Dell’s AI Charge: Think Faster, Act Smarter

In an age where ‘AI becomes as essential as electricity,’ Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell says his company is setting up partners and customers for success.

VirtuIT Account Manager and Infrastructure Consultant Donovan Henderson took an “extremely urgent” call in January from a customer needing to deploy AI immediately to help manage an onslaught of new large customers.

“They made it clear: ‘This is something we need ASAP,’” Henderson told CRN. “They said, ‘The CEO really wants us to get going with AI and figure out how we can utilize AI, so you need to get a call scheduled with whoever you have for that.’”

“No pressure, right?” he quipped.

At that moment, Henderson had a choice. He knew VirtuIT had the capabilities in-house to manage the customer’s request, as well as relationships with multiple vendors that could help. What prompted his next move—a phone call to Dell Technologies—was the speed at which the customer wanted to take action.

Henderson reached out to VirtuIT’s Dell account team, and he was back on the phone with his customer within 48 hours from the initial call, this time with Dell AI Business Development Manager Vinny Scotto on the line as well.

What most impressed Henderson—and what laid the groundwork for a dramatically short three-week AI sales cycle—was not only an in-depth impact assessment that delved into where the customer stood now and where it wanted to go but also how Scotto approached the technology stack.

“He and his team developed a complete AI strategy that the customer could implement with or without Dell, which built a lot of credibility with [the customer],” Henderson said. “And that strategy obviously included the use cases that we identified during the impact assessment, the data requirements for those use cases, the software stack that they would need and, along with the infrastructure, specs that would be needed to run that solution effectively. … It’s a bold approach.”

Dell’s “bold approach” to AI was fleshed out further in May at the company’s Dell Technologies World 2025, where it unveiled a slew of offerings, including new servers and PCs for the AI era.

“We are entering the age of ubiquitous intelligence where AI becomes as essential as electricity,” founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said during a keynote address at the conference.

Dell’s beefed-up portfolio will enable businesses to reap AI’s benefits, he said.

“Dell is the infrastructure—the backbone—enabling enterprises to think faster, to act smarter and to dream bigger,” he said.

Later in a session with solution providers, he discussed the role partners play.

“Not everyone is going at the same speed, but there is no question that AI offers extraordinary opportunities for companies to reimagine themselves and their ability to serve their customers and grow,” said Michael Dell. “Obviously, efficiency, productivity, those are table stakes, but everybody understands that this is a huge game-changer. Still, we’re at the beginning. A lot of customers don’t really know how to get going, and they need a lot of help, and I think this is where partners play a big role.”

Michael Dell gave kudos to the company’s solution provider partners for meeting the AI challenge.

“We are very fortunate to have incredible partners driving roughly half our business around the world, and we are deeply appreciative for all the great work that we are going to do together,” he said.

From VirtuIT CEO Gary McConnell’s perspective, Dell is a first-mover in AI that has correctly read the market to provide partners with a blueprint to move customers into the AI era with Dell AI Factory, a framework that lets partners work closely with customers around fundamental shifts to business outcomes.

“They’ve taken use cases, data, and transformed it into a very standard selling motion from infrastructure all the way to the services. And they said, ‘OK, well guys, we can’t do this all by ourselves. We have to be able to tap into the partner community to do so,’” McConnell said. “Technical talent is very hard to find. … The more you can tap into your partners, the more you can train and put those solutions in those talk tracks in front of your partner community, the better chance of success you have.”

Nanuet, N.Y.-based VirtuIT is not alone in finding early success with AI among its customers.

Alex Rodriguez, channel and alliances manager at Dell Titanium partner Weaver Technologies, said the Fredericksburg, Texas-based company has made AI profitable through its partnership with Dell specifically by focusing on improving research with higher education customers.

“Dell has delivered on their promise where you have those configurations available to you, whether it’s in the tools or in the training,” Rodgriguez told CRN. “We’re going to do another training session for our team at the end of May. It’s been super helpful.”

Setting The Stage

Dell Technologies famously got its start in Michael Dell’s dorm room at the University of Texas with $1,000 in capital and the idea that selling direct to the consumer stripped costs out of the price while giving buyers the exact device they desired.

When the company launched as PC’s Limited in 1984, it was one of dozens of small assemblers piecing 5.25-inch floppy drives and motherboards together to make cheaper clones of the much more expensive IBM PC.

Compaq, Radio Shack’s Tandy, Gateway and others all used IBM’s open architecture design, yet in the 41 years since then as those brands vanished from technology shelves, Michael Dell has managed to keep his Round Rock, Texas-based company nimble and one step ahead of the industry by acquiring EMC in 2016 and pushing into the enterprise market with a broad portfolio of PCs, servers, storage and cloud offerings.

