Dell’s PC Strategy for the AI Era

Enterprise computing is entering a new phase as AI workloads, hybrid work environments, and rising security requirements reshape what organizations expect from their devices.

In this segment of our series “The Next Generation of Dell PCs,” hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Jeff Clarke, COO and Vice Chairman of Dell Technologies, and Rob Bruckner, President of Dell’s Commercial Client Solutions Group, to explore how Dell is evolving its commercial PC strategy for the AI era.

As innovation across silicon, AI workloads, and enterprise security accelerates, Dell is focusing on engineering-led design, an expanded commercial portfolio, and end-to-end workspace solutions that help organizations navigate the next generation of computing.

Key Insights:

🔹 Why the PC market is at a new inflection point
🔹 How Dell’s engineering-led design is shaping the next generation of commercial PCs
🔹 What the new Dell Pro and Dell Pro Precision portfolio brings to enterprise customers
🔹 How security, manageability, and hybrid work demands are redefining device expectations
🔹 Why Dell’s scale, supply chain leadership, and AI-enabled portfolio matter in today’s enterprise environment

As AI moves closer to the endpoint, devices are becoming more intelligent, more secure, and more critical to enterprise productivity.

Want to see what AI-ready enterprise devices actually look like? Visit Dell Technologies →

Subscribe to our Youtube channel so you never miss an episode.
‍

Listen to the audio here:

‍
‍Disclaimer: Six Five Media is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

Jeff Clarke:
Customers just don't buy PCs. They just don't buy AI gear. They just don't buy servers. They buy it all. And if you look at our portfolio, which is unmatched in the industry, and then what we're doing around our AI factories and connecting the edge of the network to the training clusters of the world, I like our hands.

Patrick Moorhead: 
The Six Five is On The Road here at the Dell Interactive Lab in Austin, Texas. Daniel, client computing is on fire. The innovation is up. We've got AI that's coming in, the opportunity for AI, the threat of AI. And then, of course, we've got the operating system refresh, which helps too.

Daniel Newman: 
You know, and also it's great to do these shows when we're traveling to my favorite city, which is where I live and I'm not traveling. But yeah, it is actually really interesting. The last couple of months, the AI inflection has been exponential, right? The usability of these tools. Anyone that's out there that's listening to Pat and I talk about our nightly vibe coding efforts. But in all seriousness, what is happening is as utility grows, I think we're seeing a cycle back to figuring out where workloads should run. And I think it's creating a really big moment potentially for devices again, as you start to say, hey, these are little data centers. that we all carry around with us.

Patrick Moorhead: 
Yeah, exactly right. And history will show that compute ends up over time at the right place, most efficient that can be managed. And I think this is going to be the cycle and AI in PCs is going to get a lift from that. One company that's really at the forefront of that is Dell. And we have seen, I mean, my gosh, I would say in the last six months, we've seen an acceleration in the roadmap. I heard in my side conversations with folks, pull-ins by six months of a roadmap. A lot of software being developed, and quite frankly, a lot of innovation, and it reminds me of kind of the Dell that we all grew up with and loved.

Daniel Newman: 
You're getting a Dell.

Patrick Moorhead:   
I am. Let's do this. Let's dive in. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce Rob and Jeff to the Six Five. Great to see you guys. 

Jeff Clarke: 
Thanks for having us.

Patrick Moorhead
Absolutely.

Daniel Newman: 
Dude, I got a Dell.

Jeff Clarke:  
That's good. We appreciate that. 

Daniel Newman: 
It's awesome. So Jeff, big moment here. We seem to be at a significant inflection as it comes to what's going on in the client compute space. I'd love to just kind of get your readout. You heard our little preamble and what's going on. What's kind of your readout? You lead this business along with Rob here. What's happening in this space? Growing, changing, evolving? How's AI impacting it?

