Executives from Dell Technologies stressed the need for having clean, structured data close at hand to fuel AI applications as local businesses increasingly look for viable use cases.
Speaking at the Dell Technologies South Africa Forum 2024 at Kyalami, Johannesburg last week, under the theme ‘accelerating AI-powered innovation’, the company’s execs outlined Dell’s strategy and infrastructure and how they support AI adoption.
Mohammed Amin, senior VP for the Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East, Turkey & Africa (CEEMETA) region at Dell, said companies are keen to leverage AI but need to position their data properly to garner real-time insights.
Amin said Dell’s research found that 92% of businesses foresee that AI and GenAI will significantly impact their industry, but 31% are already struggling to keep up with the pace of the disruption.
He added that 80% of data generated is unstructured, and only 45% of businesses report that they currently use their data for real-time insights.
Going forward, learning agility, AI fluency, and creative thinking will be key, with data management, application, and strategic usage of data being the core skill sets needed to fully benefit from AI and data.
Todd Lieb, Dell's VP of cloud partnerships, quoted Michael Dell, saying, “This technology won’t take people’s jobs, but people who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t. And the same goes for companies.”
This is an acceleration game, he said. “It’s about how quickly one can adopt AI as an individual, as a team, as a division, or as a company,” said Lieb.
But he stressed the need to balance scaling and practicality in AI deployment. He said Dell had launched 900 AI initiatives, later narrowed down to 187, each justified by clear business cases and measurable ROI from AI investments.
Bringing AI to the data
He told delegates that “83 of the data that you control is on-prem”. “On prem can be a data centre, a co-location facility, a distribution centre, a warehouse edge, wherever it may be, but you have that data under your control, and because it's yours, you can train and get value out of it.
However, over 50% of enterprise data is generated at the edge, so there is a need to draw that data in to be able to use it effectively. Dell’s assertion is that it is complicated and expensive to keep moving data around, from one location to another. There is more efficiency in bringing AI to the data.
“So we’ve got a vast amount of data that’s yours, which you need to use to create AI specific to your business. And half of all new data will be created at the edge. The implications for acceleration are that you must bring AI to your data. When I do that, I’ll apply the appropriate infrastructure to that data where it is,” Lieb said.
This technology won’t take people’s jobs, but people who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t.
Michael Dell
With its Dell AI Factory, Dell is applying a factory model to AI. It uses a systematics process, starting with defined use cases and building scalable, right-sized AI solutions.
At the Forum, Dell also showcased its range of Latitude laptops and Precision mobile workstations urging delegates to think about not just what you put in your data centre, but think about how you empower users to have inferencing running at a desktop.
“A lot of the interesting, fun conversations today are around the big servers and the GPUs and Nvidia share price,” said Lieb. “But the reality is, this starts at clients’ laptops, and it goes all the way up through large groups of servers, creating one cognitive entity.”
He reminded delegates that Windows 10 will reach the end of support next year. “What that means is there's 400 million client devices that are going to be refreshed or up for refresh by next October – 422 million, to be specific. When you go through that process, refresh to an AI PC, because if you don't, you're going to a year from now. Because employees that know how to use AI will replace those that don't.”
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