Jeff Boudreau, Dell Technologies | Supercloud 4
welcome back to supercloud 4 where we're exploring the impact of generative AI in particular we're interested in the disruption potential of AI the importance of quality data and how organizations can protect their IP and still keep Pace with Market movements with me is Jeff Buro the chief AI officer at D Technologies Jeff good to see you thanks for coming to the studio thank you for having me yeah you're welcome so new role uh how come Dell decided we got to appoint a chief AI officer and and you you must be a popular guy yeah popular guy right now uh a lot of interest after we announced it um I just stepping back in regards to uh how we're thinking about Ai and specifically gen as we go forward um you know it's a defining technology of our error we we truly believe that and if you think about where uh the industries are going and what is being used for Gen and how it's disrupting how our you know our everyday lives and how people use the technology and how business operate um we think it's extremely important uh for us to have focus and dedicated leadership in this space uh specifically as I would say the uh the boards in the sea sues are basically shifting all the money to all AI projects we thought it was important to really make sure that we had the proper leadership and focus in place at though well no question I mean we've reported on this it's like it's not like the top line is all you know growing the it spending it's not like CEO is going oh just spend like you used to in 2020 it's not happening like that so AI is really stealing from some of the these other initiatives but but what excited you about this role why Jeff budro sure and before I go into that I guess to hit your last Point yes I'm definitely seeing some uh as you would say stealing from one project to another to really fund this and get this going but I actually see over the long run I think it's a huge opportunity for growth and expansion of our Tam but also the set of services so from Hardware to software to Services it really brings it all together and actually spands our Tam and our opportunity to really help our customers now what it got me excited about the role it's all about tech uh you you know long background I have uh I guess a good mix of both Business and Technology background and I have a long track record of of leadership so if you think over the last four years of leading isg merging Dell and EMC uh storage teams together taking over compute storage network uh leading and driving the industry leading Technologies and infrastructure you know across the the domains obviously running large businesses the team was over 25,000 strong so I've drove plenty of transformation issues and this was something that we looked at as as the new role so the opportunity to take Tech in business merge those together to really provide a better outcome for Dell but also for our customers is really really exciting what does a chief AI officer do with it's a great question uh it's I would say it's early Innings as a baseball person uh we're in early days so it's evolving uh in regards to the definition and the industry if you kind of look as we just talked about you look in the industry you'd say in the a heavy technology company usually it's a very technology Centric type person um if you look in other Industries uh maybe in Commerce you'll see more of a business and marketing slant to this type of role so they're evolving depending on the industry and the type of company you are uh for me specifically my role in the company is to is to Define and refine our AI strategy uh it's about setting governance policy practices guard rails uh also responsible for the I would say priorization the development uh the implementation of the AI projects that cut across the company so this is not like bu by Buu this is a true pan company type initiative and that's where the focus and Direction comes in from so I I think I'm correct in the D doesn't have uh historically a chief data officer I think Jen kind of took care of that um and so you kind of Lea frog that yes so my question is are you seeing other organizations Institute similar Chief uh AI officers and then because that gets kind of funky right because you got the chief data officer which has always been sort of you know an overlap with the CIO so what are you seeing with other organizations uh it's a great question so do I see others Oran uh uh having a chief AI officer the answer is absolutely yes yes it's happening it's happening in multiple IND Industries so I won't or can't uh uh take credit for being the first because I definitely wasn't uh but I will say there it is a morph and I've seen like I said before there's people coming from the CTO side there's people coming from the co CIO side there's some people coming from the CDO side again we thought it was important since it's such a big initiative that we had to have the dedicated focus and support and someone that could actually drive the transformation across the company um I have to as part of that uh collaborate with all my internal stakeholders so if you think of all the functions I don't care if it's legal or Finance or sales or services or go to market or supply chain I got to cut across everybody working with Jen and Del digital and providing a great uh architecture and set of services for our own internal use uh so we can have more effect there so um it's a a big role that's going to cut across a lot of different functions and I look forward to working with Jen on uh moving our data strategy and our technology strategy so we can realize the potential of AI great at at at DTW you guys put together put out a framework I think there were like four pillars your Dell's AI strategy can you just sort of review that and what's changed since since May if anything sure uh the Strategic framework that we have that we you're referring to at Del Tech world we have it I say it's four key areas it's uh AI in AI on AI for and AI with and I'll unpack that a