Jeff Clarke: 
Well, I think there's multiple dynamics at play right now. You clearly have, I loved your opening about where should AI be run. It has a way in our industry to find the most efficient way to run a workload. And clearly, we've been long-term believers that AI moves to the data, the source of value. And you think about all the data and all the content that's created out on the edge of the network, i.e., the PC, it just makes sense that while much of the initial AI momentum has been in big clusters and big training, we're about to enter or open the door, if you will, of seeing AI really excel out on the edge. You have to be honest, AI PCs maybe didn't take off as much as we thought. There hasn't been an application base around them. There hasn't been workflows around them. There hasn't been the ultimate application environment to do that. But we see that changing quickly. It's accelerating. The tools you described in your opening, it's amazing. Rob and I were in a review just this morning with our development team taking these new, fascinating, incredible tools and rewriting software and a hundredth of the time, a thousandth of the time.

Rob Bruckner: 
We felt that could be even faster.

Jeff Clarke: 
We're just beginning.

Patrick Moorhead: 
No, I mean, seriously, I spent pretty much half my weekend vibe coding. I used to game before I had kids, and now I vibe code.

Jeff Clarke: 
You're so cool. One day, we aspire to be like that.

Patrick Moorhead:
I don't know, Jeff. Sitting in your seat looks pretty good.

Jeff Clarke: 
You take that backdrop of what's happening in AI, you think about now the supply chain challenges that our industry is facing, the increased costs and challenge in getting supply, the opportunity there. Now, I like what we do. I think we're pretty good at supply chain operational excellence and discipline. Customers come to us in points of supply disruption. We're seeing that today. I don't think that slows down. So I like that component of it. And then Rob and I, you made a reference to the roadmap acceleration. We're accelerating the roadmap. You look at our products here, we're very proud of it. We know we can do more, we can do better. We're accelerating that. The opportunity, I think, is immense to really get our edge back or mojo back, which I think you made a little reference to. More is to come. And then ultimately, if you look at what's happening in our industry, broadly speaking, customers just don't buy PCs, they just don't buy AI gear, they just don't buy servers, they buy it all. And if you look at our portfolio, which is unmatched in the industry, and then what we're doing around our AI factories and connecting the edge of the network to the training clusters of the world, I like her hand.

Patrick Moorhead: 
Well, I mean, at the corporate level, I know we're talking PCs today, but yeah, I mean, you have a client play, you have an industrial edge play, and you have a data center play. So all I know is that whole chain is going to hit different times at different points. Right now, we're seeing this NeoCloud surge. Expect there to be the enterprise surge there. industrial will hit again, and PCs are in there as well.

Jeff Clarke: 
Well yeah, and you're going to hear very shortly we'll be the first to market with a GB300 PC. I'd love to get that. Guess what you'll do with that?

Patrick Moorhead: 
I'm putting open call on that thing. Maybe develop. You might hear about that here pretty shortly. Excellent. I love that. So Rob, Great to see you. I think we met once at your previous Silicon company. Am I allowed to say the name of that? I think I am.

Rob Bruckner: 
I think everybody probably knows.

Jeff Clarke: 
Well, hey, you're 90 days- That's a secret we got you from Intel?

Patrick Moorhead: 
Yes. My gosh. Secret's out. I know. So, hey, you're 90 days in. What are some of your observations that you've seen? Because listen, I went from PC maker to chip maker. You went from chip maker to PC maker. What are your observations 90 days in? Expected? Unexpected?

Rob Bruckner: 
It's just like you'd expect with any new team you're joining. There's some things that were expected, like some of the talent I was already working with while I was at Intel and working with Dell on the other side of the transaction there. building upon that what I already had formed relationships and expanding it. And then there's some things that I'd say I found opportunity to improve. And some of those are really focusing on, as Jeb mentioned, really going faster in the products, getting deeper into with our customers about their needs and how they're using those products. On top of all of this coming in new to a new company, the memory and storage dynamics arrive. and just sort of navigating through what the portfolio looks like. And we'll talk about some of the flexibility built into this portfolio to help us navigate that.

