Michael Dell talks up the power of human and AI collaboration – but not everyone’s singing the same tune

Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Technologies, has called on businesses to accelerate the power of human potential during his opening day keynote at Dell Technologies World 2025.

Taking to the stage of the Venetian Conference and Expo Center in Las Vegas, Dell repeated again and again the importance of human involvement in the “AI age”, while also talking up the importance of technology and data in enabling it.

The CEO claimed his company “[transforms data] into actions and insights that drive human partners, turbocharged by AI” and is “creating a future where intelligence amplifies human potential on a massive scale”.

He added that while AI “can distill years of experience into instant insights,” it’s “not here to replace humans”.

“AI is a collaborator that frees your teams to do what they do best; to innovate, to imagine, and to solve the world’s toughest problems,” he said, “and Dell is the infrastructure, the backbone enabling enterprises to think faster, to act smarter, and to dream bigger.”

One of Dell’s guests on stage, Seemantini Godbole, CTO of hardware store Lowe’s, also talked up the importance of AI enabling human workers, be they engineers who can use AI agents to carry out API calls, or those working on the shop floor.

It’s something that has become a familiar refrain from hardware companies, which are often exalting generative AI as an enabler of increased human productivity (although AI software manufacturers often have a different perspective).

Larry Feinsmith, head of global tech strategy at JPMorgan Chase, perhaps exposed the reality of this for most IT leaders.

Joining Dell on stage, he explained the multiple ways in which the bank is already using AI and large language models, such as for cybersecurity and fraud detection.

He also outlined how it has introduced generative AI for QA summarization and content generation, as well as systems that allow customer-facing employees to “have information at the tip of their fingers, leveraging models rather than swivel chair, application type capability”.

Through generative AI, he said the company had seen up to 20% productivity increase among engineers using the technology to create code.

As Feinsmith pointed out, all of this is “human in the loop”, but that’s not where JPMorgan Chase’s plans for generative AI end.

“The next exciting horizon is going to be using agents and reasoning models and how you orchestrate all of these agents working together,” he said.

Feinsmith didn’t follow up on this train of thought, however, but instead said that this explosion in AI and AI agents in particular has a knock-on effect on hardware and energy demands.

While Feinsmith didn’t dig too deeply into this, he concluded by saying: “I'd like to quote our chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, who believes that this AI transformation – including Gen AI – is as transformational as any technological invention we've seen over the last couple of 100 years, printing press, steam engine, electricity, computing and the internet. The opportunity here is unbelievable.”