Dell’s pivot—which used EMC’s enterprise presence as a foundation— would set the stage for it to capitalize on the next great technology shift: artificial intelligence, which is expected to bring in $15 billion in sales for Dell this fiscal year, up from $10 billion last year.

No technology trend this century has been bigger than AI, with no company more at the center of its advances today than Nvidia. So it’s telling that at the Nvidia GTC 2025 conference in March, founder and CEO Jensen Huang singled out Dell as a key industry partner in bringing AI to businesses through Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, a collaboration that has seen over 100 new product releases serving more than 3,000 customers since its launch a year ago.

“Dell is going to be offering a whole line of Nvidia IT infrastructure systems and all the software that runs on top of it,” Huang told the crowd. “You can see we’re in the process of revolutionizing the world’s enterprise.”

The revolution was jump-started by the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, which opened the public’s eyes to the possibilities of GenAI.

Dell President of North America Sales Pete Trizzino said he—along with the rest of the technology world—watched in amazement as the technology took off. The application quickly swelled in popularity to the point where it now has 400 million active users per week as of this February, according to Reuters.

What made GenAI real for Trizzino after that initial launch was when the phone calls started coming from companies that hadn’t reached out to Dell before.

“Early on, we had done probably one of the largest deals that we’ve ever done in the company with a customer we never heard of that was a new customer on the scene, and it’s been like that for the last two and a half years,” he said. “We’re doing these big, massive deals with companies that traditionally we would never be doing business with. So that right out the chute told me that this was definitely different. This didn’t feel like a normal market shift. A revolution was upon us.”

And it hasn’t slowed down.

In April, research firm IDC predicted that investments in AI solutions and services will yield a global cumulative impact of $22.3 trillion by 2030, representing approximately 3.7 percent of the global GDP. Every new dollar spent on AI solutions and services is expected to produce an additional $4.90 for the global economy, the company predicted.

To capture this opportunity, Dell sellers and solution providers have to be well-versed enough not just to understand the hundreds of products that the company sells, but also the use cases, the return on investment, the data strategy and, ultimately, how to deploy AI into a business environment.

Trizzino told CRN that when he first joined EMC 22 years ago, it was a different story, as it only sold one product.

“And when we bought Data General and we had two products, I thought we were going to confuse our customers,” he recalled.

In the decades since, Trizzino has watched Dell’s partner community grow in size, sophistication and influence to represent nearly 50 percent of Dell’s revenue and occupy “about 50 percent” of his schedule. Now, he said, Dell moves in lockstep with solution providers to talk with customers to ensure the systems that are bought and deployed can deliver what the customer wants.

“If we don’t have those conversations with our customers on the front end—with our partners that understand the business units inside our shared customers—we’re just going be relegated to a reverse auction on the infrastructure on the back end,” he said. “Customers don’t want to just buy GenAI infrastructure. It’s not going to help them achieve what they want to achieve. So now more than ever, our partners and our whole ecosystem need to work together to help that customer achieve that outcome.”

For partners and for Dell’s own sales teams, this involves constant learning, investments in enablement and workshops to exchange the lessons that each side has learned in the sales trenches. Trizzino said he has witnessed partners take the lead when it comes to managing one of the thorniest obstacles to any AI deployment: messy data.

“We really can’t do anything until the data is organized and it’s prepped, and that’s where our partners are starting to see that they need more resources to help them there as well because there’s a multitude of opportunities out there for our customers to pick from on the data front,” he said. “And I think our leading partners understand that and are really coming with an informed opinion around what that data strategy should look like. So I lean heavily on our partners from a data standpoint.”

Inside Dell, Trizzino said Vice Chairman and COO Jeff Clarke and Global CTO and Chief AI Officer John Roese are driving urgency, as well as delivering the technology that gets deployed.

“It’s all gas and no brake,” he said.

From selling XE9680 servers that form the backbone of large-scale AI data center deployments prompting industrywide discussions around agentic AI, solution providers are delivering the outcomes customers want.

“We underpin those outcomes with some infrastructure, but our partner ecosystems are the ones that sell the full solution,” Trizzino told CRN over a video call from a solution provider partner’s office in early May. “They sell the full outcome. So now more than ever, we need our partners. … We’ve got such great talent at this company that drives incredible innovation. And as a salesperson, it’s a really privileged position to be in, and I have to tell you, I’ve never been more energized in my 30-year career in technology than I am right now.”

Dell’s Internal AI Push

When ChatGPT stole the world’s attention, many technology companies pivoted to finding a way to leverage LLMs to increase productivity. While perhaps not new to computer scientists, GenAI was a novel technology for businesses in that they had to discover ways to apply it to their organizations.

