Dell Bets Big on AI PCs at CES 2025 | Dell’s AI PC Strategy and Differentiation

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Sam Burd

President, Client Solutions Group

Dell Technologies

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play_circle_outline Enhancing Devices with AI Integration: Accelerating Adoption for Smarter Workflows and Improved User Experience

play_circle_outline Enhancing User Experience: Dell Pro AI Studio Empowering Developers to Scale AI Models on Devices

play_circle_outline Use of terms like "magic" and "exciting" to describe innovations

play_circle_outline Future expectations of commercial product lineup and Dell Pro AI Studio

play_circle_outline Advancements in AI capability for customers and internal use

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Dell’s AI PC Strategy and Differentiation

Sam Burd

President, Client Solutions Group Dell Technologies

Dell is introducing new products in the PC, display, and Alienware categories, integrating AI for enhanced productivity. Commercial customers can run AI models on devices for improved workflows. AI is being designed into devices to make it more accessible and integrated into daily operations. Dell is collaborating with ISVs for various AI applications. They aim to accelerate AI adoption in the commercial space with tools like Dell Pro AI Studio. The focus is on making AI impactful in industries. At Dell Technology World, new products will be showcased, includ... Read more

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What is the strategy behind incorporating AI into devices and what benefits can customers expect from this approach? add

What opportunities do companies see for AI in their infrastructure and on their devices? add

What do builder types like Michael think of as the magic wand and magical dust in the context of the Dell AI Studio ecosystem? add

What new products and advancements are being announced at Dell Technology World? add

What advancements in technology are expected to be showcased at Dell Technology World? add

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Dell’s AI PC Strategy and Differentiation

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Savannah Peterson

>> Hello CUBE community and welcome to our special event coverage of CES. Very excited to be bringing you an exclusive preview from Dell today talking about hardware, talking about AI studios, and really what a holistic ecosystem is going to look like as we move into the AI PC era. I couldn't think of anyone better to tell me about that than Sam. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Sam Burd

>> Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's absolutely my pleasure. I'm so stoked, you really brought the heat and the energy to stage today. You had some great nerd jokes as well. Resonated with me. Many things to highlight. Can you give us an overview of all the exciting stuff that came out today?

Sam Burd

>> Yeah, so we talked about, Savannah, a couple of things. One is our new branding approach. Simpler, easier for our customers to understand. So think about Dell is the brand for our business. It's the thing our customers care about. We talked about three categories of products within that. Our crossover products, Dell for work and play, ProMonic, for professional grade products. And for our power users, the creators out there, Dell Pro Max, basically maximum performance on those systems. And then we introduced a whole bunch of products underneath that in our PC space, our display space, and my favorite Alienware.

Savannah Peterson

>> I saw you and Matt have a pretty good rapport there on stage and you mentioned that you're ready to take him on in a game. What do you all play?

Sam Burd

>> Oh, I don't know. We got to figure that one out. I think Call of Duty would be pretty good, so I'm going to have to get practiced up though to truth be told to be able to measure up to Matt. So, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was thinking about that. I can only imagine the expectations of that battle royale between the two of you. You're going to have to let us know how it goes.

Sam Burd

>> I think he might let me win, Savannah, but I don't know. I'll have to see.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we'll have to ask Matt about that. We'll have to follow back up. This product line really reflects a new era of silicon innovation and consumers wanting choice. Also wanting to bring AI to our edge devices and physically put it in our hands, not just hidden away and in on-prem situations. Talk to me about the process in designing these, how you decided to come up with these and what some of those challenges were along the way.

