Podcasts about ai pc

最近很多人開始喊台股到了高點、AI即將泡沫，但我反而不那麼悲觀， 股價漲多了當然會修正，可是AI趨勢不會因為股市震盪就消失。 黃仁勳最近在電腦展就提出一個關鍵觀點，PC正在被重新發明。 過去四十年，我們用電腦的方式其實沒有太大改變， 但AI時代的電腦，不再只是軟體容器，而是能理解任務並替你完成工作的隊友， AI股可能出現泡沫，但AI趨勢可不會回頭．．． 如果新的PC熱潮來臨，護國神山的團隊會沒有前途嗎？了解趨勢比較重要！ / 林博士的領航益生菌，不知不覺我們已經合作到六週年了！賓主盡歡，尤其感謝大家的支持，領航益生菌林博士這次送好大（當然裡面有我們幫忙送的啦❤️） 請看優惠連結

Earl Gosick, CTO at ESTI Consulting Services Earl Gosick has been attending Dell’s annual event since the EMC World days, and the ESTI Consulting Services co-founder brought to this year’s Dell Technologies World a perspective grounded in 35 years of building deep technical expertise on the Prairies. ESTI, the Saskatoon-based solution provider that won Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year, runs a pure-play Dell infrastructure practice with particular depth in storage and data center design. Earl also sits in Dell’s CTO Connect program – a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists with early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap and a real voice in shaping it. His framing for the week: AI is fundamentally a data story, and data stories are storage stories. The push toward on-premises AI infrastructure – from deskside devices up through the newly announced Exascale and Rackscale solutions – is being driven as much by data governance requirements and token economics as by raw performance. Organizations that don’t control their data, Earl argues, can’t truly control their AI outcomes. On cyber resilience, he made a point worth underlining for anyone running managed services: ransomware insurance changes the recovery equation in ways clients don’t always anticipate. When a claim is filed, infrastructure gets frozen for forensic analysis. Recovery speed from a clean, air-gapped golden image – built with technology partners like Index Engines – isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game. And to close: Saskatchewan and Alberta may be poised to become Canada’s next significant data center hubs. With regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale facility successfully built in the province and is actively pursuing more, Earl sees a real and growing opportunity – and ESTI is already working to support it. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re continuing our series of conversations from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re shifting from the Dell executive perspective to the partner perspective, and today’s guest has been making the trip to this event since the EMC World days. Earl Gosick is co-founder and senior consultant at ESTI Consulting Services, a Saskatoon-based solution provider that just celebrated 35 years in business and took home Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year. Earl also sits inside Dell’s CTO Connect program, a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists who get an early look at where Dell’s roadmap is actually heading – and, importantly, a real opportunity to push back on it. Earl’s a storage specialist at his core, and that turned out to be a useful lens at a conference that was fundamentally about AI infrastructure. Because if you pull on that AI thread long enough, it leads you back to data, and data always leads you back to storage. We talked about what the Exascale and Rackscale announcements mean for real customer deployments, why the cyber resilience conversation is as much about recovery speed as backup integrity, and a genuinely interesting thread about why Saskatchewan and the broader Canadian Prairies may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated data centre opportunities in North America right now. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Earl Gosick. Earl, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Earl Gosick: I appreciate you having me here. It’s always nice to talk about what we’re doing with Dell. Robert Dutt: No doubt, and you guys are doing a lot. I understand this is by no means your first DTW rodeo. Earl Gosick: No, I’ve been coming since the EMC World days, and I’ve never – I missed a year through COVID, that was about it. Robert Dutt: Well, I guess we’ll allow you that. So you’ve got this background here, you do the CTO Connect with Dell. What’s different about this year, if anything? What’s the tone or the energy that tells you something about where the industry is at right now, and not necessarily just where Dell would like it to be going? Earl Gosick: I think the driving factor of today is really the supply constraints. You can see what AI is doing and the effect that’s having across the board on every product that has memory or CPU or flash drives in it – which is everything in technology. So that’s really setting the tone. But it also shows how effective AI is as a market driver, and what people think is going to come out of that technology – which is, I think, very important for people to understand. It’s ubiquitous technology that’s going to drive a lot of change in our industry. And we’re seeing a leading edge of that. And if this is the leading edge, there’s some pretty exciting things coming, I suspect, and it’s going to do some pretty important and probably quite wonderful things for our clients. Robert Dutt: We heard from the main stage the idea of encouraging customers to get their hand up early – to get those orders, or even an inkling of where things are going for orders, in as early as possible – and that that will, in effect, Jeff Clarke was suggesting, get folks the best possible results. What’s the guidance you guys are providing your customers around that whole issue, and thinking about availability and pricing of hardware in this current super-fun environment? Earl Gosick: Our position does align with what we’re hearing from Dell