At Dell, an open call was made to its more than 100,000 employees to find—and describe in detail down to the technology stack needed to make it work—the best ways to use AI to improve the company. The result was a flood of 800 potential projects and the first of a series of concrete realizations about evaluating AI at work, said CTO Roese.

“You have to do this top down. You cannot do this by goodwill and hope. You’ve got to have a structure,” he told CRN. “We actually said, ‘Hey, maybe in this case, a raw collection of ideas is not the right answer. Maybe we ought to flip it around the other way. Let’s start with why are we doing this in the first place.’ And we decided that we’d like a financial impact to our company. So profit, revenue, cost reduction and material regulatory reduction, risk reduction, seemed to be the right things to do. So that was kind of the North Star.”

Dell looked at all of the internal data around people, costs, opportunity for margin expansion and revenue production, always harboring the idea that activity alone is not important—it is the outcome that matters, Roese said. Then came the task of determining where to focus.

In a move that would surprise no one who has watched Dell’s relentless drive to dominate the market in all categories of products it sells, the company chose to target its sales force.

Roese said following the data trail provided the initial use case, which aims to help Dell sellers prepare for sales calls using the intellectual property that the company had acquired through its decades of technology sales.

“We realized, ‘Hey, they’re very good in front of customers. We don’t need virtual sellers. We don’t need robots out there,’” Roese said. “We looked at the day in the life of our seller, realized [how much] of their time in aggregate was spent preparing to engage with the customer, and we said, ‘Wow, if we could fix that and free up the time a seller has in the week to go be in front of customers, that would probably move the needle in a pretty significant way,’” he said.

It has.

While Dell asked CRN not to publish the figures that Roese shared because of the competitive nature of the data, suffice it to say there has been a dramatic increase in performance among the company’s roughly 20,000 sellers.

“Today, every time I run into a salesperson they tell me all these creative things that they’re doing with it, which all correlate to they’re moving faster,” he said. “This might have been one of the 800 projects, I don’t know. I don’t really care because we decided that was the problem [to focus on] and then went top down and said, ‘OK, that’s the problem to solve. Let’s go solve that problem first.’”

‘Dell Has Delivered’

Dell’s original direct-to-consumer model was so well worn that it was the title of Michael Dell’s 1999 book, “Direct From Dell.” But then the company launched its partner program at the end of 2007. And now, this year, about half of the up to $105 billion in revenue that Dell forecasts it will make in fiscal 2026 is expected to be delivered through partners.

VirtuIT’s McConnell said by the mid-2000s, his company was one of the top Compellent Technologies partners in the nation. When Dell bought the storage vendor in 2011, the relationship accelerated, giving VirtuIT a front-row seat as Dell’s embrace of the channel has grown tighter.

McConnell said with programs like 2023’s Partner First For Storage, which incentivizes Dell’s direct sellers to move its market-leading high-end storage deals through channel partners, as well as last year’s announcement at Dell Technologies World that it would open up partner of record for all PCs, components and peripherals, the company is leveraging its channel for the scale and speed it can’t get through its own teams.

“They realize, ‘If we’re going to drive AI and really be this first-mover here, we’re going to need the partner community to do so. How we’re going to do that effectively is to open up the entire scope of our work. We’re going to open the books for you here,’” McConnell told CRN. “‘If our customers are talking AI at a PC level, we want them talking to us and partners. If we’re talking about AI at the infrastructure level, we want them talking to us and our partners.’ So the parity among their sellers in how they go to market, whether they’re talking about client or data center, has been a huge shift, and I think it is really going to help them win.”

The value of IT infrastructure for partner profitability is that the quantity of data produced by organizations and the need to manage it through advanced storage devices increases each year, he said. Introducing AI into that only brings more opportunities for partners regardless of their level of sophistication with AI systems.

“So you talk about where does the partner community fit in on AI? There’s going to be an entire partner ecosystem that exists that doesn’t touch AI, that is just focused on the infrastructure,” McConnell said. “The really effective ones will do both. But the data needs to sit somewhere, and the data is growing at a faster clip than we’ve ever seen.”

To capitalize on the opportunity, the sales teams in the trenches need to have confidence in delivering the outcomes that customers are looking for, VirtuIT’s Henderson told CRN. He can now be more aggressive as a seller knowing that Dell is on standby with that technical expertise if he needs to call on it, he said.

In fact, since that first call in January, he has notched four more AI wins for VirtuIT and Dell.

“[Dell is] an inspiring team to work with,” Henderson said. “Once you get one win with them, you’re confident that there are definitely other opportunities out there.”