As the AI evolution accelerates across enterprises, Dell Technologies Inc. CTO of products and operations, John Roese (pictured), finds himself holding a title he doesn’t plan to keep: chief AI officer.

In his view, the role is a temporary one — and that’s a sign of progress.

Dell’s John Roese talks with theCUBE about AI evolution during Dell Technologies World.

“This job is time-bounded,” Roese said. “Once you actually get a company fully into the AI era, which does take a while, it’ll be several more years, the idea of there being a single person responsible for doing that makes no sense. And we firmly believe that.”

Roese spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Dell is applying AI internally and results the company has achieved. (* Disclosure below.)

AI evolution in contact centers

Roese described how Dell identified four primary areas of its business where AI could be applied to achieve maximum impact: supply chain, global services, engineering and global sales. The company found there was an opportunity to improve its contact center and sales operations after carefully analyzing the data.

“We realized in our contact centers … there’s a huge amount of human energy that goes into providing feedback to our inside salespeople, to our contact center attendants,” Roese said. “It turns out there’s digital humans and avatars and all kinds of tools that can make that an AI project. If I have a technology that can do that, I should go do that. But it’s the data that led us there.”

In his role as CAIO, Roese is often approached by employees seeking to implement various AI tools within the company. Dell relies on an internal review board to assess whether a requested AI tool is duplicated elsewhere in the company and is appropriate for the business need.

“Everybody who comes to me with an AI idea also brings their own opinion about the tech stack,” Roese said. “That’s a terrible thing because if we implemented all of them … we’d have about 300 AI tools. So, we actually decouple that. You as the business owner do not get to choose the technical architecture of the company. By decoupling those two, you get to a point where you start getting repeatability and scale.”

Dell is also continuing to pursue various initiatives involving the AI Factory. On Monday, the company announced a collaboration with Cohere Inc. to create an advanced solution that would be integrated and deployed on AI Factory infrastructure. It is an example of how enterprises can move faster by consuming already-existing technologies rather than inventing them, according to Roese.

“Once you have an AI Factory, what do you run on it?” Roese asked. “Cohere is a great example. That’s not an AI Factory; that’s the workload you run on the AI Factory. And now you can consume it kind of as an appliance. It’s standardized. Coding assistants are heading in that direction.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE Media