Michael Dell’s Advice To Partners: Become AI-First Or You May ‘Not Be Here In The Future’

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell warned partners to become AI-first businesses or risk not surviving, saying companies that fail to embrace AI-driven tools, workflows and leadership ‘might not be here in the future.’

Dell founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell told several thousand partners Monday that if they don’t transform into “AI- first” businesses they could very well find themselves out of business.

Dell (pictured above right) made the comments in a one-on-one question-and-answer session at the Dell Global Partner Symposium with Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard (pictured above left).

When Millard asked Dell what the impact will be for those not committed to transforming into an AI-first business, Dell said: “I think they might not be here in the future. I mean that’s really the risk. This is what we’ve talked about internally. We believe that the capabilities [needed to be successful in the AI era] are a profound sort of leap from what we had before.”

Dell cited financial services company Stripe data, which shows that startups born in 2025 with the massive productivity gains sparked by new technology grew four times faster than those in 2018.

“It’s because in 2025 they have got all these new [technology] tools,” said Dell of the explosive growth those startups achieved by embracing new technology productivity gains. “So what you’ve got to do as a business leader is sort of put your brain in the future and understand if you were creating your business from scratch today, what would it look like? It’s very different than the thing of the past.”

In fact, Dell said AI solutions are going to be “pervasive everywhere” in the new agentic AI era. “Today I was talking about 5,000 customers that have already adopted the Dell AI Factory,” he said. “Next year the number is going to be 50,000. ... The reason is because if you have data and you are not using AI, you are doing it wrong.” He said now is the “time” for partners to become AI-first businesses.

Dell’s comments come with the company reporting double-digit partner ecosystem sales growth across every line of business in the last fiscal year.

Responding to the partner ecosystem sales growth, Dell said: “Thank you all very much for the incredible partnerships that we have together. What we are able to do for our customers in the field really matters. You saw that on stage with some incredible examples, but there’s so many more around the world. Our partners bring all that to life with an incredible variety of solutions.”

Here’s Dell’s advice to partners from his session with Millard during the company’s Global Partner Summit.

Embrace New AI Tools Like Nvidia’s CUDA-X GPU Libraries And Microservices

What we had a couple of years ago [with AI tools] wasn’t really ready. Now there’s so much more. We have almost 1,000 of these CUDA-X libraries and models. You see all the on-prem models and frontier models. It’s a question of when they’re coming on-prem—not if. They are all coming.

So there is a whole new capability that has to be built up and the tools are there. So everybody’s got to go embrace that. If we just kept doing the same stuff we were doing three, four or five years ago, we won’t be in business.

Gaining Competitive Advantage With AI Is About ‘Courage And Speed And Leadership’

It really comes down to courage and speed and leadership, Yes, you’ve got to go do the hard work in understanding what the tools are capable of, reimagining the processes to get to the outcomes. But change is hard. Not everybody wants to do it. It’s complicated. You’ve got to stop doing things you used to be doing. You might be deleting a lot of processes that were built up over time. I think the speed element advantages will compound.

We’re seeing that in our business and it’s showing up in the difference in the results among partners that are embracing this and building out the capabilities sooner. I think this is a step function change in how business is really being done. We hope you’ll all come with us.

The On-Premises AI Opportunity: The Most ‘Valuable Data’ In World Is Still On-Premises, Being Created In ‘Real Time’

The way I would frame this is it’s not going to be all in one place. There’s going to be cloud. There’s going to be on-prem. There’s going to be co-lo. There’s going to be edge.

The reality is that most of the most valuable data in the world is actually still on-prem, and it’s being created in real time. Think about a factory that is building medicines and drugs like Eli Lilly or any of the customers that Honeywell has for their control systems that have embedded intelligence.

The intelligence has to go where the data is being generated, and it has to be generated in real time. That’s what we’re building out. That’s why we see so much growth and as it goes to this agentic model with the orchestration and the IO that drives CPU demand.

So, look, the good news is there is a ton of demand. The bad news is we’re kind of sold out. So there’s more demand than supply in pretty much everything we use: memory, GPUs, CPUs, etc.

There Are ‘No More Excuses:’ It’s Time To ‘Go Build This Out’

Customers want to go from data to tokens to outcomes [at a fast rate]. We have all these great reference platforms and blueprints and starter kits. Nvidia has their CUDA-X libraries. There are over 400 CUDA-X libraries. If you include all the models, it’s close to 1,000.

So all the tools are there in every vertical, in every area, that you can possibly imagine. So there are no more excuses. It’s time to go build this out. Our customers are already doing it, but they need a lot of help. That is where the opportunity is for partners because it is not the easiest thing in the world to go reimagine things and rearchitect them and redesign them. The partners that really lean into this I think are going to do incredibly well.

We didn’t have any of this five years ago. Nobody knew how to do this a few years ago. Everybody is worrying as they’re going. We’ve all got to go build out this capability.

Partners Must Reimagine Business Workflows To Be Successful

I think the exponential and sort of parabolic improvements are not really obvious until you reimagine the [business] workflows. It’s hard to do. As you know internally at Dell it also involves how to radically redesign things that just unlocks incredible speed.

We can help you. We can get you started, but it’s already happening in lots and lots of companies. The amazing thing is that while we have this demand supply condition that is challenging us, the real agent take-off hasn’t really even happened in broad scale across millions and millions of companies.

I think it’s still pretty early in all of this and, as we talked about earlier, the models, they’re great, but they’re the worst they’ll ever be and they’re going to keep improving,

Now is the time to make sure that you’re diving in and you’re re-imagining your own business, helping your customers reimagine their businesses.

We've got all the tools to help you do that, but there’s a lot more that needs to be added to that to help customers make it real. That is where you all come in. We’re incredibly grateful for the partnerships that we have with all of you. I think we’re set up here for a fantastic second half of the year.

You talked about a lot of new enhancements that we’re adding to our partner program. The innovation engine is absolutely incredible. We’re accelerating our innovation with AI.

You’ll hear [Dell Vice Chairman and COO] Jeff [Clarke] and [Dell President of Infrastructure Solutions Group] Arthur [Lewis] talk about all sorts of new fun stuff for all of you to go sell and great capabilities that will help all of you be more successful. Thank you again for being here and the great partnerships. Go make it happen.