Dell's top executives are urging business leaders in the Asia-Pacific region to create AI chief roles and take a “top-down” approach to AI implementation.
While early adopters in 2024 primarily experimented with AI in production, Dell anticipates a fundamental shift in 2025, with more companies moving from proof-of-concept initiatives to deploying AI as core projects that deliver measurable returns on investment.
John Roese, Dell's global chief technology officer and chief AI officer, emphasized in a press conference that the region's main challenge is not the technical feasibility of AI, but rather creating the right strategy and organizational framework to ensure a successful adoption.
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“If you're not the chief AI officer and you don't have the power and support of your board and leadership, your ability to prioritize the right AI work in a company is limited,” he said. “You may not get any budget, you may have no control, and there may be competing AI efforts that are not the right ones.”
The rise of AI director roles in Asia-Pacific
Peter Marrs, Dell's president of Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China, explained in the briefing how he meets regularly with CTOs and CEOs across the region. In November 2024, Marrs observed signs of AI project overload: one customer was managing more than 300 AI projects simultaneously.
“I'm seeing that some of the largest clients in the world, where they don't have that strategy locked in, are still moving around,” Marrs said.
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To overcome these challenges, Marrs said more and more companies in APAC are appointing chief AI officers to lead AI strategies. This is expected to bring more consistency and focus to enterprise AI strategies.
“We're seeing a lot of our clients right now, especially more mature enterprise clients, are investing in AI directors,” he said.
While they also appoint AI committees with representation from business units, such as marketing, software development, and manufacturing, these business units are ultimately led by a Chief AI Officer.
“Sometimes the CIO plays a dual role, but increasingly we are seeing more companies investing in CIOs or Chief AI Officers to assist them in their strategy and path forward around AI enablement.”
The benefits of the 'top-down' approach to implementing AI
Roese said the biggest problem for companies implementing AI is no longer the technology or methodology, which Dell believes it has solved for its customers with its defined “AI factory” model and approach.
Instead, Roese said: “The problem we are still seeing, which has nothing to do with technology, is organizational complexity. how to do [AI] It is becoming clearer, but how to organize a company to do it successfully is the big active conversation right now,” he explained.
Roese explained that even the most advanced companies are still struggling “to build the right organizational model to make sure you have an empowered leader” for AI “who can actually make strategic decisions.” This AI leadership role would involve facing the reality that “some people won't like those decisions” made about AI strategy and having the authority to enforce the chosen direction among business leaders.
Roese said Dell was “very thoughtful” about the internal structuring of its AI efforts. The company has implemented measures to ensure that all AI projects are “top-down and strategic.” Leveraging this top-down approach, all AI projects and use cases now require approval from Roese, CIO Doug Schmidt, and COO Jeff Clarke.
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“We knew it would be impossible to achieve consensus among all business leaders on which was the most important AI project to implement, because they are all important to our business leaders,” Roese explained. “But our ability to deploy them is limited to just a handful at a time.”
Roese strongly favors the top-down approach over the “bottom-up” option. While the bottom-up approach, in which a business unit creates and implements an AI project, can encourage innovation and experimentation, it can lead to misaligned priorities and inefficiencies without clear oversight and direction. Roese warned that this approach “cannot happen in the organization.”
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Return on investment will increase in 2025
According to Dell, the first wave of AI ROI will begin next year. Roese said this will come in the form of savings, revenue, margin improvement or significant bottom-line changes and will be the result of having figured out through experimentation over the past two years how to use AI effectively.
“We've seen that most of the AI tools needed to do enterprise AI have been standardized and turnkey,” he explained. “There is no need to create your own coding assistant. You can simply buy one and implement it in your facility. There is now a clear methodology for implementing AI.
“And what we have learned is that if the right projects are chosen and approached in the right way, there is a significant business impact in terms of return on investment (ROI) in dollars. And that's important because companies don't like to go first into an area where there's no evidence they'll be successful.”
