Exclusive: Dell names Jeff Boudreau chief AI officer, creates AI business unit

Jeff Boudreau will report to Dell Technologies vice chairman and chief operating officer Jeff Clarke.

Dell Technologies has named Jeff Boudreau - who began his corporate climb more than 25 years ago as an intern inside EMC's shipping and receiving department - as its first-ever chief AI officer, the company said.

Boudreau will be responsible for the infrastructure leader's strategy as Dell positions its technology to lay the foundation of generative AI efforts in the enterprise. He will report to Jeff Clarke, Dell's vice chairman and chief operating officer.

"To establish Dell Technologies as an industry leader in AI, we need dedicated leadership to drive our AI strategy across the company. I've asked Jeff Boudreau to take on the new role of chief AI officer, reporting to me," wrote Dell Technologies Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke in an email sent to Dell employees on Tuesday. "His deep engineering and infrastructure expertise will help us accelerate and work as one team."

Prior to his new role, the longtime EMC veteran spent the past four years as president and general manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, where he took over for Clarke in 2019.

"(Boudreau) and his team will partner across the company to understand domain-specific use cases, build, define and standardize architectures for the future, and integrate AI across our product portfolio," Clarke wrote Tuesday. "The team will also build relevant AI partnerships, lead the Centre for AI Innovation that will set our policies, and help educate our team members."

Arthur Lewis, who is currently president, core operations, global infrastructure solutions group, has been named to replace Boudreau as ISG president.

"For the past six years, Arthur has been leading within ISG, most recently focused on customer-first strategy and roadmap," Clarke wrote.

"In Arthur's expanded leadership capacity, he and the team will continue to execute our winning ISG strategy while evolving with the industry and our customers."

Dell Technologies' ISG unit debuted a ready-to-deploy generative AI solution in Project Helix at Dell Technologies World in May. It combines Dell's premium XE 9680 servers and Nvidia H100 GPUs to provide the computing power needed to train LLMs.

Clarke has said that Dell is also looking at how AI may drive a refresh in PC sales. Dell said it foresees PC users adopting applications such as Microsoft's Copilot and other, similar assistants, and running several in tandem to increase productivity.

"Any time that we can get a new technology that drives productivity into the best general-purpose productivity device on the planet, we're better off," Clarke said in a July investors panel on AI. "When we look at what Microsoft's plans are with AI and future versions of Windows, it's doing just that. It's going to make the workforce more productive. And any time we've seen that with previous versions of Windows, it's driven a substantial refresh cycle. We think that's the opportunity here."