Dell Technologies World 2025 | Carolina Milanesi, Creative Strategies & Bob O'Donnell, Technalysis

Clips
More from Dell Technologies World 2025

Bob O'Donnell

Founder & Chief Analyst

TECHnalysis Research

play_circle_outline Exploring AI in Storytelling: Ron Howard and Tom Hanks Discuss Technology's Impact on Filmmaking and Audience Engagement

play_circle_outline Testing and the importance of real user feedback in product development

play_circle_outline Maximizing Workforce Potential: How Agents Utilize AI for Transformation, Upskilling, and Customer Service Innovation

play_circle_outline Hybrid AI and Dell's AI factory

play_circle_outline Maximizing Efficiency in Hybrid AI: Workload Distribution, Business Models, Data Rewards, and Deployment Complications

Info
Transcript

Carolina Milanesi, Creative Strategies & Bob O'Donnell, Technalysis

Bob O'Donnell

Founder & Chief Analyst TECHnalysis Research

Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc., and Bob O'Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research LLC, join theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Savannah Peterson at Dell Technologies World 2025 to explore the transformative role of AI in storytelling and enterprise strategy. Their discussion highlights how emerging technologies are reshaping creativity, training and organizational thinking.

Milanesi and O'Donnell emphasize that AI tools should amplify, not replace, human expression. They call on enterprise... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What topic was being discussed or presented? add

What was Ron Howard talking about at the event? add

What is an example of a creative use of technology in a customer service setting? add

What is the speaker's big theme for the next year or two regarding AI? add

What are some considerations that need to be taken into account when developing an agent or application that uses data in order to perform a task, particularly with regards to data ownership and rewarding data providers? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Carolina Milanesi, Creative Strategies & Bob O'Donnell, Technalysis

search

Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon nerd fam, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson here with Dave Vellante. It's been three days of excitement and I am particularly excited about our guests to unpacked the whole situation.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Two of my favorite people.

Savannah Peterson

>> Same.

Dave Vellante

>> Last we had-

Savannah Peterson

>> They were at my table last night at dinner. That's how much I like them.

Dave Vellante

>> You guys must have a fun table.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, we had a very fun table. Dell knows what they're doing in terms of curation. Without further ado, Carolina and Bob, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us.

Bob O'Donnell

>> You're welcome. Thank you for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is such a joy. So I love that we get to ride this rocketship together. Y'all were just in an exciting panel with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. Tell me a little bit about that, Carolina. You seem pretty inspired coming off that.

Dave Vellante

>> I was. It was interesting. A few actually things that they drove home. One that is important for everybody to hear is that humans are not going to be replaced, right? Louder for the people in the back. But they were talking about the same as enterprises do. How for them, the storytelling process and so their workflow is going to change because of AI. In general technology, you're thinking about CGI as the first ways that we maybe started thinking about AI, is changing production, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Totally.

Dave Vellante

>> How you can do something without putting the actors at risk in shooting certain scenes or being put in places where it's too cold or too hot or and all of this. So that was one part that was interesting. The other one that I think for me really was like, ding ding, this is what every business should ask themselves, is why. Why are we doing certain things? Even if it's possible, why? And who is the receiver of whatever it is, the product that you bring into market, right? The audience. By saying from a storytelling perspective as a director, as an actor, the audience is the ultimate decider of whether or not what you're bringing to market is going to be successful. But being disciplined enough to ask why, and be sure that the goal that you have is clear in your mind. And then making up as the go along as well. Not get fixated with the idea that you had at the beginning, staying true. Because sometime you miss an opportunity if you're just getting narrow-minded about what that idea is and how it should develop.

Bob O'Donnell

>> The other interesting thing was I was surprised how much Ron Howard talked about testing.

Dave Vellante

>> Right?

Bob O'Donnell

>> So they test the films, and he really made a big deal about how much they do. And there is obviously analogies to the tech world as well in terms of testing how products would work and what the experience is like, and recognizing that, look, at the end of the day, you may have an idea of how something should work, but when real people are actually doing it or using it, it may be that the things that you thought were going to be important aren't, but there are other elements that really are. And so it's just, again, everybody has to think creatively no matter what they do. And I think that was one of the key takeaways, is just you've got to think about these things. And even with, and Tom Hanks was saying, "Look, you can get ChatGPT to write a story-"

Savannah Peterson

>> Write a story.

