At Dell Tech World 2025, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Doug Schmitt, CIO and President at Dell Technologies Services, to break down how Dell is evolving its services strategy to meet the demands of an AI-driven future, with a focus on delivering value and driving customer success. 🤖
Key takeaways include:
🔹The CIO/Services Synergy: Doug Schmitt discusses his dual role at Dell, leading digital transformation internally while also managing a 60,000-strong team focused on delivering comprehensive customer support across the technology lifecycle.
🔹Harnessing AI Across the Dell Services Portfolio: The conversation highlights how Dell Technologies is integrating AI to enhance its services, including support, deployment, consulting, and managed services, to provide customers with more intelligent and efficient solutions.
🔹AI in Action: Delivering Customer Value: The discussion provides real-world examples of customer success stories in AI implementation, showcasing the tangible outcomes and benefits of Dell’s AI-powered services.
🔹The Future of Dell Services: Schmitt outlines Dell Technologies Services’ future vision, with a focus on Agentic AI and the delivery of “Intelligence as a Service” to drive transformative outcomes for customers.
Learn more at Dell Technologies.
Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Or listen to the audio here:
Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2025. Daniel, it’s been a great event so far. We have heard announcements on hardware, so software and services.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, we are off and running here at Dell Technologies World. And Pat, every year the show becomes bigger and bigger as AI has continued to become more of an accelerator of enterprise and business. And of course this really spans from the data center to the device and services. And this week I’m really eager to get a good dose of all of these things and so many great conversations.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, services really are a force multiplier. Some companies just don’t have the people. They might not have the talent or they might just need the direction of those services. And I can’t think of a better person to talk about services here than President of Dell Services and CIO Doug Schmitt. Great to see you again.
Doug Schmitt: Well, great to be back with you, Pat and Dan on opening day of DTW. Exciting times.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it really is.
Daniel Newman: It is great to be here with you Doug. And Pat teased it right, because we started talking services, but you added another title because you didn’t have enough going on or I’m not sure what’s going on exactly.
Doug Schmitt: That’s called scaling.
Daniel Newman: Work more, hopefully make more. But you are now the CIO as well as the President of services. Talk a little bit about that. Talk about what that means and what does that have you doing and how has that kind of shifted the role or added to your existing role?
Doug Schmitt: Well, yeah, well, look, first it’s always about the customers, as you guys know, which is what DTW is about in and of itself. But having the CIO role and the services role, there’s a lot of synergy around it. And the way we like to think about it is, look, we’re customer zero. What we’re talking about at DTW in many instances is what we’re going through as a company as well. We get to see that having being CIO title allows me to help with that as well. And there’s really four pillars around our AI strategy. And I know it’s going to say this fast. In on with and for. Okay, I know. Let me go through those. So the in is obviously the great products we have, you see. And I’m sure we’ll talk to Arthur Lewis about the XE servers that we have that are doing phenomenal in the AI space. So products that we have in around storage and servers and then the AI PC, Sam Burd and the CSG team building great AI PCs, those are the in and then you have the on. These would be the solutions, the software, the things that we’re building and putting around our products to make sure that they give the customers the solutions they need. The “with” is with all of our partners, the great ecosystem. Many of those folks and companies are here this week to help our customers see what they can do around the ecosystem. The “for” is what we’re doing internally to help our teams and our operations run more efficiently and effectively with AI. And that’s really built around our great supply chain, our competitive advantage and supply chain services, our go to market and then obviously the product development.
So, you know, having the CIO title with the services allows us to help with all of that and to be customer zero. A good example of that is where you saw, or we saw at least internally, needing help with use cases. We brought in our team from services to also learn from consulting, build the use cases out and go forward and then build a great solution for our customers learning from that.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, Doug, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how you’ve been scaling, adding new services to the portfolio to meet the needs of your customers. And it started very humbly with let’s say breakfast and then deploy and then all of these different services to pull it all together for traditional infrastructure. But AI brings a whole new set of needs to the table. And I think going all the way back to last year when you even did some of your work, I’ll call them consulting services on even what workloads, how do we get this thing going? But can you talk about where we are now in terms of Dell AI services that you’re providing not only to your external customers, but also to your internal customers.
