In 2024, the Dell AI Factory was introduced as a portfolio of Dell infrastructure from storage to servers to PCs, combined with an ecosystem of partners.

In 2025, this tune has a slight change. The rubber has met the road, been running on it for the past 12 months, and according to Dell’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke, over 3,000 businesses have built AI Factories with Dell, adding over 200 new features to it in the process.

Besides this stable of AI Factory customers, the learnings that Dell itself gained the past 12 months is significant. For one, Dell discovered it had over 900 so-called AI projects across their company, with little coordination, strategy, or governance.

Efforts were fragmented, inefficiencies were numerous and entrenched.

This necessitated Dell having to do a few things like establish governance for AI and data, as well as appoint a Chief AI Officer to drive strategy and accountability. The most critical realisation was that Generative AI is all about data, and Dell found itself having to clean, unify and connect data that was scattered across the organisation, into an enterprise-wide “data mesh.”

This focused and structured approach, had optimised Dell’s existing hardware and resources for solutions and they rolled out a GenAI-powered service assistant that achieved ROI in less than three months.

This experience, perhaps served as the foundation for the Dell AI Factory framework.

Deploying Enterprise AI with an AI Factory framework

“When a company buys a solution, the framework ensures that it is validated through this framework which in turn offers compatibility, repeatability, and support created with our professional services arm,” a chat with Dell Technologies’ VP of Edge Technology, AIOps and Multi-System Management, Pierluca Chiodelli, had revealed.

An interview with another exect, this time Dell’s CTO of Technology Innovation and Research, Satish Iyer also added perspective and a large piece to the puzzle picture. “It’s a platform where smaller solutions can integrate and create offerings.”   

But, there is another independent motion that his organisation executes as well. 

Co-innovation with customers

Besides working a lot with startups and ecosystems that focus on pure tech tracks like AI, Satish and his team also co-innovate with customers. “So, we work with customers on special projects to innovate and see what we can solve with them.”

And this is driven via applied research which the CTO’s office is already working on, or there is a particularly knotty customer problem to unravel and Satish described that when co-innovation happens, “A lot of times it’s goodwill, because we don’t charge. We will innovate with you. We take research team members and try a few different things to see what works.”

With 12 to 15 of such projects active at any one time, Satish pointed out that these are not neverending projects. As for a specific outcome that both parties would agree on, he shared that it depends on the project, the sensitivity of data involved, and regulations of the country their customers are based at. “From when the concept starts, we give (the project a duration of) 10 to 12 weeks to get there.”

Startups and the platform play

Dell is also taking on offerings from startups like Glean and Cohere, as customer zero. He explained, “A lot of our customers are asking us, ‘What is your experience? What have you done here?’ So, it helps when we try it ourselves, and it’s not a criteria but it’s something which we happen to do quite a bit.”

Where it makes strategic sense, Satish shared they would invest in performing companies which Dell would partner with to go to customers.

Something else which Dell finds resonates with customers is the work they do with AI startups at the platform layer, or the orchestration layer, as well as startups  that have AI application specific outcomes. “Most of (their solutions) we use internally, and we go to talk to customers about it.”

“If there is an opportunity for us to co-innovate with a customer and use a startup technology to do it, we will. But we have to be selective. At the end of the day, the goal is to solve customer problems in the most effective way. If I can do that with Dell IP and research, I will.”

The pluggable platform

Satish referred to how far Dell has come since a year ago. “This is the fundamental difference, things are changing, right?

“When talking to vertical customers about their problems, you understand that they need technology and the software stack above the infrastructure stack right? We are not an application company, so we have to partner with (the ecosystem).”

What Dell is creating is also reminiscent of another large technology brand building an open, modular and interoperable platform that enables enterprises to rapidly adopt, scale, and integrate advanced digital and AI capabilities. This is within the realm of possibility for Dell because of its technical leadership and the trust they have built with customers and partners over the years.

Satish concluded, “It is the only way we can be in front of this whole AI bandwagon, because things go so fast and the advancements in technology especially in the startup space is so incredible.

“We gotta keep up.”