AI Foundations: Building Smarter Solutions with Dell and Intel

Courtney

Hello and welcome to the Dell Technologies Forum podcast series, where we turn transformative ideas into innovation faster. In this series, we bring together Dell specialists and global experts to delve into collaborative ventures with customers across pivotal areas of technology evolution. I'm your host, Courtney Hughes, event programing content lead at Dell Technologies. And today, we're going to be building on previous episodes in which we've covered common challenges that customers face with AI.

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Courtney

Everything from complexity and the availability of usable, ready data to internal resourcing with risks like data privacy and IP leakage and, of course, cost. We're joined by Bill Pearson, VP of Data Center and AI software solutions and ecosystem from Intel. Welcome, Bill.

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Bill

Thanks, Courtney. Glad to be here.

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Courtney

Yes. And we'll be identifying the key customer needs and AI adoption, including starting points, tailored solutions and security, as well as exploring current and emerging opportunities and discovering how the close partnership between Intel and Dell helps us deliver smarter AI solutions. Are you ready to dig in, Bill?

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Bill

Absolutely. Let’s go.

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Courtney

All right. So can you start by telling us what you at Intel see as the key needs for customers in their AI journey?

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Bill

Yeah, I mean, one of the first questions that we often hear from customers is how do we get started? There's a lot to do in this space. It's quickly evolving, and customers are really trying to solve a business challenge and do so in an efficient way. And so they start with pilots. They figure out what that looks like.

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Bill

And often we hear that customers are looking for choice. They're looking for choice across hardware and software networking. And, so like one of the things we're really excited about with regard to choice is the the Dell Power Edge ECS 9680. That's based on Goudie three. And it's a great infrastructure option for customers to consider. When we look at this and hear from customers, you know, we want to make sure that we really understand their needs as they're going across their workloads, whether it's data center, edge client, that doesn't matter.

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Bill

And so the one of the ways we do that is by offering these system reference designs, we call them Intel AI systems. But really it's it's the idea of mixing the compute, the storage, the connectivity, the software and understanding then that that customer specific business requirement and being able to tailor these things to meet the needs of the enterprise and what these customers are trying to accomplish, whether that ends up being inferencing, or fine tuning RAG, the Retrieval, Augmented Generation or training.

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Bill

The central part of the strategy is choice, and then focusing on those business capabilities that they want to accomplish. One of the things that we've also seen is that as customers get farther into, okay, so now I've made some choices and I'm trying to dive in to getting these things deployed. Right. There's often a challenge just around that are specific to enterprises, and they're around things like, how do I make sure that the systems I'm putting together are really enterprise grade that they're into in there, tailored to work with my existing infrastructure?

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Bill

They're validated and optimized that the right software stacks, they're customized to my unique business requirements. They're secure, they're managed, perform well to do the job that I want. They scale and grow as my enterprise grows. They're able to manage all of my enterprise data from a variety of sources that I have plugged in, and that they're all affordable, right?

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Bill

That I can do all this in a way that that's not going to, you know, make me go broke.

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Courtney

Right. So building on that. What are the AI opportunities and key use cases for enterprises?

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Bill

Yeah, this is a fascinating space I mentioned. It's quickly evolving. And as we think about, the evolution today, we see lots of AI assistants. I'll call them where we really see AI augmenting tasks that people do. This is code generation, defect detection, these sorts of things. And, you know, at the same time, we're also seeing the emergence of AI agents.

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Bill

And this is where you have sort of domain specific workflows. Customer service and support is a great example of this. And as we go forward we’ll of course see more of the agent approach. But we'll also see more of a functional AI approach where AI is used to automate complex enterprise wide outcomes around, say, things like finance or health diagnostics.

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Bill

And in order to make these things possible, to keep this train moving. There's sort of two key forces that work together on this. You know, one is the evolution of AI capabilities. This is how do we train more sophisticated models, get more, you know, inference data sets, etc.. The second is around domain specific data. And just making sure that we're making it easy for enterprises to be able to develop and deploy models that are trained on their domain or enterprise specific data to bring that data together, to provide these rich insights and drive the growth that thereafter.

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Bill

And in order for these two things to be possible and kind of moving to that next set of agents Retrieval, Augmented Generation, the RAG technology I mentioned earlier is just really critical to all of that.

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Courtney

Yeah. And so what solutions is Intel bringing to market to support, you know, these areas of intelligence and the enterprise customer needs?