Patrick Moorhead: 
When I went from PC maker to chip maker, there was always that interesting tension. PC makers thought they knew everything and the chip makers knew nothing. And then the chip makers thought that the PC makers knew nothing. But the great part is when you've worked at both, you realize just how symbiotically connected, and they really need to both know what they're doing and kind of play their role.

Rob Bruckner: 
That's exactly right. And in fact, one of the first projects I worked on when I returned to Intel, I actually worked in another company before that, which we probably couldn't mention. That's OK. The first thing I worked on actually from, it wasn't a ground zip architecture, but it was a morphing what was happening in the Lunar Lake project, which is the first better battery life product from Intel, was to make Panther Lake. So this project was to bring forward all the goodness of the battery life, but also expand the compute capability, bring in graphics on top of that. And then of course, as you've heard Intel report, put it on 18A. This is a very incredibly difficult project to work on. Now you get to see that coming through now into market. It's so rewarding to go actually connect the dots from something you had envisioned out and then put in the actual product. And all the things that I worked on there between that, there's a following product which Intel has yet to announce. I'll talk a little bit about it, but not put something out that they're going to tell us about later. And then some of the next generation products as well. So connecting these dots end in right in the middle of the AI, like the real AI push, not the initial, you know, let's go put some background blurs into the PC kind of stuff, but the compute capability is arriving where you can do some really interesting workloads, especially as we'll talk Jeff alluded to the GB300, but it's also the precision line holistically. It is where the compute lives. It's really dominant, and I think it's a really interesting capability there. Exciting.

Daniel Newman: 
We've already had so many conversations of just the inference economics. You have two, like, super forces, though. You have inference.

Rob Bruckner: 
Are we listening in to our meeting earlier?

Daniel Newman: 
Yeah, I got a little AI. It's in there listening. And then, of course, agents. So, you know, it's interesting because everyone had kind of washed themselves of CPUs. And now, I mean, obviously, on your data center side, you're seeing there's going to be a huge renaissance that are going to be there. But then, right here on these machines, these are very good at handling those sort of serial, you know, processes. And, you know, people are going to be able to do a lot of this AI stuff right here on this device. So, you said the AI PC, I think maybe it came out a little early, fell a little flat. I just think it's a timing thing. It's kind of like IoT before AI. It was kind of like it was a thing, but now that you actually have intelligence at the edge, it becomes really interesting. Same thing's happening now.

Jeff Clarke: 
If you step back, we're at the still early innings of a new computer. It's called accelerated computing. And you read a lot about it in the large deployed clusters during the training of the frontier models. The fact is accelerated computing has been happening for many, many years. You and I go back and put in coprocessors and things. Yes. all sorts of accelerators and things. And now we have accelerated computing in a PC. Was an MPU maybe a little ahead of its time? We'd argue it probably so. If you think about where the use cases are moving in token economics, which is one of the conversations we were having with our developers this morning, maybe a little inside baseball, we gave these developers the opportunity to use one of the advanced coding assistants out there. They used all their tokens in a couple hours. So if you start thinking about the economics of that as you begin to do more software development and take on more advanced challenges there, it's going to be about utilizing the tokens where they're available that they're economically efficient. There's going to be a ton of them at the edge. and up the stack, and how you partition that is going to be very key, which I think bodes well for the PC, and particularly high-end PCs. We've been seeing, at some level, an N-1 dumbing down of the PC over the past handful of years. And Rob and I have had this conversation. You're going to see a pivot. that you're going to need more powerful computers to take advantage of the capability that everybody's going to want to use. You're going to have a swath of agents running on that doing personal activities for you as well as work activities for you. You think about engineers or financial analysts doing some of this work where there's managing a fleet of agents on that device. That's what's in front of us that's going to require more computational intensity, more accelerated computing.