Doug Schmitt: Yeah, that’s a great question. And the reason is because obviously we’ve been on this AI journey in services and I know, Dan, you and I have talked about this, but we’ve been on this journey for seven to eight years and it really started with machine learning.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Doug Schmitt: Digitizing our processes. And then what we did was, we had the data scientists seven to eight years ago starting to explore and build off of that. By the way, that digitization of the processes is huge. It gives you a very strong foundation because with that we were able to have the structured data and the happy path for how things should flow for a customer in a perfect environment. And from there we really then started to look at how we shifted the mean and we shrunk the standard deviation at the same time. So we were learning with that. Now you add the large language models, the unstructured data, the ChatGPT, however you want to frame it, but you add all that and you really turbocharge where you can head with services. And to that end you start to rethink services. You’re like, wow, this is really going to change how, how services are delivered for our customers. First is the quality of the products. Look, I would argue we have the best quality products in the industry, but look, there’s always room to improve, right? Adding telemetry and ability to see where these are at with getting the support teams and the product teams together closer is giving us even higher quality products. Second is around self healing. We’ve talked a lot about proactive predictive support.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure.
Doug Schmitt: It’s where we need to be to help our customers. AI is helping with that. And then when you look at online customers, when they have all the events come up, unfortunately maybe, but they want to go online typically first. And we have Nest Best Action. Now I’m going to try to Nest Best Action is what we’re calling our AI product and service that delivers great service for the customers. But the reason is because we take all of the knowledge management internally, all of our history, the telemetry coming in with the LLM and we’re able to essentially have the tool next Best Action that really gets to a quick resolution with a high success rate. And then last look, we’ll always be here. If customers want to call us, we are here. And we use those same tool sets with our service engineers to provide a great service. It’s all about really making sure that we have a fast time to resolution. And we’ve seen by the way, from a services and an AI factory standpoint, 3,000 customers go through an AI factory with solutions coming out. So really tremendous progress across the whole spectrum.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, AI is not new to you or services. My company wrote a white paper on your predictive capabilities on the client years ago, before AI was even cool.
Doug Schmitt: No, you’re right. And so this is really just adding additional capabilities to that. And you’re going to hear more about those capabilities today in about an hour, I believe with the keynote really around some managed service, around AI and security as well. So always expanding that very quickly.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you said a lot of really important things, Doug. Customer zero is a great indicator right now of how companies are able to adopt AI and put it to work. If you know tens of thousands of employees, you are a wonderful opportunity to see how this stuff works within your own ecosystem. And then of course you have to scale this out to your customers. One of the things I think the market is really focused on right now though, is that time to value. Right. We talk a lot about building out these mega AI factories. Infrastructure is booming. I think the economy and the macro aside, everyone’s going to keep pouring investment. The other side of the debate that is often had is who’s using this stuff? How are dollars being driven in? It seems like you’re sort of indicating that that’s a big part of what your remit is, both as CIO customer zero and leading services. Talk a little bit about how Dell is helping customers to extrapolate value more quickly from AI. I mean, you started talking about that. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that because that’s where we’re trying to go.
Doug Schmitt: No, you’re exactly right. And I think it’s sometimes in the press they’re saying people aren’t using it. Well, I’ll tell you what, with 3,000 customers through the factory, I think there’s a couple examples that come to mind. One of them is Worley. This is a large professional service company in Australia that helps with mineral and energy, their customers in the mineral energy business. And look, when they started their AI journey, they were using the cloud or trying to do it through the cloud. They ran into some bottlenecks, they ran into some security concerns. The time to value was not going the way they wanted. And we were able to really work with them to clean up those bottlenecks, get an on prem solution, get the time to value resolved, allowing them to really produce some great results around effectiveness and efficiency. Excuse me. As well as helping their customers. I mean, if you think about the business they’re in, getting their customers helped in a much faster fashion. And what’s pretty amazing about this is they have 50,000 team members and they believe now that those 50,000 are doing the work of 75,000. Just unbelievable results. Another one that comes to mind is Pure Health and they’re out of UAE and as their title suggests, they are in the healthcare business of providing services for their customers in the UAE around healthcare. They were very concerned about security and providing the services. So they are using AI. We helped them set up an AI security operations center where they’re able to look at 1,000 security protocols coming through actually a second and handle 500 incidents a day in ground security for the health care, actually making their customers and their processes around security much more effective and efficient and then providing that healthcare that they want to do. So look, that’s just two out of the 3,000. But there are a lot of examples out there where AI’s providing results today.
