Dell Technologies World 2025 | JJ Davis, Dell Technologies

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JJ Davis

SVP, Corporate Affairs

Dell Technologies

play_circle_outline Enhancing Brand Reputation through Enterprise AI Implementation and Continued Growth

play_circle_outline Customer case studies and success stories

play_circle_outline Importance of upskilling for workforce of the future

play_circle_outline Continuous Learning Initiatives at Dell Facilitate AI Journey to Success

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JJ Davis, Dell Technologies

JJ Davis

SVP, Corporate Affairs Dell Technologies

JJ Davis, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Dell Technologies Inc., joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Savannah Peterson at Dell Technologies World 2025 to discuss the real-world evolution of enterprise AI. Their conversation explores how Dell is advancing AI advocacy, sustainability and workforce readiness across sectors.

Davis highlights Dell’s cross-functional collaborations with teams such as Government Affairs and IT to help move AI from pilot projects into full-scale implementation. Partnerships with organizations such as UC San Dieg... Read more

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What topics and areas of focus are included in the work of corporate affairs at Dell Technologies? add

What has been the focus of discussion at the recent stages over the last two days? add

What are some proposed strategies for ensuring a skilled workforce for the future, particularly in relation to AI technology? add

What training approach is being utilized by the company to ensure every team member is fully engaged in the AI journey at Dell? add

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Dell fans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here coming to the close of our second day of three days of coverage here at Dell Tech World. My name is Savannah Peterson. I'm bringing you all the latest and greatest with Dave Vellante this week. Dave, I think this afternoon's lineup is my favorite so far at the show.

Dave Vellante

>> Deep into day two here, Savannah. Feeling good. Feeling good.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Deep into day two, all the smart people and a lot of smart women back to back.

Dave Vellante

>> Still love it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yvonne, and now JJ, welcome back to the show. So nice to have you.

JJ Davis

>> Hi. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Dave Vellante

>> Good to see you again.

Savannah Peterson

>> Always a pleasure. We had such a blast interviewing you last year. It feels like the whole world has changed in the last 12 months.

JJ Davis

>> For sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> Talk to us a little bit about what you've been working on and the momentum you're seeing.

JJ Davis

>> Sure. Well, it has been a great two days here at Dell Technologies World and like we've been talking about, enterprise AI is starting to grow and scale with customers moving from experimentation to implementation. What I do in corporate affairs is really think a lot about brand and reputation. How do customers overcome the risk and obstacles they face alongside the massive AI opportunity? And so what we are really working on is of course, supporting our core business and helping to create and grow the enterprise, both public and private sector marketplace, supporting our Tier 2 CSP customers, which we saw so many great customers on stage over the last two days from-

Savannah Peterson

>> So many customers....

JJ Davis

>> CoreWeave, to Lowe's and JPMorgan Chase and USAA and then our partner Cohere. Obviously, we support the company in all of those efforts, but we also work really closely with our Government Affairs team, our chief AI officer, Doug Schmitt, our head of IT, our Executive team on AI advocacy and how we think about AI and trust, energy and AI, sovereign AI, the policies that we need to put in place to influence government, skilling and what are the skills of the future to prepare the current and future workforce? So there's so many elements to making the AI era real. And so that's some of what I do every day on top of supporting the commercial endeavors of the company.

Savannah Peterson

>> So you mentioned a couple of those customer case studies that you had on stage. You even had Norby the Robot-

JJ Davis

>> Oh, yeah....

Savannah Peterson

>> was so cute. Love that one.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've also got some AI-driven customer success stories that you were able to share with us today.

JJ Davis

>> Oh, well, I know we've been showcasing customer stories on the stages over the last two days, and I was just blown away with what JPMorgan and Lowe's and USAA shared in terms of how advanced they are. Part of my remit is also sustainability. So to see that come through in their storytelling and what JPMorgan is doing with its headquarters and how they're building for a sustainable future for both business and society is really impressive. We also have a lot of public sector customers here with us this week-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah....

JJ Davis

>> and non-profits that are putting AI to work with Dell's help. So we're working with Scripps at UC San Diego. We have donated an AI factory to them to really work hand in hand-

Savannah Peterson

>> Amazing....