Daniel Newman: 
So you've got this renewed focus on the PC and on this space, Jeff. Clearly, you're telling the story. By the way, you're talking about max. My credit card's getting maxed out on these tokens, on everyone's apps I use. They say they're max plans, Jeff, by the way. But they run out of credits, and then they start charging you. Yes, they do. Yeah. And they run out really fast, by the way. They run out really fast. Enterprises are going to want to figure out how to do some stuff that's not constantly out there in the cloud. But with this renewed focus, all these strategies we're talking about, what is Dell's route or what's the reason you have the permission to win and grow market share in this particular era?

Jeff Clarke: 
I don't know if it's a renewed focus. We've been a PC player since the beginning. That's how the company started, Michael and PC's Limited. I hope what we're communicating and what you've seen from us in recent months is a renewed focus. Maybe we are a little complacent. And what you're seeing is some edge come back. We can build great products at every price span in the marketplace. And we can, we have, and we will again. I think we're trying to demonstrate we can operate with speed. we can operate in an accelerating environment and match that speed with the activities that we're driving in the organization. Which is why, quite frankly, you've seen a wholesale change of our roadmap, responding into a very formidable offering that's coming here very shortly. And then we haven't really had a chance to really toy with what's in the future and what we're capable of doing. That's what I like. And you think about the strategy that I've communicated publicly, that we had narrowed our focus to the mid-range price spans and above and convinced ourselves that's where we needed to be. And while important and we're a leader there, we have to address the entire marketplace. There are customers out there in the commercial space that we're reaching now that we hadn't reached in years with our Dell Pro Essential as an example. So then I think of a combination of why does this matter? Speed does matter. And what we're really doing is taking these things that really matter most to customers, great design, leading edge innovation, manifest themselves in a great product that solves a customer's problem. Well, that's what the new Dell Pro family really represents. Combining those attributes into one thing, our product, the manifestation of all of that great work, into helping customers solve their next advanced problem, and then prepare them, because these assets are deployed for many years, they're capable of taking on the future workloads that will be run on them next year, the year after, the year beyond. That's what you're seeing from us is Not so much a change in strategy, an improvement in execution and an improvement in focus and attention to detail.

Patrick Moorhead: 
I got to tell you what, I saw Daniel and I both attended your investor day. And your words were very clear. And it definitely seemed like a reassertion of Dell in the PC space. And we obviously got pre-briefed on CES stuff, visited, saw some of your products at CES, even took me behind the curtain room as well and showed me stuff. And I notice it. It's apparent. In the end, right, it's, What matters is how your customers respond and how the entire value chain, even inside of Dell, responds to that. But something gives me this sneaking suspicion if I look at typically where Dell is focused and they want to make something work, more times than not you've been successful. So we'll definitely see what happens. I guess, Rob, the question for you is, how does this renewed focus translate into the different product lines? So for instance, what were some of the changes that you had to make in real time. And maybe I'll couple that with, I've seen you talk about, hey, getting back to engineering excellence, right? And some people might say, boy, those are great words, great talking point, right? But what does that actually mean in the context of like pro and even pro-precision?

Rob Bruckner: 
Yeah, of course.

Patrick Moorhead: 
I asked you about 30 questions there. Pick the one that you want to answer. That'd be a me question. I'm notorious for those.

Rob Bruckner: 
Maybe a brief overview of what the offerings look like. And I'll have a couple of samples. And I'm just going to hold them up and walk you through some of the engineering we put into them. It's something that really stuck out to me personally. Of course, you have the Dell Pro. And that's the bulk of our commercial fleet for the type of usages that have all the way from essential all the way up to Pro 3. Brought the number system back. Pro 3, Pro 5, Pro 7, and then Pro Premium. And then we have the precision side of this as well, which we're bringing in all of the more mobile workstation and fixed workstation and compute. Along with that, we have also rugged products and also education. So that's how we see the world. This gives us a really good scope of all the different needs that are out there. And give you some example, we want to bring the, not just the price point down and get into like the more of the pro three limits, it's more for a small business, but in the past, Some of these pro three class products would just be some things with old silicon, for example. And so you lose a lot of technology in your fleet if you're also trying to mix between the old and the new. And so one of the parts that Intel's going to be bringing out here soon I worked on, I won't say the name of it as I mentioned. You can if you like. No. I will let them do that because I want to make sure they have that as well. But it was something basically we took Pantelic, you used to call it Baby Panther. We'll call it Baby Panther for now.