when we’re dealing with Dell Technologies, so we try and pass on the messages as transparently as we can, understanding there are supply constraints coming. And we have to deal with those in the only way we have, and that is to figure out what we need. Let’s plan early. Let’s plan the budgets we have for the year, and we can make some estimates about what’s going to be happening six months from now – but they’re estimates, and they’re going to be higher. So it’s probably going to be cheaper for you to have technology that’s sitting on the floor unused for a few months and waste through some support potentially, as opposed to delaying the purchase for three months. So if we know what we’re going to buy, we should operate in a manner that allows us to order those technologies as soon as possible and make sure you’re not waiting for something that delays your business initiatives. Robert Dutt: You guys won the Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award last year for Canada. Take your victory lap. Tell me – what is it you guys are doing in the data centre space that earned that, and what does winning the award tell you about where your practice is focused? Earl Gosick: I hope it helps demonstrate our success. So what ESTI likes to do as a business – our business model is really to build highly competent experts all the way from solution architecture to implementation of those technologies at the customer site. That takes a lot of effort on our behalf, and so it’s nice to get a reward that says we’re doing the right things. Because if you can build a strong rapport with a client who trusts your experts in their field, that creates long-term relationships – which is what both ESTI and Dell are after, and what our clients want. Robert Dutt: You’re a storage specialist at a conference that has been at its core all about AI infrastructure. But at the same time, you go back to when it was – you said – EMC World, all about storage. The more I heard this week, the more it feels like the AI story is really a data story, and data stories are storage stories to at least some degree. How are you seeing that translate in terms of what your customers are actually asking about, or what they’re going to be asking you about? Earl Gosick: It’s significant. You’re right. In order for any type of artificial intelligence to derive a useful data product out the end, it’s built on the data that you have. So customers are coming to the realization that they have to store everything. So it is driving a lot of demand for storage. It’s driving storage in different ways and they just keep everything. Then there’s another product that comes after that, which is cleaning that data – building the data pipelines. When I talk about storage, it’s really about data, and AI is a data-driven product. So it’s doing great things for the storage industry. But the clients understand that they do have to have the data – it has to be there, it has to be available. And then when they build these data products, they have to protect those data products. They’ve got to make sure they’re secure. So it’s driving a lot of initiatives on both sides of the fence that are good for all of us. Robert Dutt: Especially with new or newer customers, or customers who are looking to expand what they’re doing with AI – and acknowledging there’s going to be a range from folks who have had the religion since day one and folks who’ve just been randomly shoving stuff digitally wherever they can. Where do you find those newer customers are at, generally speaking, in terms of sophistication of data management and data governance and all that kind of fun? Earl Gosick: Unfortunately, I’d like to say there’s a median in there. There is not. Everybody is at a different stage in that cycle for them. So you really have to be a little bit cognizant and ask the questions to find out where they’re at before you can really sort of hold their hands and walk them down the road. Many people who started that journey early – you can learn from them. And so they’re going to tell us to start and do something, and you may fail, there may be some things, but you’re going to learn something from that. The second time will be more successful. Then you take that information, you pass it on to the newer people who are trying to get quick value from those investments they’re making on the AI front. So it could be things about how to connect those various data sources because they’re spread everywhere, to how do they build, or select which ones they put their money and their efforts behind. And so you take from the ones that have been doing this for a while, you pass that information on to the ones that are starting on this journey, and you connect the dots. You provide value and make pain go away wherever you can. And customers appreciate that. Robert Dutt: And that sounds like that’s where you’re kind of bridging that gap that exists and trying to bring customers to the level they need to be at to get something out of this. