While 2024 mainly saw early adopters experimenting with AI in production, Dell expects a significant shift in 2025, with more enterprises deploying AI as core projects. Moving from conceptual steps. Provide a measurable return on investment..
John Rose, Dell’s global chief technology officer and chief AI officer, emphasized in a media briefing that the region’s primary challenge is not the technical feasibility of AI, but the right organizational strategy and framework to ensure its successful adoption. To make.
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“If you’re not the chief AI officer and you’re not empowered and supported by your board and your leadership, your ability to prioritize the right AI work in your company is limited,” he said. “You might not have a budget, you might not have control, and there might be competing AI efforts that aren’t right.”
The Rise of the Chief AI Officer Role in Asia Pacific
Peter Mars, Dell’s president for the Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China region, told the briefing how he regularly meets with CTOs and CEOs across the region. As recently as November 2024, Mars saw signs of AI project overload, which is being managed by a customer. More than 300 AI projects At the same time
“I’m seeing some of the biggest users in the world, where they don’t have this strategy locked down, they’re still swinging all over the place,” Mars said.
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To overcome these challenges, Mars said more companies in APAC are now appointing chief AI officers to drive AI strategies. This is expected to bring more convergence and focus on enterprise AI strategies.
“We’re currently seeing many of our customers, particularly more savvy enterprise customers, invest in chief AI officers,” he noted.
While they are also appointing AI committees with representation from business units, such as marketing, software development, and manufacturing, these business units are ultimately led by a chief AI officer.
“Sometimes the CIO is playing a dual role, but more and more we’re seeing companies invest in CIOs or chief AI officers to support their strategy and drive around their AI capabilities. can help.”
Advantages of a ‘top-down’ approach to implementing AI
Rose said the biggest problem for companies rolling out AI is no longer technology or methodology, which Dell believes it has solved for its customers. With its defining “AI factory” model and approach.
Instead, Rose said: “The thing that’s still a problem we’re seeing, which has nothing to do with technology, is organizational complexity. How to do it. [AI] “It’s becoming clearer, but how to organize the company to do that successfully is a really big active conversation right now,” he explained.
Rose explained that even the most advanced companies are “struggling to create the right organizational model to make sure they have an empowered leader” for AI “who can actually make strategic decisions.” ” This AI leadership role will involve facing the reality that “some people won’t like the decisions” made about AI strategy and having the authority to enforce the chosen direction among business leaders.
Rose said Dell was “very thoughtful” about structuring its AI efforts internally. Businesses have implemented measures to ensure that all AI projects are “top-down and strategic.” Leveraging this top-down approach, all AI projects and use cases now require approval from Rose, CIO Doug Schmidt, and COO Jeff Clark.
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“We knew it would be impossible to get consensus among all business leaders on what the single most important AI project should be, because they are all important to our business leaders,” Rose said. Explained. “But our ability to implement them is limited to only a handful at a time.”
Rose strongly favors a top-down approach over a “bottom-up” option. While a bottom-up approach, where a business unit creates and implements an AI project, can foster innovation and experimentation, it can lead to misplaced priorities and inefficiencies without clear oversight and direction. Rose cautioned that this approach “may not be in the organization.”
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Return on investment will increase in 2025.
According to Dell, the first wave of AI return on investment will begin next year.. This will come in the form of significant changes in savings, revenue, margin improvements, or results, and will result from experimentation over the past two years to figure out how to use AI effectively, Rose said.
“We’ve seen that most of the AI tools needed to do enterprise AI have become standardized and turnkey,” he explained. “You don’t need to build your own coding assistant. You can easily buy one and implement one on premise. There is now a clear mechanism for implementing AI.
“And what we’ve learned is, If you choose the right projects and approach them the right way.has significant business impact in terms of hard ROI dollars. And that’s important because businesses don’t like to venture into an area first where they have no proven track record of success.