Dell Technologies World 2024 | Doug Schmitt | Dell Technologies & Scott Bils | Dell Professional Services

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Scott Bils

VP, Professional Services

Dell Technologies

Doug Schmitt

CIO & President

Dell Technologies

Enhancing business efficiency and innovation with Dell’s advanced AI infrastructure

From healthcare to education, the impact of artificial intelligence is profound and far-reaching, with businesses leveraging robust AI infrastructure to enhance efficiency.The integration of AI into professional services is particularly noteworthy as companies strive to harness its potential for strategic advantage. Key to this transformation is the development of a strong AI infrastructure and a skilled workforce capable of navigating the complexities of AI deployment and management, according to Doug Schmitt (pictured, left), president of Dell Technologies Services.Dell’s Doug Schmitt and Scott Bils talk to theCUBE about AI infrastructure.“AI is clearly on everyone’s mind

play_circle_outline The Crucial Role of AI Services: A Deep Dive with Dell's Doug Schmitt and Scott Bils

play_circle_outline Three key elements in helping customers adopt AI: strategy, infrastructure, and skillset

play_circle_outline Exploring the Multidisciplinary Application of AI: Dell's Professional Services Portfolio and Transformation Practices

play_circle_outline Skilling up the services team

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Business Operations: How AI Simplifies and Elevates Customer Experience

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Doug Schmitt | Dell Technologies & Scott Bils | Dell Professional Services

Scott Bils

VP, Professional Services Dell Technologies

Doug Schmitt

CIO & President Dell Technologies

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>> We are here midway through day two of three days of coverage of Dell Tech World. My name is Savannah Peterson. I'm joined here by my fabulous co-host, Dave Vellante. What a morning we've had, my friend.

>> I know, and I'm excited because services equals value. That's where it happens. I love product. We love product.

>> We do. We do.

>> We love hardware. We love software.

>> We're geeky enough that we can-

>> Services is where the money meets the road, I always say.

>> Well, and particularly in the AI revolution right now, so fantastic. We have quite the services duo from Dell joining us right now. I'm sorry. Doug Schmitt and Scott Bils, thank you so much for being here. It's fabulous to have your smiling faces on our stage. I can imagine, we were talking before we went live, we're having a moment right now. Doug, what does it feel like for you to be here at Dell Tech World with all the buzz happening, the announcements, the great stock price?

Doug Schmitt

>> AI is clearly on everyone's mind. I think if you look at the value Dell brings in the broadest portfolio and in working with all our customers while they're here and seeing what AI can deliver for them, it's hard not to walk away super excited about the possibilities, whether it's commercial, healthcare, education, government, there's just nothing that won't be touched by this in a good way. And we're looking forward as part of the services organization to helping our customers achieve that goal.

>> Yeah. You probably get to see so many interesting customer use cases. I want to talk about that in a little bit. Scott, what about for you? What's it like for you here, coming to meet all your friends, seeing all the AI celebrities?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Energy is amazing and there's a lot of discussion around professional services, particularly around what we're doing in AI and hope to accelerate customer transformation there and support the AI factory. So yeah, it's fantastic.

>> You and I met at GTC, which I said was the most important event in the history of computer industry events. I stand by that. With all due respect, the stuff I said before, but it was really transformative in my mind. I wonder if you guys could think about or help us think about the services opportunity here. I think about the Hadoop, go back to the big data days, and when you analyze the market, it was all services because it was so complex and it fell over. So I don't think it's the same dynamic here because ultimately, you're going to be using AI and teaching people how to fish as opposed to fishing for them. But given that there's such a lack of skillsets, how do you think about organizing to help customers adopt AI but then be able to run it on their own and grow and innovate? What changes have you made?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, you've heard a lot that your guests from Dell and elsewhere have talked about our AI factory. I think if you go up to that, you'll see obviously the infrastructure, our ecosystem, and then on the top of that is services, and there's a reason for that. You've seen also, obviously, it's fueled by data and the outcomes. And if you break that box out, it's really a journey for our customers to helping them achieve the value they're looking for from AI. You can break it into really three different pieces. The first one is helping our customers with their strategy and their use cases. That's an important piece because if you don't get that correct, it's pretty hard to move to the next number two of the three, and that is around the infrastructure, the deployment and then also the modeling as you're saying. And the reason I'm bringing this up is the third one is skillset. I don't know that that's getting talked a whole lot around and not because people aren't interested in it, but it is an important piece, and we are seeing where we're helping our customers not only with one and two, obviously the data and the use cases and the strategy, but also in terms of the infrastructure deployment and then this third one, which is very important, the skillset. And what we're able to bring to the table there is we can help you anywhere on your journey that you want. We can also stay with you and help you manage the modeling and help you at the end run it. And better yet, what we do a really good job of is the education side if you need the training.