Sam Burd

>> Yeah, putting AI into our devices, we really see it as the thing customers are going to want when they think about their device running over the next couple of years. So we've gone all in on AI, we're putting it into our devices. It's basically accelerators that are sitting next to the CPU, so you can think about that as enabling the apps that we use every day to be more intelligent. So capability, you're going to get in the work that you do. And then for our commercial customers, the most exciting piece to me is they're going to be able to take their data generated at the edge on their devices, their PCs, and run their AI models on those devices. So taking workflows in their business space, making them smarter and more intelligent. So everything from the home user of today, your apps, using the NPU, seamlessly bringing more intelligence and capability to our commercial customers working in a much smarter, more enabled world.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is absolutely critical to bring AI to where the data is, where the user is, where the excitement is. Obviously certain tasks and workloads going to be handled in an on-prem or multi-cloud environment depending on what you're doing. How long have you been working on these? When did you know?

Sam Burd

>> Well, we've had AI in our PCs for a long time, so you can think about the workstation space where we've had highly capable GPUs for pushing a decade. So the creator users out there have been using AI and capability in devices for a long time. We've seen it in the gaming space. You can think about how games render its super high frame rates, again using AI. The exciting thing to me is it's now coming to mainstream devices. Mainstream consumer devices, mainstream commercial devices. And we've been working on that with our Silicon partners for the last couple of years. We see that capabilities coming in software, so you can think about things Microsoft's doing in operating system and apps that we use and it had to be enabled by hardware first. So we have this age-old debate of does the egg before, or cart before the horse software, before hardware. We're enabling it in our hardware. We are really leaned in on having the best stuff for our customers and you're seeing the software in the ISV community start to really take advantage of that in their applications.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know we're early still, but are there any use cases or applications that have you personally very excited?

Sam Burd

>> Well, the stuff I use every day, I use capability in the operating system and then in a work environment, we use M365. So you can think about AI and M365 of helping you sort through an inbox, summarize a teams or Zoom meeting that you have with colleagues that you maybe didn't get to attend and you figure out when different projects were mentioned or your name were mentioned. So you can see that capability coming already today on the device. The thing that we see from the ISVs that we work with, we have hundreds of them designing for the NPU and the PC. So the things that really stick out in my mind, one is security. We're in the corporate environment, there's a lot of security apps running in that space. When you can run them on the NPU, you can do more and you don't impact battery life and system performance, so that really matters to the users. Same thing in creativity applications. Think about everything from things like background blur and other things in collaboration apps to drawing and rendering. Again, those companies thinking about how they use the NPU to add capability. So those are some of the first things that we're seeing in just ISV applications show up on the device and I'm sure lots more to come.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's so important and it's an easy thing to say, "Oh yeah, this should just be natural," but the battery life thing is critical. I used to work in additive manufacturing, actually it's Shapeways right around the corner here on 20th and Park, rendering things took so long, and you make a tiny change. We're sitting there waiting for hours to see if something's going to work a lot of the time and to be able to do that in minutes or seconds now, while also not completely eliminating the day of use you were hoping to get out of your device, I think is really critical. How are you able to accomplish that?

Sam Burd

>> Well, it's the system design. It's listening to our users, and you had a really interesting point because people talk about life cycle of devices and some of the shortest life cycle we see on devices are actually our most powerful systems for exactly the reason you said. When you think about your creators, designers, engineers, some of the most valuable people in your company that rely on PC and that technology, when you can advance capability, it's like real return of your best, smartest, highly capable creative people get even more productive with the device and people will move to the next system. So you think about workstations and our Dell Pro Max line of products, they're some of the ones that get changed out fastest for our customers because driving more performance and we start the day, our engineers are focused on how do we get best performance out of those systems. The ISVs that we work with are figuring out how do I use all the engines that you're putting in those systems to maximum advantage? We've got to do things like we talked today about some of the things we're doing around cooling and other capability that allows us to put more and more power in the CPU, in the NPU, in the GPU into those devices so that users get the benefits. And our job, make great devices, allow people to be more productive, and I'm excited to see the things they do in the world today and how it helps drive businesses and the whole world forward.