JJ Davis

>> on making the data center grid aware. How can you schedule workloads when electricity is more available or cheaper? You can do everything you need to do with your data and for your business at a lower cost with lower emissions. And so they have been able to drive down their energy costs, down their emissions and up their productivity for their studying of coral reefs and how they're helping to preserve this ecosystem around the world. So that's one great example.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that one. I did not know that narrative.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah. And they're here in the show floor somewhere, so go check it out.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. .

JJ Davis

>> Our non-profit partner, Hopeworks out of Philadelphia is also working with us. They have another AI factory, which is also available through our Customer Solution Centers, where they're putting AI assistants to work to train young adults to ready them for the workforce of the future. And so it is an AI assistant that you can engage with in any language to really prepare your soft skills, which are still so critical for landing a good high-paying job.

Dave Vellante

>> You and I talked in February, I think I was down in Austin. And with all the DEI backlash, I said, "You haven't blinked on your sustainability goals." And what dawned on me, because you were never in it for virtue signaling, you were in it because it's good business.

JJ Davis

>> Right.

Dave Vellante

>> Explain to the audience why sustainability is good business.

JJ Davis

>> Well, think about it. To be a sustainable business, first and foremost, you have to be financially sound.

Dave Vellante

>> Mm.

JJ Davis

>> But you also need to make sure you're preparing for the future from an environmental sustainability standpoint as well. We talked about it in our press conference today and Michael said, "Circularity and recycling are taking back old equipment when we sell new equipment." We've been doing this for as long as I've worked here, 25 years almost. And it is really core because what we make, when you upgrade, we need to help you do something responsible with that unit and we need all the parts-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah....

JJ Davis

>> from within that unit or a server or a storage array because we want to turn trash into treasure. Guess what it does? It lowers costs, it preserves the environment, it has positive impact when you're dealing with things like trade and tariffs. And so when we can put recycled conflict minerals back into our systems versus virgin mining, that has also positive human rights impact as well. And so companies need to think about their core values and their purpose and how they can drive sustainable outcomes for their business, their customers, and the broader community at large.

Dave Vellante

>> Can you reuse rare earth metals?

JJ Davis

>> Yeah, we have-

Savannah Peterson

>> You can. Yeah.

JJ Davis

>> We have a 50% recycled... We have 50% recycled cobalt in some of our Latitude batteries. We were the first to do that.

Savannah Peterson

>> There's a bunch of recycled magnesium in this device in front of us.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah. That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> That is so huge given, of course, today is-

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a huge thing.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> And this is why, and a lot of these efforts are part of Project Luna, correct? Is that what you all call it?

JJ Davis

>> Well, it was a concept from several years ago and it was never going to sell as an actual product, but we took elements of it that we could manufacture at scale and deliver to our customers, and that's what we're doing. And then the UC San Diego example I gave, that one has a concept name as well, Concept Astro. And that isn't productized yet. How do you make the data center grid aware? But we're working on can we productize it? And what elements might we learn from that we can make available to customers at scale? Just like what we did with Luna, pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Dave Vellante

>> Say more about Concept Astro.

JJ Davis

>> Well, the idea is how do you take an AI factory and not just make the AI factory itself more efficient? So you've heard a ton about Dell's leadership in modern data center efficiency, the best performance per watt of anybody in the market. What we're doing with liquid cooling innovation, we now have the brand name PowerCool, which we announced in Michael's keynote yesterday. Going beyond that, how can you not just make the hardware and the optimized software more efficient, but schedule your software at the workload level? How do you run it when energy is more available and cheaper? So if you have a super intensive workload, you can schedule it through agentic AI to run when the energy is available, and then your less intensive workloads can run at higher peak times. And so can we get smart enough at scale to operate our data centers at the workload level, which is going to have real benefit to energy availability for our customers?

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and you're doing this all the way from the data center to the edge here and these devices are also efficient. These AI PCs are able to do the exact same thing here on the edge where all of our data is. It's pretty exciting.