little bit so if you think about AI in that's about embedding uh AI into our offers uh so they're more intelligent and a simple example of that would be something like a Dell Optimizer um trying to make our our Solutions more more efficient and autonomous by Nature um the secondary thing is AI on you can think about that is US building worldclass infrastructure uh so customers Partners could run their Ai and ML workloads on our Solutions and you an example of that would be something like project Helix where you know Dell and Nvidia both hardware and software came together to build a stack to help our customers really uh drive or be able to deploy um uh Ai and geni type use cases in their on-prem or or Cloud environments um ai4 I really have it's a two-prong for me specifically I call it ai4 and the first step is that is for ourselves and as I think about that is it's as it's early Innings here um how are we using AI uh capabilities tools uh to help improve Dell Technology's internal processes and business processes they have a better uh operational experience for our team members and and be more effective uh the secondary part of that is uh AI uh for our customers and what I mean by that is Tak those lesson learned uh those potentially best practices um potentially a new set of service offers we could bring to Market or bring to bear for our customers to really help them on their Journey so it's really about sharing knowledge with our customers and then lastly the AI with uh you know us for a long time we are Embrace an open ecosystem and this is no different so AI with is about having strategic Partners up and down the stack from Hardware soft platform layers into software um aligning ourselves with uh strategic Partners to really be bring better better set of solutions to our customers so that might be software companies llm providers yeah so if you think of the St providers if you think of the stack I'll start with Hardware real simplistically if you think of the three layers of a modern AI stack so from a hardware layer you got infrastructure so think of what we did with Nvidia in our gpus and our 96 80s right so it's having world class silicon and um and our compute nodes to to bring that as a foundational element in the hardware and the software you st thinking about things like uh the the abstraction layers and the os's right it could be things we're doing with red hat and some other os's if you will you come up the stack into the platform ler this is where your tools and your models are there really to make the day in the life of the developer much easier right so they can develop applications um uh Ai and ml applications for the infrastructure or for their for their Enterprise um we do Partnerships with that like say meta with llama 2 uh Falcon I mean there's a lot of folks in that in that there's a lot of people in that in that bucket in full transp dozens uh more than dozens uh and then you get up into the in the higher level stack of the application layer and this is where we did part Partnerships with like folks like in the data area with like snowflakes or or or even recently with Starburst but there's so many more up there but all the way through the stack those are just some examples we're going to be partnering to provide world-class solutions to our customers the unique thing is you have to wrap that all in Services because as you know right now they're all kind of independ independent piece parts and our opportunity and where I think we're uniquely positioned is is being that integrated to bring a lot of those different pieces together in that open environment and you guys have made some announcements since May I think there was a reference architecture I think I saw at the financial analyst meeting some things on apex yeah uh we've actually there was uh and since DTW I guess going back to where you were a minute ago is that that was really setting up I would say what I call the foundation for us to enable our customers to embrace and drive AI in their own Enterprises and organizations and I would say the key things that we did as one as we expanded our Apex offer and that was about you know uh business agility uh uh workload flexibility a whole bunch of things in there that we did and it was great set of work by the team in addition to that was the introduction of project Helix that was the work with Nvidia Hardware software bringing that together for our customers um the other big one is around uh Cloud native Edge and I know you're going to be talking about Edge later on in the conference but it's really building the that software platform uh in a in delivering it in a very uh easy and secure way for our customers to to access data at the edge and use that and then lastly was a whole Suite of uh Solutions both for AI and geni solutions and that was um uh it cut across multicloud it cut across data and data preparation it cut across security it's so many different areas that so a lot of great Innovation by the team to really help our customers step forward in this journe just a few months yeah things happening fast I I want to come back to how Dell is using Ai and what you're learning because a lot of customers they're experimenting you know they're using things like chat GPT for you know marketing copy writing code stuff like that but they're really trying to figure out where the value is where are you seeing the value sure and I would say uh as I think about the customer Landscaping kind of what's going on in the industry right now um what I'm seeing and the people I'm talking to across a lot of different Industries it's a um I'd say they're exactly right they're in the assessing learning pcing kind of phase uh we're all learning together uh with that said I'd say there's kind of three or four key use cases that are really developing in a maturing so one is around what I call around customer operations and that's around uh both pre- and post sales and it's around how do we enable our agents and our customers to have a better experience there's