Savannah Peterson

>> And increasing our quality of life. I think there's a lot of potential there with AI. I know it's easy to get us in a conversation about productivity when it comes to AI because there's some obvious examples in which we'll achieve that or even doing things faster. Actually I was just speaking with one of your customers, Jess at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital not far from here. They were able to do PhDs in cancer research in three years now instead of four. If you get a generation of people learning one year faster, imagine what they're able to create. That's not even just the technology being faster or being more optimized, that's optimizing the human on the other end. And that's one of the things that struck me about our conversations and learning more about your AI PC portfolio, is it's not just about the speeds and feeds and specs inside of this, it's about the stories and the solutions and the things that people like you and I are going to be able to create at our fingertips, which is really exciting.

Sam Burd

>> And think about being able to have just on your personal device, perfect memory on all the things that you've done. You can think about the capability and the productivity you get from never forgetting a meeting, being able to instantly pull up content you've done, things you remember. There's a great personal productivity and more capability story to what AI is going to do. And the fun thing to us is we're just building that into the PCs that we have. So we talked about 40 years ago, we started the company, we believed in the PC. We saw that during COVID where it was an essential collaboration tool, how you kept in touch with your family and friends. Now you think about AI coming on the device. It is that kind of personal companion with capability that just makes you better, it saves you time, it allows you to be more efficient, it allows you to get more out of life, and that's really exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> Speaking of family and getting more out of life, you have four children, correct?

Sam Burd

>> I do, yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> And you're an adventurous troop, if I've done my homework properly.

Sam Burd

>> You have. You've done your homework, yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. I know you're an outdoor person. I love to hike. If I don't have to be in front of this and I'm not creating something magical, I'm very excited to be in an analog world observing nature. I think that's something that we share and will be one of the benefits that comes from this productivity. So I'm curious, we just had the holiday season, it's also winter, so everyone's bunkered inside. What's the conversation like at home when you've got the squad around the table?

Sam Burd

>> Oh, everyone wants to know about AI. So I say that a bit sarcastically, but I have... One of my kids is a very active gamer. So you think about what we talked today on the Alienware front all over the tremendous capability we have in our devices. Excited to see Area-51 back on the desktop.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, there was a little bit of, "Woo-hoo," from the crowd when that happened.

Sam Burd

>> Yeah, it was a great moment. You think about the expandability we have in those devices we showed off today some of the legacy of those products too that has built up to the product that we have today.

Savannah Peterson

>> That was cool . Yeah.

Sam Burd

>> It's awesome. Ultimate power. Also really excited to see that came back on the notebook side. We have Area-51. I know you like to geek out on this stuff, 280 watts of performance in that system between graphics and CPU, and we're able to cool that and it's amazingly thin for that level of performance-

Savannah Peterson

>> And quiet. The other thing you brought up too, not only are you cooling it, but you're cooling it in a very significant percentage of less sound, like you were explaining to us so well on the stage.

Sam Burd

>> Yeah, we're doing things around the thermals and the acoustics to make it live in the kind of environment people want to play in. So, we had discussions about gaming. We're a family that loves technology like you and we love to get outside. So I've got people fired up on some of our latest devices and they're great test users on some of the AI apps, on the PCs, and then we just chilled out too, which you've always got to do that over the holidays.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, mandatory. What kind of stuff are they playing with with their AI PCs? What are they doing?

Sam Burd

>> Well, some of them are still in school, so some of them are writing papers and doing homework and using AI to do homework. Hopefully not too much, so I'll have to follow up with them and see exactly what they're doing.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I expect a report card on that next time we chat at DTW

Sam Burd

>> And then we've got some already in the work environment, so putting it to use in Microsoft productivity apps. So I think seeing the potential of that. And it's great seeing the new generation of users that we have where this is the one that, to me, the powerful thing of AI, just getting into how we go work so there's not some magical, like, "I'm in an AI world, I'm in a not-AI world." I think we look forward five, 10, 20 years from now and it's just going to be integrated into how we work and how we get things done, like you talked about earlier, just making it easier and better for us. And we won't be able to imagine a world where it's not part of everything that we're doing.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. I look forward to when we can just press print on our brain, which is what I think we're driving towards here a little bit. How long, just speaking of that, ubiquity, because you and I are super aligned in this thinking is I think for most people who aren't nerds like us and who aren't driven by being a part of a new technological revolution until they see the exact use case that fits their lifestyle or their business, I think a lot of people won't ever have to think about it being in there. Their experiences are just going to change as a result of AI or as a result of your AI edge devices. How long from now do you think that will be?