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. Like I said, everybody’s on a journey at a different stage of that journey. And so you have to communicate well to understand where they’re at and what they’re trying to achieve. Once you know that – we don’t always have the answers, but we leverage great partners like Dell who do have somebody that knows the answer. And so building this sort of ecosystem of potential partners to bridge that gap is great. And Dell does that not just from us and the partner community, but their partner community as well, to support all the component pieces that go together to build these pretty highly complex solutions in some cases. Robert Dutt: Of all the announcements, all the stuff that we heard on the main stage and elsewhere this week, what kind of caught your attention – your major aha moment – the thing that’s going to be interesting going back to your business or going back to your customers with new opportunities or the ability to do something better, faster, more? Earl Gosick: So as we talked about, I am a storage guy. So I look at something like Exascale. They’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now in the CTO cycles that I’ve been to. To see that product sort of come to fruition, where you have something and you can just put a personality on that module and build something out – I think that could be very game-changing, especially for AI. They might want to do a lot of things with file storage today, object storage tomorrow. Being able to build up a cluster and put a personality on it that meets the needs of the day – I think that could be quite interesting. That Rackscale solution you saw on the stage with Michael Dell and Jensen the other day – for the larger clients, something like that could be quite interesting. I mean, we’re building these large data centers right now and trying to fill them. Rackscale infrastructure that helps with power and energy and doing a lot of powerful things is going to probably be a game changer for a lot of people. Robert Dutt: One of the things that struck me here is what I want to call the AI agnosticism, as long as you’re doing it on Dell infrastructure – that Dell is talking about here, ranging from, if you’ve got really basic needs, run it locally on your AI PC, moving up a bit there’s the GB10, which is more of a deskside machine, up to the big old box that Jensen signed on stage. How does that map with what you see in terms of customer needs for AI, and what do you think of that kind of approach to structuring both the data center and broader AI processing across the enterprise? Earl Gosick: I think as we touched on earlier, everybody’s on a different stage in that journey. So if you’ve got a guy that’s working at his desk and he’s trying to do some cool things, but he doesn’t have access to a million tokens – that little GB10 you put on the desk beside him and he’s going to do some development, he’s going to learn some wonderful things. Then as you move up the stack in your journey, you’ve got some big clients who are going to do small proof-of-concept type scenarios where they might want a smaller box and then move up that stack. I think it’s important to have a product that covers a diverse range of those people because nobody’s in that one sweet spot – they’re all over the map. Having that full technology set supports wherever they happen to be in their life cycle. Robert Dutt: You touch on tokens, and Jeff Clarke’s presentation was really deep into tokenomics and the kind of the trap there. I’m curious how that maps with what you’ve seen in customers as they’ve started to explore AI. Are they seeing these same challenges, and how are they thinking about it? Earl Gosick: Tokens are the buzzword of the day, but they’re out there for a reason. Everybody has finite resources to put towards the solution they’re trying to build. They may or may not know what that solution is – they’re working towards something, they need tokens to achieve that. What I find interesting is the people who are very early into the game of AI and building solutions around that – it doesn’t take them long before they’re like, “I’m out of tokens. I need to do some stuff.” So it just comes back to the fact that there are only so many resources to solve the needs you have, and you only have so many tokens, and you’ve got to learn to live within what you can get your hands on. And that’s driving the economy, whether it’s at a data center level or at an internal level for any business. Robert Dutt: And does that in turn drive – which I believe is Dell’s thesis here – does that in turn drive the interest in building out infrastructure in-house, so that the relative incremental cost of those additional tokens goes way down because it’s bought and built versus rented? Earl Gosick: Yeah. I think there’s a step along that AI journey where people have potentially outgrown what they can do in the cloud in an economic fashion. We see the supply constraints are driven by CPU and memory usage. If you look at what the cloud hyperscalers offer, when you get into highly intensive memory and CPU, it starts to get very expensive. A lot of storage, a lot of bits and bytes moving back and forth – very expensive. All those things are prevalent in AI. You’re moving a lot of data back and forth, you’re touching a lot of things, you need a lot of memory at times. So once you get to a point where you’re doing useful things with your AI and building generative models, no matter what you do with inferencing, it starts to get really expensive. Then it becomes a time where you can move those things into a data center you control. You can get some economics from it and you can get some sovereignty out of it. A hyperscaler outside of your control can turn things off – they can’t do that when it’s your data center. So you’ve got a lot of control as well as the economics behind how you’re achieving the outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Robert Dutt: I used a word which is actually where I wanted to go next, which is sovereignty. When we’re talking about data center infrastructure and moving bits around and enterprise storage, how is data sovereignty trending among your customers, especially folks who have regulatory concerns and that sort of thing? Earl Gosick: Being a Canadian company, predominantly, we have a larger focus on sovereignty and data sovereignty and sovereign solutions than maybe you’ll see south of the border here. And we