The global market for artificial intelligence is estimated to reach $153,389 million by 2025, growing at a rate of 49.3 percent since large-scale adoption efforts began in 2016, and Dell EMC is preparing specialized data centers to support this growing interest for AI.

AI presents a huge opportunity for businesses to more effectively leverage data toward business outcomes, but the complexities and cost of experimentation that come with this still developing technology create a barrier for enterprise adoption and optimization. In an effort to break down that barrier and encourage modernization, Dell EMC is working to enable greater transparency between tech and consumer through its updated AI Innovation Lab.

“We take servers, storage, networking and software, put it together to design targeted solutions for a particular use case, and then bring in services and support along with that so we have a complete product,” said Garima Kochhar (pictured), systems senior principal engineer at Dell Technologies Inc. “That’s what we’re doing for the AI space.”

With experience building high-performance computing solutions at Dell for almost 15 years, Kochhar is now leading her team, as well as its partners and customers, through an AI revolution. Kochhar sat down with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Ready System for AI Launch Event in Austin, Texas. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Garima Kochhar in our Women in Tech feature.

A shifting AI landscape

Until recently, the Dell EMC lab focused primarily on applications for HPC, but the company expanded its learnings to encompass AI and support an overall industry shift to the new technology.

“The algorithms and the hardware of the technologies available have hit that perfect point. Along with industries’ interest and the amount of data, we have to make it more mainstream,” Kochhar said.

As market interest and rapid tech innovation come to a head, Kochhar’s team is working to facilitate smooth transitions for customers. AI tech holds the potential for applicability across a broad range of industries, but its opacity can obstruct the path to transformation. Through its lab, Dell EMC is working to make AI tech more accessible and customizable for the commercial market.

“It’s not that AI is something new, it’s that today’s technologies allow us to use it. Because we have a lot of experience doing really elaborate solutions, it was a natural effect to develop Dell EMC’s AI deep learning machine learning solutions in this lab,” Kochhar said.

Take a tour through the Dell EMC AI lab with Garima Kochhar in the video below:

Transparency in transformation

The goal of the lab is to bring in new technologies from inside of Dell, as well as from partners, and evaluate them based on a number of factors, including performance and successful integration with complementary tools. From vetting to designing systems and creating best practices, the 13,000-square-foot data center provides a full-service resource for partners and customers to optimize solutions for real-world use cases.

“Our charter is to build the right solutions for specific workloads and see how they fit well together, because the final solution is comprised of multiple different pieces being interoperable,” Kochhar said.

Dell EMC shares its HPC and AI lab space with contemporaries handling other new technologies, a physical proximity that often enables faster resolutions for interoperability issues.

“We share those best practices because we, engineers, sit next to each other, and we discuss things with each other. We’re part of the larger organization,” Kochhar said.

The lab sees customers working in manufacturing, life sciences, molecular dynamics, cryogenic electron microscopy, weather simulation applications, and more. With every iteration of technology, there’s new learnings that apply broadly across the enterprise infrastructure, and Dell EMC is committed to sharing solutions that serve customers at every level.

“A big piece of putting these solutions together is making sure that all these frameworks are working with all these different neural network models. We run standard benchmark datasets so we can do comparisons across configurations, and then share best practices and tuning,” Kochhar stated.

While it is set up for convenient remote access, the lab also encourages customers to engage with the team and tech in person. Although Dell EMC does offer support and services, the mission in the lab is primarily concerned with engineering.

“We’re a working lab; we’re an engineering lab; we’re a product development lab. When customers come into the lab, they work with us from an engineering point of view, not from a pre-sales or services point of view,” Kochhar said.

Watch the complete video interview with Garima Kochhar below:

True partners and advisors

Dell has long been an HPC titan for enterprise software solutions, and Kochhar’s work in the AI lab is an extension of the company’s commitment to innovation. Her many years working in HPC at the company have made Kochhar a trusted guide in the AI journey for customers with a variety of specific business needs.

“We give you the right configuration and right optimizations with the data backing it up for the right decision for you for all our solutions, instead of forcing you into the one solution that we do have,” she said.

Her team is continuing to streamline collaborative processes between Dell, partners and customers to ensure it can deliver on the company’s value of facilitating the working relationships that foster innovation.

“When you’re building complex solutions, there’s no one company that makes every single piece of it. All the technologies [under] Dell EMC are because of our super close relationships with partners that allow us to build solutions that are painless for our users. That’s the advantage we bring with this lab and our company,” Kochhar said.

With the rich potential AI holds for every industry, maximizing transparency for consumers is yielding more transformative opportunities. By consulting customers at every step of development, Dell EMC has been able to build solutions and best practices for a range of use cases, as well as incorporate learnings into internal improvements.

“That’s the reason this lab is set up for customer access. It allows us to learn from customers. It allows them to get comfortable with Dell technologies, to work directly with the engineers so that we can be their true partners and advisors and help them advance their research, their science, their business goals,” Kochhar concluded.

Check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Ready System for AI Launch event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell Ready System for AI Launch event. Neither Dell EMC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE