In a keynote speech at the Dell Technologies Forum London 2024, John Roese, Global CTO of Dell Technologies, highlighted the critical importance of prioritizing AI projects with tangible return on investment (ROI).

With generative AI holding vast potential for enterprise transformation, businesses often struggle to determine how best to deploy the technology to maximize revenue and efficiency. Roese shared Dell’s journey, from evaluating over 800 AI projects to focusing on just four transformative areas: supply chain, services, sales, and engineering.

This narrowed focus has paid dividends, including increased productivity through an AI coding assistant and a shift to top-down decision-making. Roese’s insights reveal how disciplined prioritization and avoiding “shiny object syndrome” can accelerate AI adoption while minimizing risk.

Why It Matters: As businesses race to adopt AI, balancing innovation with practicality is essential to ensure significant ROI. Roese’s approach offers a blueprint for companies to prioritize impactful AI projects, overcome decision paralysis, and unlock tangible benefits in productivity and cost savings.

• ROI as the Starting Point: Dell evaluates all AI ideas based on potential ROI before considering technical or security factors. This ensures that only projects with measurable financial returns are pursued.

• Streamlining Priorities: Dell narrowed its AI focus from 800 potential projects to just four core areas, targeting transformational gains in the supply chain, services, sales, and engineering.

• Top-Down Decision-Making: Moving away from consensus-based decision-making, Dell adopted a centralized approach to avoid fragmented priorities and focus on high-impact projects.

• Avoiding “Shiny Object Syndrome”: Dell refrained from chasing emerging tools like GitHub Copilot and Meta’s Code Llama, instead prioritizing robust, on-premises solutions like Codeium that aligned with company values and security standards.

• Balancing Risk and Innovation: Dell sidestepped projects in highly regulated areas, focusing instead on applications like code automation where regulatory hurdles are fewer, achieving swift implementation and measurable success.

Go Deeper -> Dell Technologies CTO: ROI on AI should be the number one focus for execs – ITPro