find our friends in the European Union are a little bit different – they’re ahead of us even. But it’s a really big concern, especially when you have any type of government agency that you’re dealing with, or anybody that really has intellectual property that they’re looking to protect. They’ve learned that open AI models may expose things – even if it’s just from how they’re creating their algorithms. But if the data gets out there, it’s a concern. They’re protecting their assets as well. These AIs are delivering very useful outcomes for them. They need to make sure they own those outcomes and that they can actually reach them when they need them. So part of data sovereignty is not just the sovereign part of your data, but it’s the actual access to your data. We’re learning things from not just the AI piece but from ransomware – all of a sudden your data goes away. The same thing could happen with a hyperscaler for some people. Sovereign IT solutions are going to be, I think, increasingly important moving forward. Robert Dutt: On that note, you mentioned ransomware, and data resilience and protection is another area I wanted to touch on. We heard the figure that 97% of cyber attacks are now specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because of the old line about, I forget the particular bank robber’s name, but why do you rob the banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you go after the backup? Because that’s where all the data is. Does that match with what you’re seeing, and if so, how does that change how you’re designing and recommending data protection for your customers? Earl Gosick: It is absolutely changing people’s realization of how they need to protect their data. This one doesn’t matter if it’s AI or your regular business practices – your data has value, whether it’s to support applications that are running your critical business or you’re building AI products that you need to protect. That has value and you need to access it. What we’re seeing more and more – and we’ve built a really strong practice around this – is building things like cyber vaults and using Dell’s technology partners like Index Engines, where they come in and they can quickly identify threats inside your environment and act on those. Because these guys loiter around for potentially months at a time. They know how to get to your backups. They know they’re not getting paid if you can recover. So they’re going to do everything they can to try and disrupt that. They have AI engines just like ours, but they have a lot of money and they don’t have the constraints about how they use their AI. I mean, these people are criminals, so they act in a method that makes them money. We’re going to be facing even more potential threats in the future, and some of those are going to be AI-driven. We’re going to have to react at AI speeds. There are changes coming, but certainly people are learning to build protection mechanisms that are air-gapped and can respond very quickly to threats. Robert Dutt: When you’re sitting in front of a client who thinks they’re covered – they’ve got a backup solution, they’ve got someone who’s responsible for it – what are the most common gaps that you find between what they think they have and what they actually have? Earl Gosick: I think for many clients, they don’t really understand how disruptive it’s going to be if they run into a ransomware attack. If you’re a client that may have ransomware insurance, for example, and they get hit – you have to tell them, “Do you understand you’re not going to be able to touch any of that infrastructure? Because your insurance company is going to want to do some analysis on that to see how the threat came in.” That infrastructure is dead and gone. You’re starting from scratch. You need a golden image – you need something you know nobody has touched. Protecting the data is only the first piece. Rebuilding from that data, and how fast you can do that – that’s the very critical component. That’s where an air-gapped cyber recovery solution like Dell Cyber Recovery is critical, because you can understand what data to recover and you can recover quickly. Having the data there – that’s the great first step and that’s where you should start. But following that, that is only the first step. Robert Dutt: Your client base is different from a lot of partners I talk to. Given where you sit and who you’re focused on – not necessarily organizations that are under the same kind of pressure or have the same kind of resources to pursue AI – how do you translate and filter what you hear at a conference like this, where a lot is focused towards big enterprise, to a message that makes sense for your customers and scales to their needs and appetites? Earl Gosick: That’s one I think isn’t really that difficult – it’s not as difficult as you would think. Because everybody has the same problems. They run into the same problems. How they build solutions to those problems might change on the scale, but you just have to understand and recognize that everybody’s having the same problems. You can articulate and communicate to them that you’re not the only one that has this. We can resolve this problem at a large scale, but we don’t have to. You came back to it earlier when we talked about the product sets, from small to large – you just pick the right one to meet the solution that these guys have. How you solve that problem of the day doesn’t necessarily change for a really, really large client versus a very, very small client. It’s really just the scale of the end solution and the architecture that’s put together to solve the need. Robert Dutt: From a Titanium partner’s seat, what did the program changes that we saw rolled out – the agentification