Business leaders need to focus more on the return on investment (ROI) from AI projects, prioritizing those with definable value, according to John Roese, Global CTO at Dell Technologies.
In conversation with ITPro at Dell Technologies Forum London 2024, Roese argued that there’s immense potential for AI and generative AI in the enterprise but that customers still struggle with identifying the best route to adopting and using the technology to unlock revenue returns.
In the past year and a half, Dell Technologies narrowed down its AI projects from a potential 800 to 360, then again down to four key areas that could benefit most from AI transformation. These are global supply chain, global services, global sales, and global engineering.
“If any of those four get better in a material way, I win,” Roese stated in his opening keynote speech, emphasizing the importance of measurable success in these early years of enterprise AI.
In the past 12 weeks, Roese has also taken on the role of chief AI officer (CAIO) at Dell Technologies and has overseen a rethink of how the company approaches AI decision-making.
“The very first thing we evaluate before anything else, before technical or security, is ROI,” said Roese.
The pragmatic approach to AI investment is already seeing returns. Its new AI coding assistant has been rolled out to 20,000 engineers, raising productivity and lowering the barrier to entry for new engineers.
Roese emphasized the importance of a top-down approach to AI investment decisions at Dell, moving away from a consensus model that proved ineffective.
Key Insights on AI ROI
“This is not consensus building; our first go-around we tried to do that by the way, we tried to get consensus and it went nowhere,” Roese noted, highlighting the pitfalls of broader input on AI priorities.
He further illustrated his point by comparing the decision-making process to a scenario where 15 business leaders collectively prioritize their own projects, leading to a lack of alignment.
Generating AI Momentum
Roese utilized the metaphor of a flywheel to explain the critical need for initial projects that yield financial returns, which can then build momentum for further AI initiatives.
“Some things slow the flywheel down, like an HR project, some things speed it up like a services project,” he explained. “The key is, if it’s not moving at all, throwing a whole bunch of things that slow it down is not going to make it move.”
Transformative AI Projects
At Dell, Roese underscored the focus on transformational AI projects that demonstrate substantial savings or productivity boosts. “Only the most important projects will generate returns of this kind,” he stated.
Despite potential projects being plentiful, Roese expressed the significance of prioritizing those with immediate revenue impact rather than selecting projects based solely on ease or controversy.
Roese concluded with a call for businesses to commit to implementing their chosen AI tools to truly gauge their return on investments, advising, “What matters is: does that tool create a platform to solve your problem, to unlock the ROI that you have chased? If those conditions are true, ignore the shiny objects and just put it into production and go.”
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