JJ Davis

>> Well, you heard all about the Dell Pro Max today from Sam Burd. And the power of a data center, essentially, at your fingertips. And how do you offload the AI small language models or inferencing onto a laptop or a workstation and take that burden off of the data center? That's going to be good for the environment as well, which is a side benefit to what developers actually want.

Dave Vellante

>> Client-server's back.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> In a different way, but it's big.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JJ Davis

>> I think what is important for everybody to remember is we innovate based on what our customers demand, what they need. And building sustainability into our innovation engine is what our customers want us to do.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. How would you rank the concern of energy efficiency, for example, in the sustainability stack to the other concerns that some of your customers have when they come or things they need other demands I should say ?

JJ Davis

>> Well, energy availability and cost, especially, in markets like Europe where energy is very expensive. It's a huge concern, but they're thinking about energy diversification, energy availability, cost. You've heard a lot in the last two days about underutilization in data centers of today, much less greenfield and what's coming. And so we need to help our customers make sure they're not over-provisioning or where they can consolidate, do that. How do we make sure that all kinds of energy are available? And so it is a big issue, but they're not thinking about it always from an altruistic point of view. This is what they need to do to run their business and get ahead, but they want to do it the right way.

Savannah Peterson

>> Mm-hmm.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, it's like I was saying, it's good business. And capacity planning has become a thing again-

Savannah Peterson

>> Right. You're absolutely right about that, Dave....

Dave Vellante

>> because if you heard Jeff talk about the incremental impact and how many more tokens, and that's all energy.

JJ Davis

>> Right.

Dave Vellante

>> And so how do you plan for that?

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> You can't just pick a number and double it.

JJ Davis

>> Right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and you got to be mindful. I love your point. It's not just about the good vibes. In the same way a diverse team produces better results and higher ROI, a sustainable business will save you money and achieve you bigger results.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Talk to me a little bit more about the customer conversations that you have around these when they're sharing these requests with you or you're talking to the people about saving the coral reefs. I'm not going to get over that, I'm going to bring that up 10 different times in the show. That is so cool. I love snorkeling and you're speaking my language.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> But what's the feedback loop like?

JJ Davis

>> Sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> How do you know what to do?

JJ Davis

>> Sure. So we have customer RFPs that we answer every day. We have customer questionnaires from existing customers. Sustainability is in 95% of our RFPs today.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome.

JJ Davis

>> We have customer advisory boards and partner advisory boards. I spent an hour and a half with our partners yesterday in ways we can best partner to deliver more asset recovery services to our joint customers as an example. So we have that 360 feedback loop. In fact, just this morning I shared our Q1 insights from our sustainability RFPs. So the product groups can get that and factor it into how they're thinking about longer-term sustainable roadmap decisions that they need to make. And so I think with AI and agentic AI coming, we're going to be able to combine so many sources of insights from our trusted analysts as well, to be able to package them up in a way that I think is so much easier for our sales teams, our product teams to make decisions. It's harder than it needs to be right now, but with the help of technology, this data and these insights are going to be so much easier to act on because we'll be able to integrate them in a way we never have before.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. You just sparked a little light bulb moment for me, JJ. And I'm wondering, I'm going to ask this as a question, but maybe an observation. The negative conversation around AI is a lot around costs and power and capacity as we scale. The reality is, if I'm hearing you right and putting the pieces together, AI might actually make us a more sustainable world in general.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> We could be even more energy efficient across the board.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah. We are working on AI for green. And so not just how do you make AI infrastructure more efficient, but what problems, big problems can AI solve? And you can apply them to healthcare and farming and all kinds of areas that are desperately needing this scale to solve these problems. My son starts medical school in August-

Savannah Peterson

>> How exciting....

JJ Davis

>> and a lot of people are like, "Well, what about AI? How is it going to impact the medical field?" And he wants to do research and cure disease. Well, maybe he will actually be able to do that in his lifetime.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, last night we had Memorial Sloan Kettering on. And I love Jess, she's such a firecracker-

Dave Vellante

>> Amazing conversation....