>> I think, too, it's very multidisciplinary. We like to think about AI and AI skills, but it's like I need to apply AI to security. I need to apply AI to my IT ops. I need to develop new workflows, the whole BPO thing.

>> The customer experience. Yeah.

Scott Bils

>> There's a lot.

>> So I think we tend to think about AI in this narrow little stovepipe, but it's not. It's going to be ubiquitous. How do you think about that?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah. We're seeing that in our professional services portfolio right now. So the way we're organized and aligned is to help customers drive critical transformations in their business. So we have essentially five different transformation practices within professional services. We have AI obviously now. We have multi-cloud. We have applications and data, resiliency and security and modern workforce. And Dave, to your point, AI is not a standalone. We're seeing AI components across the portfolio, multi-cloud, resiliency and security. It's touching everything. So as we think through our portfolio of services around professional services, around consult, manage, education services, residency, it's cutting across all of that, not just from AI but those other transformation areas.

>> You're touching a lot, 60,000 people on the services team. Dell has 120,000 employees total. Half the squad is out here helping people empower and enable their solutions to solve problems. You mentioned skilling up. I'm glad you brought it up because it's not just about implementation, it's about making sure all these systems are optimized and used properly and the data is safe. How do you get those 60,000 people inside your squads skilled up to be able to meet the customers where they're at right now?

Doug Schmitt

>> That's a great question, and it's an important one in the aspect of we're learning as well. In addition to helping our customers transform, which we love doing for their outcomes and AI and in the five practices, but we're also going through our own internal transformation and we're seeing that in services. There's so much we can do and we are leveraging inside of AI. We're using ourselves as the first test case. And believe it or not, we actually started this six or seven years ago. We've actually talked about it here with you before in that we've leveraged structured data very early on in digitized processes. And now with gen AI, we're actually turbocharging that and removing steps that the customers don't mind to free up time for our team members to actually spend more time with our customers, which is what we're seeing, and helping them in that. And along that way, we've actually built learning classes for our internal team so that they can actually become certified and trained in what we believe are the future skillsets. So open communications, transforming internally, learning and spending more time in front of the customers, that's what it's about.

>> I think-

>> Oh, go ahead, please.

>> I love the free time. It's more time for developers to create and to code for people to interact with customers. We had McKinsey on the show with Google a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that the winner of AI is actually going to be the dog because we're going to have more time to go out and walk the dog and spend time with our families. And I love that analogy. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's letting your internal team as well as your partners spend more time doing the things they want to do, which is enhance the lives of their community.

>> Exactly. When I think about applying gen AI, I put my CIO hat on, not that I was ever CIO but I know a lot of CIOs.

>> You can wear that hat. It will empower you.

>> Thank you.

>> Yeah.

>> So the methodology around which I would approach, I have all these applications in my portfolio and I have all these use cases and people are just sending them in. You guys see this internally, I'm sure, in Dell. What about this? What about this? Jen Felch is saying they just stack up. We have to prioritize. So I'd want to go through a rationalization exercise and I would want to identify those workloads and applications that I think I could really replace or disrupt with gen AI, but I'm fearful because what if it doesn't work the way it's intended? So I have to maybe do some experimentation. So my question is what's the methodology around which you go from those use cases and how does it tie into the broader portfolio that CIOs and your customers are managing?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, I'll let Scott go into the details, but you mentioned Jen Felch, our CIO, does a great job, obviously, and we actually leveraged our professional services with Jen. This was a while back.

>> Client zero.

Doug Schmitt

>> Exactly right. And so we took those 800 use cases and worked with her on a methodology that we had developed. And Scott, why don't you take them through that?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, so it's really two dimensions. You take a look at the business and technical dimensions, the business value, the ROI you're going to get from a particular use case and then the technical feasibility. The work we did with Jen and team, we have a model of framework that has over 20 different dimensions to it where we analyze the use cases. One of the big learnings coming out of it was if you have a hundred use cases, at the end of it, you don't want to think about it one through a hundred in terms of going out and implementing individual use cases. You want to take a look at clusters. What are use cases that have commonality in terms of the users, the data, the likely architecture, and having that drive where you go from an implementation standpoint.

>> So let me follow up on that because we have a term we used to call GRS, getting rid of stuff, and we never get rid of stuff in IT. And I'm wondering. Is AI an opportunity to get rid of stuff or is it going to be more stuff? What are you seeing maybe from your own experience and hopefully from customers?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, I think both. And I'll say this. Getting rid of, I think what you're talking about is the complexity inside of IT.

>> Yes, absolutely.

Doug Schmitt

>> It definitely helps with that. But just as important is it helps get rid of steps. As we've digitized our internal processes and leveraged AI, we've streamlined this back to walking the dog. We've streamlined those processes and we have a happy path. We alert our managers now when those happy paths aren't followed real-time and able to correct those again. And not only that, then use AI to shift that mean to find a better process. Now, that matters in terms of freeing up time. But in addition to that, we are finding that we can streamline the technology as well. So because technology tends to follow, I would hope, in most cases, the process so that you're able to automate both. So it's been a very interesting journey and we're taking all those learnings and applying that inside the professional service side as well.

