening up the conversation around, hey, I could actually get some intelligence from this cluster. It doesn't have to be millions and millions of dollars. Of course, there's demand for that too, but now it bends

Tim Wood

>> the—I think that's spot on and a great observation. I think we're seeing 3 things from customers. One, as I mentioned, is business outcomes. You can no longer do AI just for the sake of doing AI. You need to have a goal in mind that is in line with the corporation's goals. Two is getting the data and AI as close together as possible. Right. So we know that token costs are rising. Those generally live in the cloud. So if you can do anything to mitigate that, you might be able to reduce some of your costs. And then third is getting that potentially as close to the edge as possible, right? Even the PC where you might have an NPU with an AI PC that's able to do some of the compute and thinking on device, saving you all of the tokens running up to the cloud.

John Furrier

>> And the agent side, the agent world is actually kind of— what's Andy Grove's favorite expression I quote all the time? Let chaos reign and rein in the chaos. Yeah. It's being reined in and Agentic is really a nice use case for compute in the factory. So we're seeing it's not mutually exclusive. Are customers tuned into that? I guess that's the question. What's your take on that?

Helen O'Sullivan

>> So I think they're getting there. And to what Tim talked about on stage earlier of now we're seeing the balance with Agentic coming into the full scope and center stage is now, and back several months ago, my team, also saw this coming. We saw the rebalance and the heavy, heavier utilization on the CPU when it comes to agents. Customers are getting there. They're not quite there yet from the scope I'm seeing. there's still a lot of focus on the GPU, but we're continuously educating with partners like Intel to get customers to realize the balance. And you don't have to, you know, just focus on the GPU when it comes to Agentic.

Tim Wood

>> Yeah, well, and a lot of enterprises already have CPUs in their data center, as you mentioned. And so there may be existing resources and headroom in the infrastructure they already have that's capable of doing some of these next generation apps and workloads.

John Furrier

>> And they don't have the big CapEx budgets that the Neo Clouds have that are being funded to the tune of billions of dollars. Hey, it's a billion dollars, right? Well, no, I'll just do a managed service with a Neo Cloud and leverage my existing— or by the way, We have some power. Let's put a little node in there. That's right. And squeeze some intelligence power out of the on-prem, maybe sandbox some new AI-native opportunities. Absolutely. Are you guys hearing that too? Yeah.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> I mean, a lot of them are building out POCs and sandbox environments to trial the different models. The continuous plethora of new models and open source, open weight across the board. They're utilizing more CPUs to do the testing, but also, getting GB10s, GB300s to do some on-prem testing before taking it into production. Awesome.

John Furrier

>> Final question to wrap up. As folks are watching, prospects, customers of Intel and Dell, what are you guys optimizing for right now? What's your focus? What's going on? What's the activities? What's the current motion, what are you guys up to? Tim, we'll start with Intel.

Tim Wood

>> Yeah, that's a big one. I think it's a consultative approach, specifically from an end-to-end customer motion, it is let's sit down, let's have a conversation, let's tackle those business outcomes that are desired, let's look at the existing infrastructure, let's look at CapEx versus OpEx models and conversations, and then put together a plan that moves the customer in the right direction. Helen?

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah, I would say very much the same. And this is why we're partners, right? Focusing on the outcomes like Tim mentioned, but making sure customers stay, you know, keeping the holistic picture when it comes to AI in mind. Because a lot of them just see the GPU and how fast can I get the GPU or Vera Rubin or what have you. But it's about the data. It's about going through the necessary steps to think through the process, to achieve enterprise AI at the right

John Furrier

>> scale.Well, we're in Silicon Valley. It's the heart of innovation, the West Coast up in Seattle. Silicon Valley's got the mojo up there. They got Microsoft, AWS, a lot of technology. The Intel building's right here. I can see the top of the building. Been in the headquarters. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for a

Helen O'Sullivan

>> day.Appreciate it. Yes, thank

Tim Wood

>> you, Thank you for having

John Furrier

>> us.I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We're here at Dell Technologies Symposium. Thanks for watching.

Helen O'Sullivan, Dell Technologies & Tim Wood, Intel

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

>> today.Thank you,

John Furrier

>> John.Tim Wood, Sales Director, Northwest Region for Intel. Guys, great talk you had. I had a little talk on sovereignty, maybe a little bit forward thinking, but great job up there.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Awesome.Thank you.

Tim Wood

>> you.Yeah, appreciate

John Furrier

>> it.So it went well.

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah, it was a great

John Furrier

Tim Wood

>> stage.Back in the mainstream.

John Furrier

>> It's not the GPU anymore, it's everything around the system. Helen, we'll start with you. What's your

Helen O'Sullivan

>> take?Yes, yeah, so great discussions today, great conversation. I loved your session, especially on sovereign AI. That was the one thing I was like, maybe I won't cover on my

John Furrier

>> session.

Helen O'Sullivan

John Furrier

Tim Wood

>> Right.

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> You got a unique perspective there.

Tim Wood

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Yeah. Now we have agentic wars.

John Furrier

>> Agentic wars. My

Helen O'Sullivan

>> Gmail—That's my favorite thing about

John Furrier

Tim Wood

>> The whole point of having an agent is that it is autonomous and does things for you. Ideally, the things that you want when you are sleeping and allows you to free up your time.

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

John Furrier

Tim Wood

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

Tim Wood

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

John Furrier

Tim Wood

Helen O'Sullivan

John Furrier

Helen O'Sullivan

>> day.Appreciate it. Yes, thank

Tim Wood

>> you, Thank you for having

John Furrier

>> us.I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We're here at Dell Technologies Symposium. Thanks for watching.