Patrick Moorhead: 
No, I like Baby Panther.

Rob Bruckner: 
First time Jeff said it, I was like, OK, that can work. It's got all the same CPU capability. The architecture CPU is the same as Panther Lake, and the battery life architecture is the same. So now you can have an entry-level class PC with all-day battery life, not just using old technology, and it's got AI features as well. So that's an engineering challenge to marry what was Intel doing and putting this into a product that brings new value to the customer. Another interesting one for us is on the engineering side is the Pro 7. So one of the challenges you have with a large fleet of customers and a lot of different needs is the Pro 5, that's where all our configuration is. It's the sweet spot of the portfolio and you can think of each of the features from the front of the screen, the amount of mobility, the connectivity, we have all types of configuration to meet those needs. Intel, AMD, different versions, different generations just to make sure we can really hit the sweet spot. Well, with that configurability, you still get a nice thin and light program. It's actually thinner and lighter than our last generation Pro 5. We knew it could be even thinner and lighter if we actually put a focus on this in this generator Pro 7. This is one of our thinnest and lightest in this type of category of engineering. Now, what's cool about that is this includes the latest Pantelic and Gorgon. So these are more performance in the PC while we're getting thinner and lighter. So the challenge of these two dynamics going the opposite way is a pretty big part of that, for example. And finally, I'll show you another key architectural pivot you're seeing. The precision side is, you used to have a CPU and a GPU, and you had to go cool these things and power these things, and you use all kind of real estate inside the product. It took a lot of Z height and weight and battery to actually do that. Some of the new architectures with Yuma architecture, unified memory architecture for the CPU and GPU combined, Now you can bring something thinner and lighter and have a workstation quality class performance. So that's just the three that really stick out to me, Pat, that are just sort of the spots where, besides the typical way Dell brings that value, we actually are bringing new engineering capability from the offerings available.

Patrick Moorhead: 
So I do want to get an answer on the engineering excellence part. What does that mean? Does that mean setting up giving engineers access to more engineering resources, making targets and KPIs a lot more difficult, giving a new reward system or something. What does that look like?

Rob Bruckner: 
Yeah, I think it starts first for us, starting with talking to the customer more directly. You'd be somewhat maybe surprised if you look at the amount of time we spend looking at the products we want to do within just the Dell walls themselves, you can actually get sideways on what really matters and values to your customers. So doing the right product first allows you the time to do an even better product, for example. So one of the things we want to make sure also happens is we're looking at what's feasible in the industry and listening to our silicon partners. I was talking to Jeff several years ago while I was at Intel. And regularly, we provide feedback to each other about, hey, Rob, here's how I'm thinking about Intel, what you're doing. You have some concerns here. Hey, Jeff, here's what I'm thinking about you're doing. And so I think when you start to open up your ears and listen to what people are telling you, you can kind of see what the industry can do, what you need to go do. So you start to change your design point. So the design point no longer is, OK, we're going to be at 15 watts CDP for a certain system when we know it needs to be with the power, the compute needs to be at the 22, 25. So a design target would not have been set like that before. But that deep integration with your partners and listening to your customers sets the right design point for us.

Jeff Clarke: 
I don't know if you have a… No, I would point to, yesterday we had a town hall with our CSG team, and we recognized an engineer. And the engineer we recognized was all about innovation and engineering excellence, which you asked about. And specifically, it was the XPS 14. And you think about a definition of engineering excellence. Here we took a 14-inch product and it fits inside someone else's 13-inch envelope. Right. We took a leading-edge display. We took leading-edge battery technology, a battery density that has not been seen before. We created all-day battery performance out of a leading-edge product in a form factor that we took out about a pound of weight, reduced by about three millimeters of Z height, that's engineering excellence. And when we talk about that across the entire portfolio, now that definition will manifest itself differently in an education product. It will manifest itself differently in a probe precision, as it does in an XPS. But driving that level of excellence, driven by what our customers want, our understanding of the technology landscape around us, and then driving what's the best product we can build. How do we take that part of a gram out? How do we take that part of a millimeter out? How do we put more proverbial stuff in the five-pound bag? that's what we're trying to drive. And it was great to see the response from our team, recognize that in front of everybody yesterday, of what great looks like.