>> Really interesting job. So I'm curious. You don't have to throw anyone under the bus or use any explicit examples here, but what's the general energy when you're talking through people about finding their use cases? Are companies nervous? Are they excited? Do they feel FOMO? What's the vibe?

Scott Bils

>> Overwhelmed.

>> Overwhelmed. Yeah.

Scott Bils

>> There's so much opportunity and it's a matter of prioritizing it and figure where the biggest leverage points are. And it's how do I get started? Where do we get started? There's excitement around it, but it's a lot of how do I think about it and how do we get things in motion?

>> And a lot of hitting singles too today, don't you think?

Scott Bils

>> Yes.

>> You're not seeing these ... Well, in some cases, you're seeing these big moonshot goals, but generally speaking, it's like, hey, let's try it, let's see, get some experience, figure out the skill situation, find a partner to help us sort through this. But eventually, CFOs are going to want the big payback. So how do you think that will evolve? Maybe, again, from your own experiences internally because Dell is a perfect example of a big company that can drop a lot of money to the bottom line through better automation and AI and then you can bring those learnings to the customer. It's almost like you're way ahead of the customers, I would think, in many cases. I don't know if you're seeing that.

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, we are, and I know when you talk to Yvonne, hopefully you don't bring that up, our CFO, so you could .

>> I'll make sure .

Doug Schmitt

>> She's a sharp lady. I'm sure she'll be all over this.

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> She'll figure it out.

Doug Schmitt

>> No, that's right. And I think, look, this comes in a journey of, like I said, removing steps. I want to be very clear on this one though. We're removing steps and improving the processes that don't impact the customer. They actually help the customer experience. And that's an important first. And then the second one as we talked about, you brought this up, this great point, of helping train and also build the skillsets for the future of the internal team and bringing them along. The third piece of this is the culture. And look, this is a model change. This is new to people, how we're running stuff. I think we just talked about the digitization of the processes. Think now, I and the rest of my entire leadership team have the data real-time, real-time on how we're performing for that service and where the issues and the errors are at. So all of a sudden, the managers aren't bringing and showing you where the issues are at. You're actually working with them real-time on it. That's a pretty big change. So there's a cultural change. There's a skillset change, the model to get the additional efficiencies all while improving the customer experience.

>> There's so many opportunities here. I think of healthcare. I think of automotive. I think of manufacturing. One that came up the other day on a breaking analysis we were doing with supply chain, and you think about supply chain is really a batch job, there's a problem in the warehouse and then somebody has to fix it the next day and the customer gets impacted. To your point, Doug, you're taking out steps. Imagine when whatever you're going to pick is not there, it's somewhere else and you don't have to wait a day. You can in real-time actually have the forklift go get it, put it on the truck so that the customer doesn't get impacted. There's thousands of those examples. Are you seeing any that really excite you? Healthcare obviously is one that's I think ripe.

>> It's a passion of Dell's, if nothing else, but literally-

>> And Michael in particular. Are there any that stand out that you're like this is really going to be one to watch?

Scott Bils

>> In terms of use cases, there's so many out there across all verticals. It's hard to pick one. It's hard to land on one. I think one of the use cases we're seeing a lot of excitement in our customer base right now is around digital assistance. You've heard from City of Amarillo around how they're using it to improve information access to citizens.

>> Great use case.

Scott Bils

>> Great use case.

>> Beautiful.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah.

>> Talk about inclusion too.

Scott Bils

>> Absolutely.

>> Which really matters. I think people forget that's going to be a big part of AI.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think we'll continue to see ones that are applicable across verticals like digital assistant. There's really interesting use cases that are all vertical specific by retail, manufacturing, pharma, very interesting.

>> When you find these, you bring them on theCUBE like City of Amarillo and we can profile them for our audience.

Doug Schmitt

>> Rich Gagnon, their CIO.

>> People see that and they go, wow, okay. And Rich was saying that he's working with other cities to help them adopt this thing. That's the great thing about local governments, is they're not trying to hide this stuff.

>> Right. It's not competition. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug Schmitt

>> It is a classic and a very good example of look, governments, they're us and so when they're able to bring that together, as you're saying, the inclusion and all of the great assets they have and bring them to the customers. I'm sure Rich, as he very well says, only 24% of his constituents, English isn't a first language, and so he's able to get closer with those folks in terms of what's available from the government services, how they can help. That's a powerful story.

>> He mentioned that one of those middle schools, they speak 67 different languages.

Doug Schmitt

>> Yes.

