Dell views Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) as being at the forefront of the global AI landscape. Peter Marrs, Dell Technologies’ President in Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) said, “We already see AI adoption in the region increase, and (there is) a diverse use of AI.”

Not only is there huge growth, but these technologies are being leveraged to improve customer experience as well as drive significant productivity gains. If only 39% of APAC businesses leveraged AI in their operations in 2022, this figure almost doubled in 2023 to 76%, according to IDC who also anticipate AI adoption to soar in this region as 80% of CIOs in APAC will harness AI by 2028.

Dell enjoys diverse customers using AI, from banking, telecoms, to even manufacturing and more. Peter said, “A prominent telecom provider in Asia is developing an in-house GenAI platform to bolster their research and development efforts for 5G products and services. A leading global bank launched a high-performance in-house AI chatbot for operations efficiency, relationship managers and customer support. 

 “Also, a multinational manufacturing conglomerate developed an in-house GenAI system to support research and development of cutting-edge innovations to solidify its market-leading position.”

This diverse use of AI bodes well for its future in this region, and this is further bolstered by recent events – the accelerated development of AI technology, led by large language models (LLMs). 

A Relook at Existing Use Cases

According to Peter, accelerated development and LLMs are driving organizations to revisit AI use cases.

There is more data compared to before and the increased availability of large datasets have made it possible to refine AI models.

“One example is CyberAgent in Japan who partnered with Dell by adopting Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers to store their large datasets – the servers are able to secure a larger amount of resources, which make it easier for them to respond to requests to evolve their LLM services, improve the accuracy of catchphrases and deliver more effective content,” Peter explained.

Customer operations, content creation, software development, and sales are areas where existing AI can be enhanced for better outcomes. But it is more than just better productivity or more seamless flows. Peter said, “We are seeing organizations relooking how they deploy AI with privacy and security as such concerns come under greater scrutiny with AI adoption becoming more widespread.”

Low Hanging Fruit

There are many ways to slice and dice the opportunities for AI usage, and Dell organizes it into how AI tech can be used in four ways.

Peter explained, “As the market demand for AI-enabled solutions continues to climb, we are focused on four areas – AI-In where AI is built into products, AI-On which is our strategy for hosting AI workloads and storing AI-related data, AI-For, or the use of AI to modernize our business, and AI-With, which is how we work with our ecosystem of partners to make AI real.”

It is worth noting here that this vendor’s storage portfolio already plays a huge role in the AI ecosystem as much of the world’s critical data already resides on Dell systems. During a channel analyst event in Bangkok, recently, Dell announced that AI-optimized servers now make up a third of Dell’s server revenue. 

Peter had also shared that as more customers do testing and modelling with large language models (LLM) for AI, there will eventually be a “data reckoning” for data storage. More data is generated from AI applications means a massive opportunity for storage providers like Dell.

“We are seeing organizations relooking how they deploy AI with privacy and security as such concerns come under greater scrutiny with AI adoption becoming more widespread.”

Also, current Dell collaborations with players like Meta aim to simplify and hasten advancements of GenAI on-premise by facilitating a streamlined process for Dell customers to launch Meta’s Llama 2 models. Another collaboration with Hugging Face also makes it easy for enterprises to create, finetune and implement their own open-source GenAI models with the Hugging Face community on Dell infrastructure products and services.

Bringing AI to Life

Dell is actively developing and maintaining an ecosystem of AI solution partners, ranging from silicon providers to model/data set curators and relevant software stack component providers.  All this is with the goal of bringing their AI strategy to life, and Dell’s Generative AI Solutions, a set of solutions that span IT infrastructure, PCs, and professional services, help to simplify and facilitate the adoption of full-stack GenAI with large language models. 

Peter also shared about the huge role that internal teams play in advancing their strategy. “We have fostered a culture of company-wide experimentation and flexibility with a focus to curate reusable data and AI insights, whilst standardizing and automating processes, with emphasis on data quality.”

It has become more seamless to integrate new capabilities into their workflows as a result. 

“Most real AI projects will require all these elements – compute, storage, data protection, edge, multicloud automation and multicloud ecosystems as well as broad / deep expertise and professional services capabilities. Dell is well positioned as one of the only companies with the depth, breadth and ecosystems to deliver real world AI outcomes,” Peter concluded.