Sam Burd

>> Well, we're trying to bring it alive in the commercial space in this next year. So we talked about, today, Dell Pro AI Studio that lets companies start running their AI models. You talked about data on the edge, 50% of the data created on the edge. So their AI models with their data on their devices. And I think that's the start of it. You saw our future view of agents and everyone wants to talk about agentic architecture. The PC is the ultimate place for you I and others to have agents running that are helping us in our lives. So we're going to start to see it next year. We're trying to make it easy for our customers to put their models on devices and then I think it's anyone's guess is as good as mine, but we've seen AI move so quickly. It's hard to pick an exact year, but we're enabling it with our technology for customers on systems that'll be shipping next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> That was a wonderful way to avoid a very specific answer that I could tack you to.

Sam Burd

>> Oh, thank you very much.

Savannah Peterson

>> But you're right in the sense that we are moving at a different velocity in cadence than we have been historically right now, which I think is very cool. One other thing before I hit you with my last question that I want to touch on, in addition to all of the great hardware that we got to talk about today and learn about, and I can't wait to continue playing with honestly for the rest of the day, you also have your Dell AI Studio and that helps round out the ecosystem for developers. That layer being critical, these devices are fantastic, that's very clear, but if we don't have the right user experience and tools built on top of that, it's going to be less successful. How does that play into your holistic approach about providing not just one piece of the AI solution, but a broader piece from PC to the AI factory and beyond?

Sam Burd

>> Yeah. Well I think like you said, it fits in this story and the opportunity we see from companies for AI in their infrastructure and AI on device. We look at the PC in two categories of apps will have AI in them. We're going to see some great companies out there writing their apps to take advantage of accelerators on the PC. As I talked about before, we saw it on GPUs a long time ago, we're seeing that on NPUs now. The place where we can add a lot of value as you talked about, is helping companies get their models on device and they need to keep them up to date, they need to deploy them at scale across thousands of users for different use cases. And that's what our Dell Pro AI Studio is all about. Tools for companies to use the management approach they have with us and the portal they have with us to go get AI models deployed on device. So we'll see applications that are much better and companies and their IT departments and their smart folks building that kind of architecture and able to deploy it on PCs. So we'll see everything from models running in data centers on really high-end accelerators to as those models become smaller to quantized, one billion, seven, eight billion parameter models, those can run on PCs with NPUs and we're going to see people do that. We're working to make that easy for companies anticipating that's where they're going to go, and I think that's a safe bet as we look at next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> So cool. I'm just sitting here smiling. It is the notion of even being able to do that at my fingertips. I'll even just speak for myself right now, five or 10 years ago would've been unobtainable, would've been not something you hope, but I don't know that we would've known. This all happened as fast as it did.

Sam Burd

>> Well, and it was fun earlier today to have Michael look at the first PC.

Savannah Peterson

>> I loved that by the way.

Sam Burd

>> Which he stashed away in a closet in our Round Rock office and we were doing some of the math on the performance improvements and I think we missed by... He was correcting us because we missed by a few zeros on the calculation. But like you said, it's incredible to look at where we were 40 years ago to where we are today and the capability that we put in people's hands, and it's only getting faster. It's really totally amazing when you look at it from that kind of perspective.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, no, it is super cool. You could feel the excitement, and I do think it is a good comparison. It's the right event to bring out that wonderful old gem there to show off. And because we are at the very infantile stages of what is going to be something that changes the way we interact with the world around us and solve the problems that we have, which so cool.

Sam Burd

>> Agree.