>> I can't imagine. It's mind-blowing when we think ... We talk about hyper-customization with AI all the time, but what a brilliant use case for it. What a great way to go in and be able to help save people's lives. So given that you ... And I love it. I could tell you don't want to pick your favorite child here when we're talking about use cases. I totally understand that. But I am curious. Are you seeing any industries adopt this more successfully or more rapidly than other industries or is it completely spread across verticals?

Scott Bils

>> From my point of view, it seems to be spread across. And a lot of POCs, a lot of early deployments.

>> Yeah. It would have been feeling a little bit, yeah.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah. It's back to that point that a lot of organizations are at that first step or two of understanding the use cases. Once they prioritize it, then standing up POCs, start to play around with it, test it, experiment. But I think it's pretty even across the verticals that we've seen. I think some of the verticals are going to have different dynamics. A lot of it may end up being by size. So I think one of the things that we'll end up seeing is larger enterprises, for example, may end up replicating the private cloud model where they provide AI as a service to internal stakeholders rather than having separate business units, separate departments going out and standing up their own use cases.

>> Oh, that's interesting.

Doug Schmitt

>> But I also think, look, the commercial side is fairly straightforward and not easy, straightforward to see all the great things that could occur in there, but think about education as you're bringing this up, individualized education for the individual. When you teach, all of a sudden, you're able to identify work courses right away for what an individual needs. And then think about that, we just talked about City of Amarillo, but the governments being able to get closer to their citizens and what they can do in terms of that and healthcare. The verticals in the industries are important, but I think this is going to be a model change for more than just the commercial side.

>> I don't know if you guys saw the Sal Khan demo. Have you seen this with this kid? So Sal Khan, Khan Academy, he's there with his kid, like 14-year-old kid, and he's talking to the AI saying, "I want you to help tutor my child on this geometry problem, but don't give him the answer. Just nudge him." And it was like, "Find the hypotenuse," and he did the wrong one. He goes, "No, no. It's the opposite of the right angle. Can you find it?" And then he draw ... It's very good. And it's just amazing, right?

>> Oh, yeah.

>> They were talking. They weren't typing.

>> No.

>> They were talking.

>> Well, have you seen Moxie, the little robot, the Moxie robot?

>> Yeah, that's great.

>> I love Moxie. She's adorable. We had Moxie on the show actually. And that's personalized education, not just in the teaching and the coaching, but also for neurodiverse learners and for folks with different ... I'm super dyslexic and it's so cool to see.

>> That is really so cool to see. The reason I bring it up is because last year, we saw Project Helix, and you're like, oh, okay, GPUs and servers. This year, we see the AI Factory. So Helix becomes the AI factory.

>> Right.

>> And I'm trying to think forward, what are we going to see next year?

>> Well, let's ask them. We might have some people with that.

>> What are we going to see next year?

>> Yeah.

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, clearly, we're learning every ... You know how fast this is moving so I think you're going to obviously see this continue to be turbocharged. But look, we're going to build off of that. What I can tell you in all this learning is we're learning internally by actually running very fast. We're also then helping our customers and we learn every single day through them and then the technology of our ecosystem and building that. But what I can tell you is we'll stay close to the outcomes of what the customers are looking for, make sure we build the services to deliver those. I think you're going to see us talk more about networking, which will be an important piece of this stack and this for services of what we can do. I think you'll talk about more about the outcome-based experience services and delivering those as well and then pulling it together end-to-end for our customers.

Scott Bils

>> And I think when you think about that transformation journey and the fact that most customers today are focused on use cases, the next shoe to drop will be data. So I would anticipate a year from now, we're going to be talking much more about data and how organizations are managing data-

Doug Schmitt

>> Very true....

Scott Bils

>> thinking about data, scaling it to support AI use cases. I think that'll be a bigger focus next year.

>> Okay. So today, you're spending more of your time with customers or a lot of time on helping them sort through what the business case is.

Scott Bils

>> What are the use cases that you have to prioritize?

>> And the next logical ... It probably is linear, use case, data, little POC and then scale.

Doug Schmitt

>> It is. But it's interesting. There's customers in different pieces of that journey and spaces of that journey. We've had an example being of a German high-tech company for cybersecurity, research institute and they actually had the use cases and the technology. What they were looking for to go faster was deployment of the solution and the physical deployment and then actually helping just get the model deployed very quickly. And then we have other instances with a large communication provider where it was actually a little bit more upfront in terms of the use cases. And so we can help them anywhere inside that journey.

>> Interesting. So from an organizational standpoint, Doug, how do you accommodate that? Is it like a kitchen where all the chefs are cross-trained or do you have to think about, well, today the bell curve is toward business case expertise and now we're going to have to shift it to data expertise? Is your team pretty much cross-trained?

Scott Bils

>> Now, that's where we do have specialized skills. So there is, to a certain extent, you can cross-train for more of the consultative advisory use case type work, but when we get into things like data, implementation, model selection, use case deployment, those are typically specialized skills and we build the capability to go deliver that.

>> I suppose under-utilization is not a problem these days.