a whole thing around uh what I'd say content creation and management um in that domain uh and then there's a lot of things around software product develop uh product excuse me software developer productivity it's really about how do we make the team members more efficient in what they're doing and how they can have our developers who are you know highly thought of highly paid very talented people they're working on the most important things versus kind of the noisy things and we're helping do some of that stuff now for Dell specifically um we're leaning into a bunch of different use cases um that we're driving so in the spirit of the ai4 we have a modern modernization effort going on and really how do we improve our entire our operation uh one of it's uh we're focused on what I call sales and go to market enablement and that's really how do we enable our sellers to be more productive how do we provide a more personalized experience for our customers um as we go to market the second one I would give you is around our uh customer operations on the postale support and we have doing a lot of great and interesting work so if you think and talk to some of our customers they'll tell you hey we love your support teams uh we always get the right answer unfortunately sometimes it takes too long to get to the right person or get the right answer and we're doing some creative work with AI and geni to actually flat that entire uh ecosystem almost thinking about giving them a a chat GPT or a prompt if you will where they can put an error log in it can in in seconds tell them through our knowledge bases our best practices our white paper guides and tell them in seconds basically here's your error here's the specific actions you need to take here's a link to actually show you in the knowledge base exactly what the problem was if you want to a reference and there's also an opportunity if you're an agent to actually click a button and say and I want to provide a a customer communication on a regular interval when something happens so we can actually take a lot of that latency in noise out uh so those are some of the big ones we're focused on as a team one real example I guess a great example I can I can give you for me in the early days um one of our products and I won't use the name uh had a had a memory leak and this issue had persisted for a period of time and it was causing some frustration with some of our big customers because they were feeling the pain um in addition was costing uh me a bunch of money and what it was was is I was throwing Hardware at the problem to help one of our customers because I want to do the right thing by them but also taking our talented resources and say hey we got to go figure this out and our teams were looking like do I did I write the code wrong did I have a syntax issue what was the problem so this specific product actually has um a part of it is open source and a part of it is our controlled IP we just took the open source we put it into one of the models and said you know just walk it and tell us if you find any issues and it actually within 2 minutes it came back and actually said told us um you had a order of operation more or less a an order of operations we just had two of the lines so there was no stic issue so our team was look what they were looking for was right it was just there was an order of operations this first and then yes and that was causing the memory leak and within two minutes something that we've been working on I want to give you the whole timeline but uh a long time with a lot of money and a lot of frustration uh we were able to find that out in roset in less than two minutes we made the change that same day uh we did a test in validation and I had it back in the customer's hands with a fix in less than two weeks um so that to me was the AHA wow and and back to what you were saying before about the customer and the the service capability so the customer who doesn't get an immediate response he or she might be start might Google it they're not sure if the response is accurate they're waiting for for a response to frustrated so the value there is obviously the customer satisfaction but it's also the cost of doing that service drops right to the bottom line so those are the types of use cases that I I would expect are really going to start driving AI to gain share in other words I'm spending on AI I'm getting value now let's spend more it might even trickle back to some of the other initiatives that to your point rise as All Ships it rises All Ships it absolutely does and we definitely see as an impact on customer experience which we think will have a direct impact on stickiness and revenue opportunities as we go forward uh we definitely see uh benefits in regards to productivity for our customers and for our Sal which then they can figure out how do you want to take those resources and redeploy them right and some of that could go back to a p&l to be more profitable some of that could go back to investing in future uh Innovation or just on higher valued projects versus the the noisy project so a lot of opportunity there I want to bring up the power law of of gen AI that we developed um I don't know a couple months ago and what this shows is in the vertical axis is the size of the model so you've got the big cloud guys you've got the Llama twos you've got open Ai and you know kind of on the left hand side and on the on the horizontal axis is the model specificity and that orange line is a sort of historical example of the music industry where you had very few music labels do dominated the industry and you had a really long tail and our premise is with all this open source you can see those red lines it's pulling you know to democratize Ai and then you see in the middle there on premises the the special specialized AI that model highly domain specific model that's what you just described you're using your data now my question is will that our premises it'll happen on on Prem of course it's self-serving but will that happen