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23 September 2024

Direct from Michael Dell: Leadership lessons and the future of AI

McKinsey Quarterly

There are only a handful of people who have taken a start-up from zero to $88 billion in revenue and continue to lead it today. Michael Dell is one of them. The founder, CEO, and chairman of Dell Technologies has steered his company through four decades of change and wave after wave of technology trends. The company that he founded in his college dorm room in 1984 has become a giant with remarkable staying power.

Some trends matter, while others disappear. Michael Dell believes that AI is a trend like no other, one that will transform the way organizations operate, organize themselves, and do business. His company’s latest evolution has been to become an end-to-end provider of AI solutions to enterprises. Those organizations are rapidly experimenting (72 percent of companies have now adopted AI, up from 55 percent in 2023), while navigating cost, talent, security, and risk challenges. These are early days: McKinsey research shows that fewer than 10 percent of companies have seen EBITDA gains from AI at scale. Dell Technologies brings an arsenal of accelerated AI servers, unstructured-data storage, AI PCs, and a portfolio of networking and services to the challenge. All of this is a bet that organizations aiming to move fast while protecting their increasingly valuable data will want AI at their fingertips.

Michael Dell is uniquely positioned to give a clear picture of the potential of AI and generative AI (gen AI). He recently sat down with McKinsey senior partner Tarek Elmasry to provide insight on that subject and much more. Their wide-ranging discussion extended to the ever-increasing power of data, the resilience of the personal computer, and the leadership lessons that come from building a technology company over 40 years of technological change. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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