Bob O'Donnell

>> " ... write a scene, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you've got to decide and you've got to ... is that going to really connect with people or not?"

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And do whatever you're going to do. And his point is it's still not good at telling stories, thankfully for them.

Dave Vellante

>> He did, he said, "It's not going to be that good." And then he apologized to the audience.

Savannah Peterson

>> Amazing, amazing. Yeah, yeah.

>> But he also made a very interesting point about the fact that technology is going to allow you to do things that you couldn't do before. Also means that maybe the medium that you're going to use to show that movie or series cannot be the TV. So he called out Sinners, and if you haven't seen Sinners, you should. But the way that the movie was shot and the fact that Michael B. Jordan plays two characters throughout the movie and so they shot the same scene twice from the other side. It's just mind-blowing. And his point was, "Had I watched that at home, I would've probably walked away and went to make a sandwich or something, because it wasn't rendering, because the screen doesn't give you the same experience." And so it was calling about the importance of the overarching experience. And I think it's true with technology, if we're thinking about whether it is a PC screen or XR, augmented reality, all of that, right? Thinking about how you choose that technology and the ultimate experience that you want to drive will also put pressure on the receiver of that technology to do things differently. And I think when it comes to AI, we're still trying, I think, to use AI to cut corners, not necessarily to rethink how we do things.

Dave Vellante

>> Really .

Savannah Peterson

>> I really agree with what you just said, because I think it's like when we got the internet, and we did what we've always done, which is write letters, but we called it email.

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> We weren't doing actually a new activity and taking advantage of the increased capacity and technology. So I couldn't agree with you more, Carolina. It's going to be that Z-axis that's really interesting where we start to see stuff that's never been done before. And I think some of that ... I was having some really interesting conversations with our guests yesterday about the younger generation, because they're not boxed into our linear thinking. They have the capacity to say, "Oh, this could do this." And we're like, whoa, really? I didn't even realize that.

Dave Vellante

>> Because really easy today to cut corners with AI. And it's not so easy to rethink everything, especially if we've got inertia and we're entrenched.

Savannah Peterson

>> And we haven't been fostering that type of creative thinking.

>> 100%.

Savannah Peterson

>> We've been trapped within our existing framework.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And the other huge problem, and this is something I see coming up all the time, and I even have some research on this, is that people are developing these tools, but no one's training their employees how to use them. A study I did-

Savannah Peterson

>> Outstanding .

Bob O'Donnell

>> More than 55% of the employees or of the companies that I surveyed were doing zero training on a-

Savannah Peterson

>> Zero.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Zero.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's kind of appalling, to be honest.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And I just saw a survey that HP is working on, and their number was identical. It was 50. I think that was just luck. But the point is a majority-

Savannah Peterson

>> I was just going to ... yeah.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And because again, what's happening with these AI tools is they are forcing us to rethink what we do. And to your point, a lot of us have habits, and habits are hard to break.

>> Yep, muscle memory. I know .

Bob O'Donnell

>> And if all of a sudden, somebody gives you a tool that you have to do something completely differently, yeah, and the outcome can be amazing. And again, I've heard this story from other companies like, "Oh, we built this incredible AI app and three people ended up using it because they were the only ones who were willing to spend the time to really learn it, and their productivity is off the charts. But everybody else tried it, and they couldn't really figure out how to integrate it into their ..."

Savannah Peterson

>> Workflow.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Workflow. So that that's the issue we have now. The other interesting thing-

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a really interesting insight, Bob.

Bob O'Donnell

>> The other interesting thing, and this gets into some of the other bigger things we're talking about, is I also think it's a really interesting, I would call sort of the second generation of the AI stuff. First generation being the LLMs, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Everybody was like, "Okay, cool. LLMs, this is crazy." But now with everybody talking about Agentic, and we were just at Microsoft Build. We both happened to be at that event.

Savannah Peterson

>> Y'all have had a week.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Before we came to this one. And that Agentic theme of course was a huge issue. And when I think about what the agents, the things that our people are trying to do is basically use an agent to take advantage of an LLM. Because one of the big problems with LLMs, and this gets back to the training point, is when you're at a chatbot screen, I call it the DOS prompt of the 2020s. What the hell do I type into that? I have no idea. People just don't know. And so with an agent, you've got, there's some level of intelligence. And at the end of the day, an agent is basically writing fancy prompts that are targeted and focused to leverage some level of knowledge from that LLM, and then go off and do something with it. But again, it's that I think we're moving up to that second level. And we saw a little bit of that here. We definitely saw it in Microsoft, but from very different perspectives.