Scott Bils

>> No, it is not. It's the opposite.

>> You don't really have to worry about that. So I won't even ask that question.

Doug Schmitt

>> Yeah. Under-utilization is not the issue.

>> I think everyone is excited. Well-

Doug Schmitt

>> Back to the skillsets, developing and giving it that-

>> Yeah. It was like little ponies waiting to get out on the racetrack. This was fantastic. Scott, Doug, thank you so much for spending time with us today-

Doug Schmitt

>> Thanks, guys, for having us....

>> and sharing in this thrilling week with all of us. Dave, thank you always for the fantastic questions and insights. And thank all of you for being a part of our fabulous community here. Day two of Dell Tech Week. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Doug Schmitt | Dell Technologies & Scott Bils | Dell Professional Services

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>> We are here midway through day two of three days of coverage of Dell Tech World. My name is Savannah Peterson. I'm joined here by my fabulous co-host, Dave Vellante. What a morning we've had, my friend.

>> I know, and I'm excited because services equals value. That's where it happens. I love product. We love product.

>> We do. We do.

>> We love hardware. We love software.

>> We're geeky enough that we can-

>> Services is where the money meets the road, I always say.

>> Well, and particularly in the AI revolution right now, so fantastic. We have quite the services duo from Dell joining us right now. I'm sorry. Doug Schmitt and Scott Bils, thank you so much for being here. It's fabulous to have your smiling faces on our stage. I can imagine, we were talking before we went live, we're having a moment right now. Doug, what does it feel like for you to be here at Dell Tech World with all the buzz happening, the announcements, the great stock price?

Doug Schmitt

>> AI is clearly on everyone's mind. I think if you look at the value Dell brings in the broadest portfolio and in working with all our customers while they're here and seeing what AI can deliver for them, it's hard not to walk away super excited about the possibilities, whether it's commercial, healthcare, education, government, there's just nothing that won't be touched by this in a good way. And we're looking forward as part of the services organization to helping our customers achieve that goal.

>> Yeah. You probably get to see so many interesting customer use cases. I want to talk about that in a little bit. Scott, what about for you? What's it like for you here, coming to meet all your friends, seeing all the AI celebrities?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Energy is amazing and there's a lot of discussion around professional services, particularly around what we're doing in AI and hope to accelerate customer transformation there and support the AI factory. So yeah, it's fantastic.

>> You and I met at GTC, which I said was the most important event in the history of computer industry events. I stand by that. With all due respect, the stuff I said before, but it was really transformative in my mind. I wonder if you guys could think about or help us think about the services opportunity here. I think about the Hadoop, go back to the big data days, and when you analyze the market, it was all services because it was so complex and it fell over. So I don't think it's the same dynamic here because ultimately, you're going to be using AI and teaching people how to fish as opposed to fishing for them. But given that there's such a lack of skillsets, how do you think about organizing to help customers adopt AI but then be able to run it on their own and grow and innovate? What changes have you made?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, you've heard a lot that your guests from Dell and elsewhere have talked about our AI factory. I think if you go up to that, you'll see obviously the infrastructure, our ecosystem, and then on the top of that is services, and there's a reason for that. You've seen also, obviously, it's fueled by data and the outcomes. And if you break that box out, it's really a journey for our customers to helping them achieve the value they're looking for from AI. You can break it into really three different pieces. The first one is helping our customers with their strategy and their use cases. That's an important piece because if you don't get that correct, it's pretty hard to move to the next number two of the three, and that is around the infrastructure, the deployment and then also the modeling as you're saying. And the reason I'm bringing this up is the third one is skillset. I don't know that that's getting talked a whole lot around and not because people aren't interested in it, but it is an important piece, and we are seeing where we're helping our customers not only with one and two, obviously the data and the use cases and the strategy, but also in terms of the infrastructure deployment and then this third one, which is very important, the skillset. And what we're able to bring to the table there is we can help you anywhere on your journey that you want. We can also stay with you and help you manage the modeling and help you at the end run it. And better yet, what we do a really good job of is the education side if you need the training.

>> I think, too, it's very multidisciplinary. We like to think about AI and AI skills, but it's like I need to apply AI to security. I need to apply AI to my IT ops. I need to develop new workflows, the whole BPO thing.

>> The customer experience. Yeah.

Scott Bils

>> There's a lot.

>> So I think we tend to think about AI in this narrow little stovepipe, but it's not. It's going to be ubiquitous. How do you think about that?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah. We're seeing that in our professional services portfolio right now. So the way we're organized and aligned is to help customers drive critical transformations in their business. So we have essentially five different transformation practices within professional services. We have AI obviously now. We have multi-cloud. We have applications and data, resiliency and security and modern workforce. And Dave, to your point, AI is not a standalone. We're seeing AI components across the portfolio, multi-cloud, resiliency and security. It's touching everything. So as we think through our portfolio of services around professional services, around consult, manage, education services, residency, it's cutting across all of that, not just from AI but those other transformation areas.

