Dell Technologies’ Professional Services VP, Scott Bils discovered soon after Dell Technologies World 2025 that global reception to the latest iteration of Dell’s AI factory has been very positive, with different regions showing unique approaches to AI innovation.
In the UK specifically, he highlighted the emergence of public-private collaborations like Project Dawn, which is working to create the country’s most powerful supercomputer.”This is a partnership between ourselves, the University of Cambridge, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), designed to accelerate breakthroughs in healthcare, climate modelling and life sciences.”
More broadly in Europe, he observed how government-backed initiatives and partnerships with industry were coming together to drive innovation as well as sovereign AI capabilities.
Scott was encouraged with what he was seeing globally in terms of the different evolving models around private partnerships to drive and accelerate innovation and adoption.
The platform
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.
But Scott wanted to point out how this platform is more than just for services to plug into and go-to-market with Dell. He said, “It is clearly a platform to help customers accelerate innovation and adoption, but on top of that platform, we are also introducing specific solutions that are deployed and built on the platform.”
The professional services organisation has collaborated with its product groups, Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and Client Solutions Group (CSG), to bring pre-built solutions on top of the AI factory as well.
It is clearly a platform to help customers accelerate innovation and adoption, but on top of that platform, we are also introducing specific solutions that are deployed and built on the platform.
Scott Bils
In essence, Scott’s organisation provides all the needed capabilities across the full AI transformation journey, so Dell customers can get value out of the AI factory. But it does this via an ‘easy push button’ of sorts that helps to reduce time to strategy, implementation, and then managed services.
Structured around four main practices – AI and data, multi-cloud and modern data centre, resiliency and security, and modern workforce. Dell’s professional services has consulting, managed, as well as education offerings.
People and process
As organisations embark upon projects that are anticipated to bring innovation and transformation, a majority tend to overlook the people and process aspects that need to come along on the ‘journey’ as well.
Scott pointed out, “Technology is obviously a very critical part of the AI factory, but for customers to realise the full benefit of AI transformation, they really have to address the people and process elements as well.”
Equally critical to do at the start of any project is understanding and prioritising use cases. Dell’s own 800+ internal use cases was a good example of Scott’s organisation needing to collaborate and help develop the overall framework and strategy for an end-to-end vision of how Dell Technologies was going to leverage AI.
This had meant Dell needing to appoint a Chief AI Officer “…right around the time we were struggling with the massive use cases. One of the first things our Chief AI Officer put into place was an AI use case review board, and then the governance structure and process for ensuring we were focused on the right use cases, and that we were focused on implementing them the right way.”
Two other examples of how professional services came to the fore was when it came time to implement and ‘stand up’ the AI factory to “…really get to that Day One capability and start to drive AI innovation.”
Data is also where Dell brought its distinctive capabilities to bear. “A lot of our customers are struggling with how to organise, classify, catalogue, label and basically prepare their data for AI. You’ve probably heard that 40% of the world’s data is stored on Dell hardware. We have a very unique position and capability here.”
AI Transformation = Change Management
Scott discussed the importance of change management in AI transformations, emphasising the need to focus on both people and processes to drive value. “I think the change management challenge is absolutely real, but it’s very common for transformation in general. What you really need to do at the end of the day is drive people and process transformation to get value out of the use cases.”
So while driving the overall change management program, there is a lot of having to also understand what the new processes look like, and how the organisation is going to measure the transformation, from a KPI and metrics standpoint to ensure that it is on track.
You’ve probably heard that 40% of the world’s data is stored on Dell hardware. We have a very unique position and capability here.
Scott Bils
Scott concluded, “It’s an end to end transformation that’s required across processes and people to really drive the outcomes that are needed from an enterprise standpoint.”