>> Yeah. It's fascinating actually when you're thinking about the agents, how aggressive Microsoft is talking about Agentic AI and the role the agents have. They just published a study with the World Trend Index where they are talking about everybody's going to be an agent boss. I will be working with an agent. I don't know if it's one is my-

Savannah Peterson

>> ....

Savannah Peterson

>> researcher, writer, my editor, whoever that is, right? If you are listening to Dell, they are much more pragmatic, and they're really thinking more about an agent can be a task or you can think about an agent as outsourcing your work. And so where do you want the agent to be? Do you want to train somebody internally? And so is an employee? Whether or not you want to talk about it in terms of digital employee or not is a different story. Or if you're even thinking is a task and it is a work to be done, is that work done outside your organization? And that has implications on your data and your IP.

Savannah Peterson

>> Tons, yeah.

>> So it's quite interesting how people are navigating this, right? And not making it easier.

Dave Vellante

>> Very wide spectrum that you just laid out. I think the article Marc Benioff wrote in The Wall Street Journal is, "We're the last generation of managers to be managing humans only." But your point is you're going to manage agents differently not just from humans, but even along that spectrum that you just laid out.

>> 100%. Yeah, absolutely. And it is interesting. There was one point that I did an interview with the researcher at Microsoft, and she was saying, "It's not a bad thing for managers to try their skills on an agent versus a human." I was like, gosh, she's a point. Right? I think their skin is a bit thicker maybe. Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> But you make interesting point. So two examples from two of my girlfriends. One has turned GPG into a person for them. They're looking for a new job. And so it finds unique things in their resume and hypes them up before a job interview or, "Hey, you should mention this about X experience." And one of my other favorite examples is my girlfriend's turned it into a dating coach. So she literally pulls in the profiles of the men that are hitting on her in the apps and then has it analyze, is this photo made with AI? What's the sentiment analysis of this conversation? Not even kidding you. And so-

Dave Vellante

>> Agent 10 years.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're absolutely right. I mean, we were just joking with Microsoft on the show a second ago about how AI might find me a husband by this time next year, which is bold in a lot of ways.

>> I mean, according to Zuckerberg, our friends will be agents, right? We are going to fabricate our friends because apparently in America we don't have enough friends.

Savannah Peterson

>> But we're still going to be friends. .

Bob O'Donnell

>> For sure. But what this does bring up, and Microsoft pushed this, and actually Jensen Huang in his Computex keynote used the exact same phrase, which is that, "Agents are going to be digital employees." And the issue is if you really think about that, anthropomorphizing a piece of software and in Microsoft's case, they're giving it a digital identity for Entra, their authentication. That's going to freak people out. Come on. Let's be honest.

Savannah Peterson

>> For sure. I mean people who aren't the nerds like us are, it's a whole new workforce.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And even the people who are nerds, but they see the writing on the wall. I truly think it was just unfortunate timing. Microsoft announced 6,000 layoffs and apparently a good percentage of them were programmers. And then two days later, they're talking about this GitHub coding agent that will write all this code for you. And so it's like what kind of correlation is there happening here?

Dave Vellante

>> It is happening.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is. But I also think that part of it can be solved if companies actually thought differently about the role that people will play. To your point about we are focusing on the skill gap when it comes to AI to deploy AI, but we are not thinking about actually training the employees to do what they're going to be doing next once AI comes in. Right? And it's about changing our roles and changing the way we work. It's not about making people obsolete. And I think being totally transparent, I think part of it is laziness. AI killed 10,000 jobs. Not really. You wanted to let go of those people because of either cost or-

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a great point.

>> Let's try not, because that's what obviously freaks people out. And I think that the comment, the focus should be, okay, if I don't need an editor anymore because AI is going to edit my work, what does the editor do now? Well, that editor can actually become a writer.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was just going to say a creator. Yeah.

>> And that's the responsibility of the companies that are doing this work and then of the enterprises that employ the people to think that way.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And again, a lot of this comes back I would to this notion of training and up-skilling people.

>> Absolutely.