Patrick Moorhead: Excellent. You started off strong. You’re adding on AI capabilities to help your customers derive value from AI. But obviously you’re not standing still. And I’m curious, how are you evolving the rest of your services to keep up or accelerate even further?
Doug Schmitt: Well, that’s right. For the efficiencies we have in AI, it’s actually about doubling down where we’re headed to help our customers in a vast area outside of just AI. I mean, but they’re all interconnected. We know that data center modernization is still very important. If you think about data centers of the future and where we’re at today, that’s going to be ever more prevalent. You also can look at things like data management. And I know we talked a lot about this. It’s the fuel for AI. Having that ready, clean and ingestible for the AI is something our customers need help with. Think about the PC refresh that’s going on from 10 to 11 and so we have that occurring and then obviously security. So there are plenty of service solutions and issues that we can help our customers with and what we’ve seen to help our customers with those. The consulting side, now I have to give you guys credit, we’ve talked about this for a number of years and you’ve said customers are going to want more consulting, they want more assistance and we’ve been putting a lot of focus on that. So it’s been very helpful for our customers. The growth has been very good in that area, but more importantly, helping our customers. We’ve actually won awards with Fast Company for Business Services and Forbes, actually Forbes Business Consulting. So we’re proud of those awards, kind of doubling down and seeing where we’re at with consulting deployment. Customers want more time to work on their strategic AI imperatives and deployment is something we can help them with.
So leveraging our capabilities around deployment so that we’re able to help our customers time to value much quicker is something we continue to make strong investments. The managed service side, again, customers are wanting us to help them manage their environments, whether it’s PC or data center, to free up time again to work on more important initiatives. By the way, one of the things you’ll hear us announce today is Lifecycle Hub Plus, which helps manage the PC fleet. So better fleet management, security around that. And then last but not least on the support side, continuing to build that out in a closed loop fashion. This is going to be important because I think AI helps with this but this closed loop of getting it back into the products and the solutions is going to speed up and so going to be a lot of great things that we continue to work on around overall services.
Patrick Moorhead: A lot of stuff moving forward. We’ve got about two minutes left here. I think we got time for one more quick question.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, let me take, take advantage of the moment. A lot is going to get announced here. We know there’s going to be some big infrastructure announcements, agents and tokens, big focus right now. You see these next generation technologies quickly finding their way into. You know I heard a little LLM here but that’s kind of a couple years old now. Like how quickly does agents for instance infuse into the services business Doug?
Doug Schmitt: Oh, we are working and actually are implementing those as we speak. And that agent stuff, I’m excited about the agents. I am. So if you look at what agents are going to do and we know this autonomous self learning is able to complete the task and you think about especially the support or the delivery of services from the detection to the diagnostics to the remediation is really what service is about. Agents are going to be huge and are huge and we’re working on that right now where they’re going to be able to just provide a tremendous amount of value on that. And I think when you start having these agents work together, agentic. Look, I think this is going to just be an unbelievable opportunity to really genuinely rethink health services, deliver for a better customer experience. And that’s what this is ultimately about.
Daniel Newman: Doug, I want to thank you so much for joining us here at Dell Technologies World 2025. It’s the first day but there’s so much more to come and of course we appreciate you joining us on The Six Five. Let’s have you back soon. I think it’s become a bit of an annual, hasn’t it Pat?
Doug Schmitt: It is, it is. I’m glad. Always enjoy talking to you guys.
Daniel Newman: Let’s do it more often. Thank you everybody for tuning in to this episode of the Six Five on the Road. It’s Dell Technologies World 2025 for this episode. We got to say goodbye but we’ll see you much more this week, more to come.
Patrick Moorhead: And stick around we are headed to a break.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
