Jason Ward finds himself revisiting old ground as he takes the reins of Dell’s operations in northern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This job includes acting as managing director of Dell Technologies Ireland, a role he vacated two years ago. Moreover, he is in charge of Dell’s business in the Nordic-Baltic region, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and the Baltics, a region where he previously headed the enterprise for Dell.
This territory feels somewhat like home, but it comes with added responsibilities, including tackling new technologies like artificial intelligence.
Ward’s return to the Irish unit happened earlier than he had expected due to Catherine Doyle’s departure in June to head up Microsoft’s Irish business. Regardless, he is filled with enthusiasm for what lies ahead. Ward subscribes to Reid Hoffman’s philosophy which encourages taking on roles for a few years before seeking fresh challenges.
He admits to being naturally inquisitive and enjoying challenges, adding that he would lose interest if he were to keep doing the same thing routinely after a couple of years.
AI is causing rapid changes within the business environment, prompting Dell to place it at the epicentre of its future developments. This includes manufacturing AI PCs, servers to run applications, and software to help businesses capitalise on the technology.
Over the past 30 years, Dell’s journey in Ireland has transformed significantly. Even though manufacturing was moved from Limerick to Poland in 2009, leading to a loss of 1,900 jobs, the company now stands as an employer of more than 4,500 people in the country. Looking forward, Ward hopes the dawn of new AI technology will result in further growth in the region.
“He suggested that the ongoing evolution of the company includes the integration of fresh technology and innovations, with a distinct focus on advancements in Generation AI. Ireland, in particular, is becoming a hotspot for such innovative activity, attracting a high influx of tech giants. He believes that a significant amount of AI development could likely take place in Ireland due to its popularity among these tech conglomerates.
However, he also flags a potential pitfall that could see Ireland lose out on this significant opportunity – the need for data centres. Dell, while not owning these data centres, does provide critical infrastructure for them.
Scandinavia is currently recognised as a data centre hub within Europe, with giants such as Meta and Google setting up their critical facilities due to the cooler climate. Ireland, too, has drawn considerable interest from data centre businesses, although there has been a recent resistance against these facilities, slowing down the approval process.
The data centres issue notably revolves around energy requirements, and his opinion is that the approach to this crucial issue needs re-evaluation.
“Reconsideration of our planning strategy for data centres is of utmost importance – they are set to play a fundamental role in every country’s infrastructure in the forthcoming years. With the abundant resources of wind, hydro, and wave energy, I believe Ireland should exploit these resources to power data centres. It is vital to speed up planning permission in these areas,” he argues.
He also adds that overlooking this potential could lead to missed opportunities, despite having such resources at our disposal. The demand for data centres is likely to surge as companies utilise power-intensive tech like AI. Dell, he suggests, is ideally poised to benefit from an impending AI revolution.
The developing market in Ireland across sectors like small businesses, government, or banks, has started dabbling with AI, according to him. He predicts an upcoming upswing in enterprise AI spending and suggests that a company like Dell, due to its comprehensive portfolio, can assist customers to optimise the advantages they draw from AI.”
Dell is leveraging artificial intelligence not only to bring benefits to its customers but also to enhance its own operational efficiencies. The firm has established virtual assistants for its support services, harnessing the wealth of professional knowledge Dell has accumulated throughout the years. AI is helping the company’s developers and coders save as much as 40 per cent of their time by automating specific tasks, which in turn allows them to focus on more valuable assignments.
According to Ward, this is particularly important given the challenge of finding highly skilled software engineers. Dell is repurposing its engineers’ time, which was previously spent on menial quality checks and recoding tasks, into bringing innovation to the company’s offerings. This has resulted in the faster launch of products to the market, and enabling the engineers to extract more value out of Dell’s products and develop new ones.
In Limerick, the company uses its resources to demonstrate to its clients – from vehicle manufacturers keen on creating and testing new engines and vehicles to healthcare firms seeking to examine MRIs or invent new drugs using digital twin tech – the advantages AI can bring to the table. The technology allows products to be developed in a fraction of the usual time.
Nonetheless, AI’s advancement is not without hurdles. For instance, there have been recent efforts within the European Union to introduce regulation to the emerging technology, culminating in the enactment of the AI Act last August. The move has had its critics, with several claiming it stifles innovation.
However, Ward disagrees, arguing that the EU’s regulation of AI is timely and significant considering the rapid growth of computational power behind these large language models. He warns that future AI models will be vastly more powerful and, while this promises more potential, it also presents greater risks. Thus, regulation is required to manage these risks effectively.
A recent analysis of AI capabilities unveiled some shortcomings in the protective mechanisms set up by the firms themselves. While enquiries relating to the creation of napalm were discerned and halted by AI systems, a clever request for the AI to impersonate a grandmother narrating a bedtime story – which featured the process of making napalm – went undetected. There is a recommendation for an external auditing process to be involved in setting up effective protective measures, to avoid such instances in the future.
Ward commented that the commendable effort made by the EU aims to develop restrictions around both Gen AI and AGI. He emphasises that the major decision-making power in terms of investment in the vast language models lies not just with powerful nations, but also with largescale IT corporations. Ward remarks on the continuous, autonomous training of AI models, suggesting that regulating these models would be more beneficial than leaving them uncontrolled.
Famously, prominent early proponents of AI, including the co-founders of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis, have voiced their belief in developing safeguards and regulations. They champion transparency among owners of large language models about their development processes and the influence they wield.
Drawing a parallel, Ward compares the current drive for regulation to the influential roles played by international independent bodies established post-Cold War to supervise over nuclear weaponry.
In his opinion, Ward believes the EU’s approach towards regulation is spot-on; and that appropriate protective measures will be pivotal in shaping the future evolvement of this technology.