on Prem are you talking to customers about hey I don't want that IP leakage I want to do this you know in my own estate I think it could be more cost effective safer more secure what are you hearing from customers here yeah I'd say uh the big thing I'm hearing from customers is it's uh it's as I said early Innings and it's still immature I guess in its nature and the Enterprises truly haven't seen the benefits yet because they're working through this um I would say the biggest Trend or thing I'm hearing from customers is that they're concerned a lot a handful of things in full transparency one is about complexity uh two is Around Talent that we have the right talent that actually could do the data prep or could I do the um you know the the build the model train the model tune the model prompt the model what have you um in addition to that the concern about security right and now is this a a tax service bigger or not and the biggest thing they're talking me about is IP Control kind of where you just ended uh so they are worried about all that stuff and they're realizing uh there's an opportunity here in regards to that they could do it a lot more cost-effectively and have a lot more uh control over their data and their security and their IP Control if they do it on smaller models on Prem models with some of these open source tools that allow them to go do that and that's something that they're all leaning into so I would say to you right now uh is as we've talked about in the past all data is not created equal uh it is a hybrid world so I do see a hybrid AI world as well and depending on the use case uh the value of that use case and where you can get the best service if that's in a cloud or a Colo or an on-prem type environment I do think we're going to see a hybrid model I do believe more of that because of the critical IP I think more than 80% of the world's most critical IP is still on Prem I think that plays to our hand and to your point um it's a huge opportunity so you described earlier that sort of modern data stack I'm comfortable that the the the core infrastructure in the os's there's plenty of that that you can bring on on Prim that's world class are you confident that the the the tools and the models and the llms that you'll be able to to bring that to create as Rich of an experience as the cloud guys uh the answer we have to right in in the in the quick and dirty but but it's we have to have an easy button we have to make it a simple onr for our customers so they actually can do what they want to do which is keep their critical IP on Prem so the answer is I think we can with the open models you know you you you made the comment about uh how do we democratize certain things and you and I were talking before you know one of the things that I have in my head is you know some one of the defining Technologies of our time was the worldwide web in 1989 and that democra democratized you know uh the access to information and what I'm seeing with AI and specifically gen AI That's changing the game it's democratizing everyone and all of our opportunity to use AI um so it's democratizing Ai and usage in addition to that though it's actually democratizing gen specifically is democratizing um our opportunity to use that information or that data in a more um uh impactful uh way for our for our for our organizations for for each other in our day and life so I think that creates just tremendous opportunity and all these different tools you know you're going to see Innovation continue to happen it's still early so I'm seeing innovation in the Silicon layer and Hardware so you think about the nitas the amds and the intels there's about 30 or 40 other startups I'm tracking in that space that are all doing some unique and interesting things depending on the use case some of that's on you know on the big stuff that we're doing with large language models other stuff is going on the small models uh some of it's going for inferencing especially at the edge and other things I think Rag and inferencing so a lot of stuff going on that space you come up the stack and you think about the closed models or the open models you think about what meta did with llama 2 some really cool stuff going on in there and what you can do uh obviously what open AI has been doing there's just so much Innovation happening there's a lot of startups in that space that are actually doing some really cool things on how to what I would call going back to my old storage days and we talked about data efficiencies where you would compress and DD and thin things they're actually doing that to the models to make them thinner and easier so you don't need big huge resources to drive some of the stuff and just it's just we're in the early Innings you're gon to see so much Innovation Innovation explosion Jeff brro congratulations on on the new rule you got to be super excited what give you I'll give you the last word uh just hey I I I think it's first thank you for having me let's startop with that it's more important uh and I just want everybody to understand that I do believe in that this is a important period in time I think AI is going to change the game in regards to how we work and and and how we live um I am a as we say d but I'm I'm a technology Optimist I truly believe it can help us make the world a better place and help really Drive uh human progress in a better way and I want to be very clear Dell we will not be sitting on the sidelines just like every other technology transition we will be at the Forefront we will be help standing side by side with our customers and we will help them bring this this open ecosystem together so they can benefit in the most uh um beneficial way to them and their customers fantastic all right Jeff thanks again thank you all right and thanks for watching supercloud 4 we'll be right back with more live and On Demand content from our studios in paloalto with John ferer Rob stretche and myself more great conversations around AI keep it right [Music] there
2023-12-17 12:25