>> You're touching a lot, 60,000 people on the services team. Dell has 120,000 employees total. Half the squad is out here helping people empower and enable their solutions to solve problems. You mentioned skilling up. I'm glad you brought it up because it's not just about implementation, it's about making sure all these systems are optimized and used properly and the data is safe. How do you get those 60,000 people inside your squads skilled up to be able to meet the customers where they're at right now?

Doug Schmitt

>> That's a great question, and it's an important one in the aspect of we're learning as well. In addition to helping our customers transform, which we love doing for their outcomes and AI and in the five practices, but we're also going through our own internal transformation and we're seeing that in services. There's so much we can do and we are leveraging inside of AI. We're using ourselves as the first test case. And believe it or not, we actually started this six or seven years ago. We've actually talked about it here with you before in that we've leveraged structured data very early on in digitized processes. And now with gen AI, we're actually turbocharging that and removing steps that the customers don't mind to free up time for our team members to actually spend more time with our customers, which is what we're seeing, and helping them in that. And along that way, we've actually built learning classes for our internal team so that they can actually become certified and trained in what we believe are the future skillsets. So open communications, transforming internally, learning and spending more time in front of the customers, that's what it's about.

>> I think-

>> Oh, go ahead, please.

>> I love the free time. It's more time for developers to create and to code for people to interact with customers. We had McKinsey on the show with Google a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that the winner of AI is actually going to be the dog because we're going to have more time to go out and walk the dog and spend time with our families. And I love that analogy. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's letting your internal team as well as your partners spend more time doing the things they want to do, which is enhance the lives of their community.

>> Exactly. When I think about applying gen AI, I put my CIO hat on, not that I was ever CIO but I know a lot of CIOs.

>> You can wear that hat. It will empower you.

>> Thank you.

>> Yeah.

>> So the methodology around which I would approach, I have all these applications in my portfolio and I have all these use cases and people are just sending them in. You guys see this internally, I'm sure, in Dell. What about this? What about this? Jen Felch is saying they just stack up. We have to prioritize. So I'd want to go through a rationalization exercise and I would want to identify those workloads and applications that I think I could really replace or disrupt with gen AI, but I'm fearful because what if it doesn't work the way it's intended? So I have to maybe do some experimentation. So my question is what's the methodology around which you go from those use cases and how does it tie into the broader portfolio that CIOs and your customers are managing?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, I'll let Scott go into the details, but you mentioned Jen Felch, our CIO, does a great job, obviously, and we actually leveraged our professional services with Jen. This was a while back.

>> Client zero.

Doug Schmitt

>> Exactly right. And so we took those 800 use cases and worked with her on a methodology that we had developed. And Scott, why don't you take them through that?

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, so it's really two dimensions. You take a look at the business and technical dimensions, the business value, the ROI you're going to get from a particular use case and then the technical feasibility. The work we did with Jen and team, we have a model of framework that has over 20 different dimensions to it where we analyze the use cases. One of the big learnings coming out of it was if you have a hundred use cases, at the end of it, you don't want to think about it one through a hundred in terms of going out and implementing individual use cases. You want to take a look at clusters. What are use cases that have commonality in terms of the users, the data, the likely architecture, and having that drive where you go from an implementation standpoint.

>> So let me follow up on that because we have a term we used to call GRS, getting rid of stuff, and we never get rid of stuff in IT. And I'm wondering. Is AI an opportunity to get rid of stuff or is it going to be more stuff? What are you seeing maybe from your own experience and hopefully from customers?

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, I think both. And I'll say this. Getting rid of, I think what you're talking about is the complexity inside of IT.

>> Yes, absolutely.

Doug Schmitt

>> It definitely helps with that. But just as important is it helps get rid of steps. As we've digitized our internal processes and leveraged AI, we've streamlined this back to walking the dog. We've streamlined those processes and we have a happy path. We alert our managers now when those happy paths aren't followed real-time and able to correct those again. And not only that, then use AI to shift that mean to find a better process. Now, that matters in terms of freeing up time. But in addition to that, we are finding that we can streamline the technology as well. So because technology tends to follow, I would hope, in most cases, the process so that you're able to automate both. So it's been a very interesting journey and we're taking all those learnings and applying that inside the professional service side as well.

>> Really interesting job. So I'm curious. You don't have to throw anyone under the bus or use any explicit examples here, but what's the general energy when you're talking through people about finding their use cases? Are companies nervous? Are they excited? Do they feel FOMO? What's the vibe?

Scott Bils

>> Overwhelmed.

>> Overwhelmed. Yeah.

Scott Bils

>> There's so much opportunity and it's a matter of prioritizing it and figure where the biggest leverage points are. And it's how do I get started? Where do we get started? There's excitement around it, but it's a lot of how do I think about it and how do we get things in motion?