of the program, some of the incentive shifts – tell you about where Dell sees growth opportunity, and how does it align with where you’re already going or where it might take you? Earl Gosick: I think you can see very easily that Dell is putting a large focus around AI and what it can do for them to streamline their business and be successful. We, like any other company we deal with, are doing the same thing. What they’re doing with their Dell One program, and having a single operation from lead generation down to quoting and pricing and follow-up – it matches what we’re doing on the back end and trying to automate that. Because as long as we can automate that process and reduce the friction in those programs and dealing with Dell, we can spend that time focusing on our clients’ needs. You see Dell, I think, leveraging the same technologies to do that. And if we’re smart business people today, we’re looking to the people around us who are being successful and trying to do what they’re doing in a sense. That’s true for us and our clients. Leveraging AI and seeing how that’s being successful for our partners is driving what we’re all doing – to drive automation and simplification through the processes that are just painful every day that we have to do better at, to support our clients. Robert Dutt: I’m guessing you guys are pretty far down this road already because you’re pretty much a pure-play Dell on the infrastructure side, as far as I understand. But when a company like Dell rolls out these incentives focused on expanding customer footprints – getting a Dell storage customer into Dell PCs or any of the other solution lines – just curious if that moves the needle for you in terms of the incentive, or is it already baked into what you’re doing? Earl Gosick: It’s baked into what we’re doing. In the end of the day, you are trying to build a rapport with a customer based on being a trusted expert. You’re not going to flip your technologies around based on what’s going to get somebody a little bit more money. You’ve got to do the right thing for the customer today and every time you deal with them. The advantage of dealing with Dell is they typically tie their incentives to the product that they are investing in today – that they see the future growing into. So they usually coincide. They understand the pain points of the year, and the incentives usually match the requirements of the day as well. So they’re really good at that. And then they usually have a lot of tools to support that initiative of IT transformation, whatever it is for that time and place in our industry. Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re on the CTO Connect program – pretty small room, an exclusive group. Tell me about what that relationship looks like on the inside of the room, and the value that an organization like ESTI gets from sitting in there. Earl Gosick: I guess I’ll put it this way. We deal with some technology providers – predominantly Dell. Dell puts us in a room, they tell us what they’re doing for the next year or two, and they ask us if they’re on the right track. That’s telling to me – they care and they listen. They talk about the technologies that we’re going to see upcoming, so it’s helpful for us to talk to our clients about where the industry is headed. But they do sometimes say, “We’re going to do this,” and the room says, “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Our customers love this,” or, “We like this for this reason.” And they say, “Oh, okay.” And we have a dialogue about those things. So I think that’s one of the most important things that comes out of CTO Connect – we hear about industry trends, but they also ask us our opinion on whether they’re on the right track, and then they listen to that opinion. I think that’s telling for any company you deal with – one that engages not only with their clients, but with their technology partners. It’s one of the things I really like about CTO Connect. Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 35 or so, as I understand, as an organization. That’s a long time to be running a consultancy in any market – and markets move, vendors come and go. What’s the philosophy behind building something that durable in a market that changes so fast, and especially in an area of the country that doesn’t necessarily get as much headline attention from vendors as a Toronto or a Vancouver or a Montreal? Earl Gosick: I think it comes back to what I stated earlier around building strong and capable expertise across the board – and that’s building relationships with the clients, building relationships with partners like Dell to solve the solutions of the day. Our clients respect that because they know they can come back to us again and again and we’ll do the right thing together. So that’s really the crux of it. Our business model is a little different in that we support a little bit more of an entrepreneurial aspect to our business. When young, capable people come on board and they build differentiating products, they get a seat at the table – and that’s critical for ESTI and the way we operate. But it’s really about looking at modern technology solutions and being agile to support those ever-changing technologies. It makes our industry exciting. You’re never doing the same thing every day. And as long as you can recognize the fact that you won’t be doing the same thing tomorrow and you just have to find a way to deal with it – that’s how we thrive in our company, and in working with Dell as well. Robert Dutt: All right, so let’s close with asking you to do a little bit of the impossible, given that pace of change. What’s one thing that you’re thinking about today, but maybe not totally all-in on at this point, that