Dell maps out transforming the partner experience with AI

Dell Technologies has highlighted significant channel investments during the past 12 months as it aims to transform the partner experience with AI. 

Dell chief partner officer, Denise Millard emphasised the importance of its channel partner network and shared what partnering with Dell looks like in the future, particularly in the face of rapid change in the market with generative AI and its autonomous decision-making capabilities. 

“There’s things that we’re doing to lay the groundwork to really transform your experience with Dell and this is going to be a multi-year journey,” she said. 

Three key areas Millard is focused on include lead management; collaboration and engagement; and quote-to-order capabilities.

In regard to lead management, Millard said it was stepping up from standard leads to an ‘enriched program’ using AI powered predictive insights, looking across billions of data points to create demand. 

“Those demand signals give us the ability to give you the highest probability leads – buy and refresh and we’re coupling that with contact information, account intelligence and AI generated scripts so partner teams are informed and ready. It’s all about, how do we get the right opportunity to the right partner at the right time?” she said. 

Tightened collaboration, consistency and engagement will see Dell redesign its collaboration efforts and make sure its tools support bi-directional communication both at the account and opportunity level.

“We’re giving our account teams greater visibility, providing them with the best information about our ecosystem across a single pane of glass,” she said. 

“They’ll have transaction and registration history and partner capabilities so they can understand the full impact of our ecosystem across every account and opportunity. The more our sellers understand, the more predictable and better engagement with you.”

Dell is also seeking to simplify the quoting and ordering functionality through embedding intelligent pricing and the ability for partners to rapidly select quotes and order in real-time.

“We’re also putting agents into the quoting tools so that you can configure the best solution for your customers with the right outcome,” she said. 

“We’re doing more to empower our partners. All of this in the spirit of winning and growing with all of you and AI is going to play a huge role.”

Millard said in the past year, it has experienced more than 40 per cent growth in sales in collaboration with partners as well as a 20 per cent increase in PowerStore revenue ever since it switched towards a partner-first strategy for storage. Earlier this year, updates were also made to its partner program featuring enhanced incentives and rebates to help partners capture a bigger slice of opportunities in the market.

“Over the past 18 months, we have made massive investments across our program, go-to-market, tools and processes,” Millard said. “We’ve aligned our sales campaign so that when we go to market together, we’re aligned in front of the customer.” 

Millard underscored the critical role of partners in driving Dell’s success, particularly in AI adoption and customer engagement.

She also hinted at building out a specialty Client team to grow and win with its Client portfolio through partners.

“It’s clear we are all in with our partners across all lines of business,” she said. 

CEO Michael Dell also joined Millard, stating partners drove about half of its business, globally. 

“There’s no question that AI offers extraordinary opportunities for companies to reimagine themselves and their ability to serve customers and grow. This is a huge game changer and still, we’re at the beginning,” he said.

“Our vision and strategy give customers choice and there’s a great role for partners to play that guides customers on that journey.”

Globally, AI is expected to add US$15 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

During his opening keynote, Dell said the future of AI will be decentralised, low latency and hyper efficient.

Dell released a host of new technology updates across its portfolio, in particular to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA 2.0.

More than 3000 customers are running Dell AI Factories globally, with a lot of success and a majority of this is driven through the partner ecosystem, Dell said. 

“The Dell AI factory is up to 60 per cent more cost effective than the public cloud, and recent studies indicate that about three fourths of AI initiatives are meeting or exceeding expectations,” he said. 

“That means driving ROI and productivity gains from 20 per cent up to 40 per cent and some cases more. Now with agents, compute and deep reasoning, the models are helping us think, and they’re thinking and acting on their own with autonomy.”

For AI to reach its economic potential, Dell said adoption has to broaden.

“85 per cent of enterprises plan to move generative AI workloads on-premises in the next 24 months,” Dell said. 

“Together with partners like Microsoft, Hugging Face, Red Hat, Cohere, Meta with the Llama stack, Google bringing Gemini on-prem, ServiceNow, Mistral, Glean and many more, we’re developing AI for the enterprise, delivering end to end solutions with the right infrastructure at the right scale for every use case across every industry.”

Dell said the installed base of a billion and a half PCs is aging, and being replaced with AI innovation. 

“The Windows 10 end of life is coming, and we are ready. Dell is the leader in commercial AI PCs, and we’re further distancing ourselves from the competition,” he said. 

“We’ve simplified our portfolio and made it easy to choose the right system, giving you the choice of the latest from NVIDIA, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.”

Dell also showcased that AI innovation wasn’t only focused on the large enterprise, pointing to Australian start-up Norby. 

The company was founded by Adrian Mullan, who created a conversational language companion that helps language learners improve their pronunciation and speaking skills, supporting more than 20 languages.

“We have the ability now of some of the new AI technology to be able to tailor the interaction to each individual user,” Mullan said. 

Dell Precision workstations and the NVIDIA GPUs have been a huge help in creating Norby, using the technology in a few different contexts, Mullan said in helping with the mechanical engineering and CAD designs for manufacturing, and the other part in being able to train and fine tune some of these large language models.

“We are getting to the stage now where a lot of these large language models run in the cloud, but also locally,” he said. 

“We can load them on to workstations and train or finetune them at the edge.”

Dell added the power of an AI driven revolution in personalised learning, language and speech therapy, presents incredible possibilities. 

“Dell is powering this transformation, connecting the data, intelligence and innovation,” he said. 

“At our core, we’re about solving the world’s toughest challenges and enabling human progress, and that’s happening every day in laboratories, on manufacturing floors, in boardrooms and at dinner tables around the world.”

Julia Talevski travelled to Dell Tech World in Vegas a guest of Dell Technologies.