Savannah Peterson

>> just a brilliant person, but they're literally, they just had 100% success rate with this clinical trial for rectal cancer. 100% success rate-

JJ Davis

>> Yeah. Incredible....

Savannah Peterson

>> first time. It's really incredible. I think when your son's a resident coming out on the other side of that, his experience or researcher, whatever pathway he chooses-

JJ Davis

>> Yeah....

Savannah Peterson

>> we're not pigeonholing him, but there will be such a different landscape of possibility.

JJ Davis

>> Right.

Savannah Peterson

>> He'll be able to achieve things faster and really have even greater impact.

JJ Davis

>> Well, AI skilling is another big topic. And how do we ensure that we have the workforce of the future? And so you're even seeing a recent executive order coming out of the White House in late April around what we need to do to upskill America at the K-12 level and as students try to go enter the workforce. And so what training and education and skill building do we need to provide to the students and to the teachers? How can public and private sector partner?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

JJ Davis

>> And so we are driving a lot of initiatives inside our company with our partners and in the communities that we want to share. So together we can hopefully scale what it is society needs to fully participate.

Savannah Peterson

>> That upskilling piece is so important.

Dave Vellante

>> I was going to ask a follow-up on that. How did you deal with the upskilling internally?

JJ Davis

>> So we have a learning development arm within our company, and we started just with one-on-one. So we had a four-part AI skilling series, where we just educated our team members on our AI strategy, what AI is and all the things that they can start to engage in. And we had a near 100% participation in that. John Roese has just rolled out Agentic AI training. Michael talked about it today around leadership imperative, which is something when we have a big tectonic change or transformation in our company, we start at the most senior level and we do a train the trainer model. I did a class of 50 people, where we talked about our AI strategy and what it is each team member needs to do to fully participate. So it's a multi-pronged change management approach because we need every single person at Dell all in on this AI journey, but we've got to train people. That's kind of at the bigger general level, but then all the way down to training on the tools. So we are content creators in marketing, and so we use a different AI tool than maybe the developer uses or the salesperson uses.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Sure.

JJ Davis

>> So we had to train people and we have to pay for that-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah....

JJ Davis

>> and the licenses we need. We also need better workflow, so that the AI and the AI created content can eventually connect to the workflow. So it can be automated with less people , if you will. And it's going to be an ongoing journey because it's going to constantly change. So this idea of always on learning, no matter what age you are or what level in your career you are, is going to be so important.

Savannah Peterson

>> Stay curious.

Dave Vellante

>> Invest in your people through training, it'll always pay for itself eventually.

JJ Davis

>> That's right.

Savannah Peterson

>> And just stay curious, man. I think that's the curiosity quotient, most important of the EQIQ CQ, whatever it might be. I think that's one of the metrics. I'm going to write a piece on it. One of the metrics of how successful companies will be because-

JJ Davis

>> That's right....

Savannah Peterson

>> it's kind of cool, we're coming back... Yvonne was talking about Sunday school and how she's teaching little kids and how they're showing her all the neat things that they're doing with AI. And I love this because to your whole full circle moment is teach the teachers and bring that down. And then also these new minds that are rising up, these AI natives are going to be teaching us a lot. I'm sure we're going to learn a lot from them. Wow. Okay. This is so fun to think about. JJ, final question for you.

JJ Davis

>> Sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> When we're hanging out at Dell Tech World 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

JJ Davis

>> Oh, gosh. Well, I hope that elements of Concept Astro are real and that we can really make the data center grid aware.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love this. Yeah.

JJ Davis

>> So that we can start to really add even more value and greater savings for businesses and the planet.

Savannah Peterson

>> But we cannot wait to continue to tell that story.

JJ Davis

>> We'll find out.

Savannah Peterson

>> Maybe we can even bring some of them up here and have that dialogue. I'm just pumped, I'm going to have to dig into that.

JJ Davis

>> Yeah, that's great.

Savannah Peterson

>> JJ, it's always such a joy to have you on this show.

JJ Davis

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> We appreciate you.

JJ Davis

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> Thanks, JJ.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. And thank you Dave. And thank all of you for tuning into our three days of live coverage here in beautiful 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.