Bob O'Donnell

>> You've got to-

Savannah Peterson

>> I was just going to bring it back to that, Bob.

Bob O'Donnell

>> If people aren't being taught how to leverage these tools ... And the other problem is it's happening at such a ridiculous pace. We move fast in tech period. But this is off the charts.

Dave Vellante

>> But that's the thing. I think a lot of organizations don't know how to train.

Bob O'Donnell

>> They don't.

Dave Vellante

>> Hopefully they will, figure it out. And we know invest in your people through training and it pays back.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> I think there's just a lot of uncertainty in how to train.

Bob O'Donnell

>> And again, it's literally changing so quickly that any training courses you develop are going to be out of date .

>> And I think that's part of the point too though. That if you focus on the technology, you are always going to be behind, versus if you're focusing on-

Bob O'Donnell

>> The concept....

>> what you're trying to achieve and then fit the technology for that purpose.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. And one thing that even taking that one step further, when you up-skill people, they invent the solutions that we're not even thinking about.

>> Correct.

Savannah Peterson

>> So I burned out a couple of weeks ago bed and snuck off to Hawaii for four days without telling anyone, which was so with the doctor ordered. And I had a fascinating conversation with the front desk manager of the Fairmont who had created a custom GPT for all of his front desk employees, human employees, that allowed them to respond to guests as fluidly as they would in their native language in whatever language that was.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Wow.

Savannah Peterson

>> So it was a hotel-specific, and he had just built it for him himself and for the team so that the star employees who had such a good rapport in whatever native language that might be, could then distribute that across. And I was sitting there and I'm like, man, this is such a great use case. Because here you are, a front desk manager, you have these tools. It's not in his scope to be the head of AI at the Fairmont front desk, but here he is able to invent this solution that then they scale across their whole company-wide all around the world. And it was a total light bulb moment for me where I thought, oh man, we're going to do some good stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> And what he did was create a moment of delight for every customer that came through. Right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Exactly. And the coolest part was, and I could tell because I got to talk to some of the employee. This is of course I'm burned out, so I go on vacation, I end up talking about AI, classic. But I got to talk to one of the employees that he had that was French, and the empowerment that employee felt because he was the top customer service agent in a lot of categories, being able to give that same level of customized service and delight to other people. I just watched his eyes light up and I thought, to your point, he was someone who now felt up-skilled by this revolution, and excuse me, and the whole ecosystem, this is where it's going to get interesting. These are going to be the inspiring stories. Okay, we're running out of time, so I got to ask you one final question. When we're hanging out at Dell Tech World 2026, which this group definitely will be, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today about this ecosystem? Bob, I'm going to start with you since you're just-

Bob O'Donnell

>> I think it'll be, there's a lot more AI actually happening on this.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, the workloads are going to be edge.

Bob O'Donnell

>> We're going to see workloads move to the edge, and we're going to see ... My big theme for the next year or two, if not longer, is hybrid AI. And Dell's been talking about this, right? So they talked a lot about their AI factory, is sort of the enterprise AI story. There's obviously the cloud story, which it's not going to go away. Enterprises are building it, and then there's going to be the device side of it. And getting smart about how those workloads are distributed in a hybrid AI environment is something I see coming and I'm hoping by next year, it'll actually be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think you're absolutely right with that, Bob. I concur. I concur. What about you?

>> I don't know if I want to see, or no, Bob.

Savannah Peterson

>> Can't wait to hear what you say next, genuinely.

>> But I think we're going to spend more time talking about business models, especially when it comes to agents and developers. And so as a developer, when you're developing an agent or an application and that agent or application takes advantage of data in order to do the task, there's a lot that we haven't figured out yet as far as who owns the data. How do you reward the entity that provides the data for you to develop the service? We're not talking about that. Right now we are just worried about making it happen. But that's just the technology part of it. The business side is a whole different ballgame, right?

Dave Vellante

>> It's a lot of here's the hardware, we can deploy it and stand it up.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, it's like go do the things without thinking about the ramification of the things and it is a layer of complication. I think that's a really great point, Carolina. Caroline and Bob, this is always such a joy.

Bob O'Donnell

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> I just love, y'all.

Dave Vellante

>> Thanks you, guys. Thanks .

Savannah Peterson

>> Appreciate you, Dave, for always curating such fun and thank all of you for tuning into our three days of live coverage here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.