Patrick Moorhead: 
Yeah, it kind of gets back to the adage of, you know, the work starts when somebody says no, or I can't do that, right? And challenging to be able to do the things that quote, unquote, shouldn't be, you shouldn't be able to do, and you shouldn't be able to do it in a certain timeframe.

Jeff Clarke: 
Right, and the switch of the mindset which Rob is driving the organization of, not necessarily a no, I don't know how, but I'm going to go figure it out. Exactly. That's when the culture of when we were at our very best, lists all up and down through these buildings and what we're driving to.

Patrick Moorhead: 
Well, and permission to fail, because every risk that gets taken is not going to hit. You want it to, but if everything hits, you're not taking enough risks.

Daniel Newman: 
They're not big enough. They're not big enough.

Rob Bruckner: 
They were actually famous when we were in reviews together. Someone shows up with the traffic lights is all green. We see this as a problem.

Daniel Newman:
You're going too slow. Nobody's this good.

Rob Bruckner: 
You're not setting an ideal bar. You're not challenging yourself.

Jeff Clarke: 
We haven't pushed ourselves.

Rob Bruckner: 
That's right.

Jeff Clarke: 
That's ultimately it. Whether that's a speed, whether that's a cost target, a performance target, a set of features, whatever it might be that's appropriate, that's what we're going to push on.

Daniel Newman: 
Maybe they're the first one to figure out how to get a thousand agent engineers working with them. And they're just moving really fast in that chat. Well, that'd be good. I mean, yeah, I agree 100%. Why not 2,000?

Jeff Clarke: 
I don't know.

Daniel Newman: 
Again, why are we setting limits here, folks? No. I mean, it's infinite, right?

Jeff Clarke: 
I think there's something to be said of that. What is the boundary? We're not trying to put a boundary in place. What's the art of the possible? And the truth is, we don't know. I love that. And that just gets back to

Patrick Moorhead: 
High-tech product management basics. That's where I learned that.

Daniel Newman: 
So as a nice way to sort of bring this all home, you know, for our audience out there, you're obviously very excited, you're doing things, we're breaking things, we're seeing convergence of what's happening at the edge and in the data center coming together. We're building a little, you said GB300, so people can carry around in their bags with them soon, right? Yes. Yes. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It's a big bag. It's a big bag. A guy like you, you know. I got this, man, I got this. But tied together, you've got innovation, you've got engineering, you've got Dell scale, supply chain, you mentioned all that. What's the message to our audience out there about what you want to make sure hits home on this launch?

Jeff Clarke: 
You haven't seen nothing yet. More to come. What we've done is very, very good, but it's going to get better.

Patrick Moorhead: 
Just wait. That's right. That's it. I think that's the mic drop moment there, Daniel.

Daniel Newman: 
I think we just say goodbye. Yes. I think that's good. Rob, Jeff, that was a lot of fun sitting down with you. We look forward to seeing this launch and watching it all play out in real time. And of course, send samples, especially that one that I can carry uniquely. Of course.

Jeff Clarke: 
Or www.dell.com. Click. That's right. Buy. We take your credit card. I'm sure you got one. And Danny, you got this giant company.

Daniel Newman: 
Take that baby right there. You tell everybody about it. Dude, I'm getting myself a Dell. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of The Six Five. Looks like I just got myself a new expense. I appreciate you all being part of the community. Sign up, subscribe, follow all our content here. But for this one, we've got to say goodbye. See you all later.

‍