>> And a lot of hitting singles too today, don't you think?

Scott Bils

>> Yes.

>> You're not seeing these ... Well, in some cases, you're seeing these big moonshot goals, but generally speaking, it's like, hey, let's try it, let's see, get some experience, figure out the skill situation, find a partner to help us sort through this. But eventually, CFOs are going to want the big payback. So how do you think that will evolve? Maybe, again, from your own experiences internally because Dell is a perfect example of a big company that can drop a lot of money to the bottom line through better automation and AI and then you can bring those learnings to the customer. It's almost like you're way ahead of the customers, I would think, in many cases. I don't know if you're seeing that.

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, we are, and I know when you talk to Yvonne, hopefully you don't bring that up, our CFO, so you could .

>> I'll make sure .

Doug Schmitt

>> She's a sharp lady. I'm sure she'll be all over this.

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> She'll figure it out.

Doug Schmitt

>> No, that's right. And I think, look, this comes in a journey of, like I said, removing steps. I want to be very clear on this one though. We're removing steps and improving the processes that don't impact the customer. They actually help the customer experience. And that's an important first. And then the second one as we talked about, you brought this up, this great point, of helping train and also build the skillsets for the future of the internal team and bringing them along. The third piece of this is the culture. And look, this is a model change. This is new to people, how we're running stuff. I think we just talked about the digitization of the processes. Think now, I and the rest of my entire leadership team have the data real-time, real-time on how we're performing for that service and where the issues and the errors are at. So all of a sudden, the managers aren't bringing and showing you where the issues are at. You're actually working with them real-time on it. That's a pretty big change. So there's a cultural change. There's a skillset change, the model to get the additional efficiencies all while improving the customer experience.

>> There's so many opportunities here. I think of healthcare. I think of automotive. I think of manufacturing. One that came up the other day on a breaking analysis we were doing with supply chain, and you think about supply chain is really a batch job, there's a problem in the warehouse and then somebody has to fix it the next day and the customer gets impacted. To your point, Doug, you're taking out steps. Imagine when whatever you're going to pick is not there, it's somewhere else and you don't have to wait a day. You can in real-time actually have the forklift go get it, put it on the truck so that the customer doesn't get impacted. There's thousands of those examples. Are you seeing any that really excite you? Healthcare obviously is one that's I think ripe.

>> It's a passion of Dell's, if nothing else, but literally-

>> And Michael in particular. Are there any that stand out that you're like this is really going to be one to watch?

Scott Bils

>> In terms of use cases, there's so many out there across all verticals. It's hard to pick one. It's hard to land on one. I think one of the use cases we're seeing a lot of excitement in our customer base right now is around digital assistance. You've heard from City of Amarillo around how they're using it to improve information access to citizens.

>> Great use case.

Scott Bils

>> Great use case.

>> Beautiful.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah.

>> Talk about inclusion too.

Scott Bils

>> Absolutely.

>> Which really matters. I think people forget that's going to be a big part of AI.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think we'll continue to see ones that are applicable across verticals like digital assistant. There's really interesting use cases that are all vertical specific by retail, manufacturing, pharma, very interesting.

>> When you find these, you bring them on theCUBE like City of Amarillo and we can profile them for our audience.

Doug Schmitt

>> Rich Gagnon, their CIO.

>> People see that and they go, wow, okay. And Rich was saying that he's working with other cities to help them adopt this thing. That's the great thing about local governments, is they're not trying to hide this stuff.

>> Right. It's not competition. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug Schmitt

>> It is a classic and a very good example of look, governments, they're us and so when they're able to bring that together, as you're saying, the inclusion and all of the great assets they have and bring them to the customers. I'm sure Rich, as he very well says, only 24% of his constituents, English isn't a first language, and so he's able to get closer with those folks in terms of what's available from the government services, how they can help. That's a powerful story.

>> He mentioned that one of those middle schools, they speak 67 different languages.

Doug Schmitt

>> Yes.

>> I can't imagine. It's mind-blowing when we think ... We talk about hyper-customization with AI all the time, but what a brilliant use case for it. What a great way to go in and be able to help save people's lives. So given that you ... And I love it. I could tell you don't want to pick your favorite child here when we're talking about use cases. I totally understand that. But I am curious. Are you seeing any industries adopt this more successfully or more rapidly than other industries or is it completely spread across verticals?

Scott Bils

>> From my point of view, it seems to be spread across. And a lot of POCs, a lot of early deployments.

>> Yeah. It would have been feeling a little bit, yeah.

Scott Bils

>> Yeah. It's back to that point that a lot of organizations are at that first step or two of understanding the use cases. Once they prioritize it, then standing up POCs, start to play around with it, test it, experiment. But I think it's pretty even across the verticals that we've seen. I think some of the verticals are going to have different dynamics. A lot of it may end up being by size. So I think one of the things that we'll end up seeing is larger enterprises, for example, may end up replicating the private cloud model where they provide AI as a service to internal stakeholders rather than having separate business units, separate departments going out and standing up their own use cases.