Savannah Peterson

>> I also love that Michael was talking about magic. And we don't talk... Technologists and particularly engineering types or builder types, like Michael, don't necessarily use, what I'm going to refer to as a slightly fluffy term, like magic, but there is magic here to make it tangible for the audience. I think of the devices as the magic wand and I think of the ecosystem and the Dell AI Studio as a bit of the magical dust that goes along with that and the community is going to be the dust that creates whatever is or whatever the reveal is of the exciting things. But I think we're just at such an exciting time. Since everything's moving so fast, my final question for you, Sam, is when we are hanging out at Dell Tech World, this has obviously been going well, so I'll be seeing you again this year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Sam Burd

>> I think we'll just see an acceleration of your magic wand and dust coming together on the commercial side. So, what I know we'll be able to say is we're going to have all the devices that you saw today, we'll have that full lineup shipping, so we have parts of that today. We're going to have the full commercial lineup shipping at Dell Technology World, which will be-

Savannah Peterson

>> Very exciting.

Sam Burd

>> Very exciting to see. We'll have that shipping with our new brand with Dell front and center and the new categories. We're going to have some amazing products that everyone will be able to get their hands on, and then you're going to see what you just talked about, Dell Pro AI Studio in the hands of our customers starting to make a difference in their workflows. So I'm excited about that opportunity. I'm excited to go see those products like we talked today about the capability we have on Alienware. We're going to see a bunch of displays also at Dell Technology World, so we're doing crazy things. We had beam, you saw the beam forming sound on QDO-led displays.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is awesome.

Sam Burd

>> Pretty amazing. Great, you think about that in the return to office kind of world we're in, it fits great-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Can you actually, just because I have you and this makes sense, can you explain that a little bit and what that means and how you design that? Because I was pretty blown away by that, actually, earlier today.

Sam Burd

>> Yeah, so we can look at how you are oriented around the monitor and actually change how the sound-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, so literally pretend this isn't a display. I'm turning, I'm leaning.

Sam Burd

>> And we will do things to cancel sound and amplify sound from our different speakers, which fit acoustically. It provides a great 3D audio for however your head is oriented. So you can think about... Yes, it's pretty impressive. Along with the most beautiful displays in the industry.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I know our production team is actually very excited about those. We've got a lot. Everyone has the thing they want in the showroom that you have right now.

Sam Burd

>> Yeah. Well, I liked our commercial devices too. You think about the journey we've been on, you talked about it earlier, of high power, low noise, so devices that are below the sound level in office environments, and we're going to get better than that. So we'll see all that shipping at Dell Technology World. I'm sure we'll have some great advances in AI capability as we get our customers enabled, they're going to go do amazing things. We're ourselves looking at how we apply that technology internally, so it's not just great for our customers, it's stuff that we're doing internally. And I expect we'll have some really good stories to tell about that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, I'm holding you to that, Sam, because-

Sam Burd

>> I know you will.

Savannah Peterson

>> Of all the people asking questions today, that is my... I'm so excited for you as leaders in this space to elevate the stories both potentially anticipated, but really the stories that weren't anticipated, of the use cases, the solutions, the creations, the variety of things that are going to come out of these AI PCs. And I am holding you to it. You got to tell me all the cool stuff. We'll have to have you on theCUBE and we should have some really fun examples. Because I do... That's how we inspire the next generation of creators and entrepreneurs and technologists, or even folks sitting at a desk right now who think, "Oh, I don't know that AI will necessarily apply to my life perhaps or what it could do. And then bam, I see someone like me who loves making music," for example, and then they cut their latest track in seven minutes or an hour instead of weeks. So who knows?

Sam Burd

>> It's impressive. Yeah. We're going to have to have you on stage at Dell Technology World, forget just the CUBE interview. Yes, that sounds great.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love it, Sam. We'll take you to the next level.

Sam Burd

>> Okay, I'm ready.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, man. Sam, thank you so much for this. I appreciate it.

Sam Burd

>> Thank you for having me and thanks for joining us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, anytime. I'm all about it. And thank all of you for tuning in to our very inspiring special coverage of Dell's 2025 CES preview. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.