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Bill

Yeah, we're starting with enterprise RAG and really looking at how we bring together, we call it Intel AI for enterprise RAG. So it's helping enterprises get custom results from their AI models by tapping into the data that they already have inside their organization. This is separate from any models, but data from their data sources, their past business activities to really improve TCO, total cost of ownership that they can get otherwise.

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Bill

And so as we do this, you know, we're looking to make sure that we're providing solutions that simplify integration, leveraging Intel Goudy accelerators and Xeon processors, and then making sure that these solutions really work with the enterprise environment that they have today, their existing infrastructure, while also scaling with their business needs. And so some of the ways to do this, it's making sure that we can develop software that complements the hardware that's fully tested, validated, just easy to consume, full of microservices, intuitive APIs, documentation, things that we know our customers are after and then, you know, making sure it meets all of the needs around total cost of ownership, security and openness.

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Bill

So it works with all of their favorite solutions in the way that they know it needs to be right, robust and secure. One of the things that we're doing around here is creating a catalog of solutions. So we're developing a handful of enterprise RAG solutions that are based on the most common inputs we get from customers. We're launching these in Q4.

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Bill

We'll put them all in a catalog. So if a customer buys the Dell 9680 and they say, hey, I want to get started quickly with some solutions, they can go right to the catalog, download them and run them.

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Courtney

Oh that's awesome.

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Bill

Yeah. Isn't that cool? Yeah. And the solutions will be things that we hear businesses trying to do every day. So chat, Q&A, code generation, frequently asked questions, content summarization, these sorts of things.

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Courtney

And so how are you, you know, making it easy for them to get started with the Intel AI for enterprise RAG.

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Bill

Yeah, that's a great question. The, as we mentioned, ease of use is super important. So the thing that we're doing there is using this catalog as a leverage point. So by putting the content all in one place, it's easy for a customer to say, oh, here it is. Here's my options. Then they can take those options, find one that's right for them and experiment with it.

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Bill

So this is the idea of testing downloading it for free, trying the use cases, being able to go in and see how they're going to work in their environment with their data or with their needs. And then when they're ready to deploy, we're really making it easy to deploy these solutions with partners like Dell, of course, so that the solutions that just absolutely work on the hardware that they're buying from Dell.

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Courtney

Yeah. Can you expand a little bit more on the collaboration with Dell, with their deployment?

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Bill

Yeah, absolutely. So as we have been working together for a long time with Dell, we continue to drive choice, efficiency, ease of use. And, we love working with Dell because they're just a leader in this space. And, as we have been doing for a long time, we co-engineer these solutions. We work together closely to make sure that we're bringing our customer insights together with our engineering expertise across both companies, and then leveraging the best resources from both.

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Bill

So one example of that is, you know, with the PowerEdge XE line up that we're talking about here in 9680. So we've got these, systems that are optimized for AI, Gen-AI workloads, and then they're purpose built to drive today's AI use cases. So this is, you know, intelligent systems with open managed and iDrac and secure systems with the latest security.

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Bill

And as we look at these, you know, there's strong value in these systems. So not just good performance but good price performance and value there. Scaling efficiency again as we mentioned, enterprises want to have systems that grow and scale with them. So in addition to these systems, which are key sort of the foundation, we've been also working on developing joint solutions as part of the Dell AI factory.

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Bill

And this idea here is that we can have high performance systems that scale along with solutions. The software that goes with them. And as we work on the software and hardware engineering together, we can develop these solutions together to test these solutions and really deliver a seamless experience for our customers. As we co-engineer the solutions together and work to accelerate business outcomes for our customers.

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Bill

These solutions are really full stack solutions. So we talked about the systems, the hardware that they run on. Of course, we talked about the use cases, but there's a lot in between there that also needs to be there. So you think about the full stack. We're bringing in open source and partner components, validating these components across the full stack to make sure that they work.

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Bill

They work well. They work seamlessly, and that they do truly accelerate the customer's time to value for their enterprise.

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Courtney

All that is so awesome. And so interesting. I could ask you so many more questions. Bill, but I definitely want to thank you so much for your time. It's been really insightful talking to you.

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Bill

Thanks, Courtney. It's been a pleasure.

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Courtney

And thank you to our listeners for your company on this journey into the future of technology. We hope you found today's topic and Bill's insights both insightful and valuable. For those of you seeking further knowledge, the Dell Technologies Forum Roadshow is coming. Look out for that on our website where you'll also find our online resources. Delving deeper into these topics. The Dell Technologies Forum podcast series is brought to you in association with Intel, Microsoft and Nvidia.