>> Oh, that's interesting.

Doug Schmitt

>> But I also think, look, the commercial side is fairly straightforward and not easy, straightforward to see all the great things that could occur in there, but think about education as you're bringing this up, individualized education for the individual. When you teach, all of a sudden, you're able to identify work courses right away for what an individual needs. And then think about that, we just talked about City of Amarillo, but the governments being able to get closer to their citizens and what they can do in terms of that and healthcare. The verticals in the industries are important, but I think this is going to be a model change for more than just the commercial side.

>> I don't know if you guys saw the Sal Khan demo. Have you seen this with this kid? So Sal Khan, Khan Academy, he's there with his kid, like 14-year-old kid, and he's talking to the AI saying, "I want you to help tutor my child on this geometry problem, but don't give him the answer. Just nudge him." And it was like, "Find the hypotenuse," and he did the wrong one. He goes, "No, no. It's the opposite of the right angle. Can you find it?" And then he draw ... It's very good. And it's just amazing, right?

>> Oh, yeah.

>> They were talking. They weren't typing.

>> No.

>> They were talking.

>> Well, have you seen Moxie, the little robot, the Moxie robot?

>> Yeah, that's great.

>> I love Moxie. She's adorable. We had Moxie on the show actually. And that's personalized education, not just in the teaching and the coaching, but also for neurodiverse learners and for folks with different ... I'm super dyslexic and it's so cool to see.

>> That is really so cool to see. The reason I bring it up is because last year, we saw Project Helix, and you're like, oh, okay, GPUs and servers. This year, we see the AI Factory. So Helix becomes the AI factory.

>> Right.

>> And I'm trying to think forward, what are we going to see next year?

>> Well, let's ask them. We might have some people with that.

>> What are we going to see next year?

>> Yeah.

Doug Schmitt

>> Well, clearly, we're learning every ... You know how fast this is moving so I think you're going to obviously see this continue to be turbocharged. But look, we're going to build off of that. What I can tell you in all this learning is we're learning internally by actually running very fast. We're also then helping our customers and we learn every single day through them and then the technology of our ecosystem and building that. But what I can tell you is we'll stay close to the outcomes of what the customers are looking for, make sure we build the services to deliver those. I think you're going to see us talk more about networking, which will be an important piece of this stack and this for services of what we can do. I think you'll talk about more about the outcome-based experience services and delivering those as well and then pulling it together end-to-end for our customers.

Scott Bils

>> And I think when you think about that transformation journey and the fact that most customers today are focused on use cases, the next shoe to drop will be data. So I would anticipate a year from now, we're going to be talking much more about data and how organizations are managing data-

Doug Schmitt

>> Very true....

Scott Bils

>> thinking about data, scaling it to support AI use cases. I think that'll be a bigger focus next year.

>> Okay. So today, you're spending more of your time with customers or a lot of time on helping them sort through what the business case is.

Scott Bils

>> What are the use cases that you have to prioritize?

>> And the next logical ... It probably is linear, use case, data, little POC and then scale.

Doug Schmitt

>> It is. But it's interesting. There's customers in different pieces of that journey and spaces of that journey. We've had an example being of a German high-tech company for cybersecurity, research institute and they actually had the use cases and the technology. What they were looking for to go faster was deployment of the solution and the physical deployment and then actually helping just get the model deployed very quickly. And then we have other instances with a large communication provider where it was actually a little bit more upfront in terms of the use cases. And so we can help them anywhere inside that journey.

>> Interesting. So from an organizational standpoint, Doug, how do you accommodate that? Is it like a kitchen where all the chefs are cross-trained or do you have to think about, well, today the bell curve is toward business case expertise and now we're going to have to shift it to data expertise? Is your team pretty much cross-trained?

Scott Bils

>> Now, that's where we do have specialized skills. So there is, to a certain extent, you can cross-train for more of the consultative advisory use case type work, but when we get into things like data, implementation, model selection, use case deployment, those are typically specialized skills and we build the capability to go deliver that.

>> I suppose under-utilization is not a problem these days.

Scott Bils

>> No, it is not. It's the opposite.

>> You don't really have to worry about that. So I won't even ask that question.

Doug Schmitt

>> Yeah. Under-utilization is not the issue.

>> I think everyone is excited. Well-

Doug Schmitt

>> Back to the skillsets, developing and giving it that-

>> Yeah. It was like little ponies waiting to get out on the racetrack. This was fantastic. Scott, Doug, thank you so much for spending time with us today-

Doug Schmitt

>> Thanks, guys, for having us....

>> and sharing in this thrilling week with all of us. Dave, thank you always for the fantastic questions and insights. And thank all of you for being a part of our fabulous community here. Day two of Dell Tech Week. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.