DXC and Dell: Harnessing GenAI to reshape the enterprise

In this, the second of our interview series with Dell Technologies, DXC Technology speaks with Dell Global Alliances CTO for AI and Data Management Rob Shear about the potential of GenAI to transform businesses, and how DXC and Dell — along with NVIDIA — can help you on the journey. DXC, Dell and NVIDIA have a cohesive, well thought-out strategy across services, hardware, compute capability and the integration that goes with it — whether it’s edge or cloud or on prem.

DXC and Dell: Partnering for innovation (Part 1)

Making multicloud part of your enterprise AI/GenAI strategy (Part 3)

Q: How can the individual strengths of DXC and Dell in AI and GenAI be combined to transform customers’ businesses?

Rob Shear: Dell brings a great portfolio of solutions, including all our best-of-breed hardware and software. GenAI is use case-driven, so there is a large consulting side to GenAI engagements. That's where DXC comes in. DXC takes our hardware and platforms, and ultimately brings business value to end users.

In fact, the power of Dell with DXC and all our partners is that we bring a full portfolio of servers, storage and solutions, as well as our Dell-validated designs for training, inferencing and retrieval-augmented generation. Our Dell Data Lake House makes it easier and quicker to get access to your data.

In this new world, data is king. Companies that can harness their data to bring it together and feed it into their AI deployments are going to have a huge advantage. It’s very easy to do siloed GenAI deployments and get something out. But having single business units doing their own thing in an organization is not going to lead to success. That’s where DXC’s AI for the Enterprise approach comes in. DXC approaches these projects with a longer-term, whole-enterprise view. That is a much better strategy.

Q: The lineage of the data involved in creating, fine-tuning or augmenting AI models should ensure compliance to governance, privacy laws and taking into consideration issues like the right to be forgotten, HIPAA-compliance in healthcare, or AI best practices that an organization’s Office of AI would publish. What structures do you think companies should put in place for AI governance?

Rob Shear: I think regulation is going to take a long time, because it's difficult for legislators to keep up with the speed of GenAI. I don't know if we're even ready for regulation yet because we need the industry to continue to mature. So, best practices around data governance and the quality of data does matter. Many companies store a lot of data that is outdated and no longer relevant. We have to ensure that it is not brought into the models. So when we're working with customers and building out an enterprise strategy, we identify relevant and current data for the input. We put some governance around it, ensuring that the output is accurate. That’s especially important for externally-facing GenAI projects, where there is no margin for error. 

Q: At DXC, we recently set up managed services for an international insurance firm that is based on the Dell AI Factory and NVIDIA's Enterprise AI suite. We are also working with a global pharmaceutical company that is very interested in a more comprehensive enterprise AI strategy for their data. In the banking and capital markets sector, we are demonstrating how GenAI can be used to automate research, identify risk and optimize investments. What industries do you see as being better suited for GenAI projects, and what are some of the use cases for these?

Rob Shear: I think every major industry is looking for use cases for GenAI, including some of the more regulated industries. For example, financial organizations are looking at how GenAI can help them generate some of the vast regulatory documentation that usually takes months to produce. It is these industry-specific use cases that show a very quick ROI for companies.

And if you look at, say, patient outcomes in a hospital setting, there is a tremendous amount of data generated that is not currently leveraged. It might show up on a screen at a nursing station. But it's not captured and looked at longitudinally across all the patients that come through that hospital. There is a lot of work being done now around patient outcomes. But adding GenAI within a patient focus, privacy, regulations and governance are much more complicated. If you don't have an Office of AI and rock-solid governance, you're never going to get that through any major hospital.
 

Q: What about outcomes reporting? How do you draw a direct line from AI/GenAI projects to value delivered in customer organizations?

Rob Shear: I see outcomes being measured at the business unit level, depending on the way the company is structured. So if you're working a project around developer productivity, you’re measuring lines of code or quickness of rollouts. In manufacturing, for instance, you’re measuring increased worker productivity, reduced error rates in the facility and improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
 

Q: Our customers tell us all the time that they want us to help them with their AI vision -- to avoid mistakes and future-proof their decisions. What questions are you hearing about AI and Gen AI?

Rob Shear: The biggest one is where to begin. They have a thousand possible use cases they can and want to do, so they’re stuck in analysis paralysis. I think that’s where a consulting engagement with DXC can help. DXC comes in with the maturity and expertise to help the company develop a plan and pick some projects to get started with out of the gate. Then they can ultimately measure the success of the venture.

Q: Looking forward, what will the DXC-Dell partnership be focused on this year around AI/GenAI?

Rob Shear: We've had a 20+ year relationship with DXC going back to the CSC days. DXC is one of our top partners across all of Dell, and their bringing GenAI consulting and use cases is so critical to success in this space. Dell makes great platforms and we have great partnerships with ISVs and great solutions, including with NVIDIA. In order to be successful and do this at scale, we need DXC as a partner, to bring value beyond the platforms. I'm super excited going into FY25 / FY26, to expand this relationship, grow this business and bring business value to our customers. As regards GenAI, we need to draw all parts of DXC — consulting, global infrastructure services and global business services — together with Dell and NVIDIA and bring this “power of three” to customers to show ultimate value.