you think is going to be shaping the business for ESTI and your customers when we’re sitting here at DTW 2027? Earl Gosick: Well, that’s a really hard question. On the investment side, we do look at some of the technologies today – and as we talked about, AI is big for us. We need to build services that our clients don’t have. So we spend a lot of focus on where they have skills and where they don’t. We’re going to build a lot of expertise around cleaning data, building data pipelines and that kind of stuff, to focus on the needs our clients are asking us to help them solve. So that’s kind of an easy one because everybody sees that going forward. Beyond that – we’re making a strong effort in Saskatchewan and Alberta to build a sort of data center economy to support a lot of these data centers that need to be built. We already have access to power infrastructure to support those things. That’s going to drive a little bit of a change in our operating model just to support our local governments as they try and take advantage of the differentiators we have. That’ll drive some change for ESTI. And then as we expand across the rest of Canada, different geographies have different requirements as well. So lots of change, lots of new people coming on board all the time – interesting but dynamic. Robert Dutt: That will be an interesting thread to pull on. I remember going to an event – God, it must have been 15 years ago now – talking about how Canada really should be a data center powerhouse. When you consider we have power, clean power in relative abundance, we have cold, which turns out to be important – it sounds like maybe there’s an opportunity to realize some of that with what you guys are doing and what governments are starting to look at more seriously. Earl Gosick: They are. Also, right outside my hometown, they just announced a very large data center which is going to house some infrastructure from CoreWeave – and we’re going to see more of that, I think, because that process went very well. I sat in on a conference a couple of weeks ago where it was government and industry getting together to talk about why they were successful, what they bring to the table. Saskatchewan is unique because they have regulated power, energy, and land. They can guarantee, “We will give you power, we can guarantee you’ll get LNG.” Those types of things are very important for anybody trying to build a data center – it’s the critical piece. And with the government having control over all of those, they can guarantee them. That’s where I think Saskatchewan is going to have a real differentiator to support that technology, and the government is well aware of that fact now. They’re going to want to do more of these things. And then our neighbors in both Alberta and Manitoba are sort of on board as well. Certainly Alberta has done a few key data centers to support AI and those are going to continue to happen. We’re sometimes slow to move because it’s government. But once they realize the differentiators they have and what it can do for the market, I think there’ll be some traction there. Robert Dutt: Should be interesting times, and sitting where you’re sitting sounds like a big opportunity. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. I think it’s a big opportunity for all of us – supporting your community around you as well as building a thriving business. Robert Dutt: Earl, I appreciate you taking the time once again. I hope this has been a good DTW for you. Earl Gosick: It’s been a great discussion and a good DTW, so thanks a lot for having me. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services. I’d like to thank Earl for his time last week in Las Vegas. Thirty-five years building deep technical expertise from Saskatoon, in a vendor relationship game that tends to reward proximity to the bigger centres – that’s not an accident, and it came through in the conversation. A few things I’ll take away from this one. First, the AI-is-a-storage-story framing. Every AI product ultimately requires data to be collected, governed, moved, and protected. That’s not news to Earl, but it’s a useful reframe for anyone still trying to connect their existing practice to the AI conversation. The hardware gets the headlines. The data work actually gets the contracts. Second, on cyber resilience – the ransomware insurance point Earl raised is worth sitting with. The moment a client files a claim, that infrastructure gets frozen while the insurance company figures out how the breach happened. Your ability to recover doesn’t just depend on whether the backup is intact – it depends on whether you built a clean, air-gapped golden image that nobody has touched. That’s the conversation. And if you’re not having it with your clients, maybe someone else is. And third, keep an eye on Saskatchewan. Regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale data center get successfully built in the province and wants more of them. Earl thinks that’s just the start of something, and I’m inclined to agree. If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, that really does help folks in the channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

✉️ 掌握前瞻趨勢與科技脈動，立即訂閱 IC之音電子報：https://pse.is/8wpwwxCOMPUTEX 2026依然圍繞在AI，但焦點不再只有資料中心與AI伺服器。隨著NVIDIA與聯發科共同開發的AI PC晶片RTX Spark正式亮相，個人電腦再次成為產業關注的主戰場。為何身為全球手機晶片龍頭的聯發科要跨入規模遠小於手機市場的PC領域？面對早已布局Windows on ARM多年的高通，NVIDIA與聯發科聯手將如何改變AI PC競爭版圖？RTX Spark透露什麼樣的產業布局？從異質整合晶片、AI PC發展路線，到聯發科在ASIC與伺服器晶片市場的最新進展，聯發科、高通與NVIDIA，持續在風起雲湧的AI浪潮中殺出自己的版圖。

1:32 HVDC是本次COMPUTEX最大的亮點與機會 5:05 台達電無庸置疑就是HVDC最核心的廠商 7:19 PSU、匯流排、穩壓變壓器，完成降壓滿足各零件需求 10:00 能源電力的最有效運用，更大尺度看NVIDIA DSX 12:52 往更小的尺度看SST、液冷散熱、高階電容、功率IC與導線架 19:11 還沒完全發酵的Power whip、Busbar connector 21:24 PSU/BBU模組化，金屬構件的客製化與製造能力是商機 26:00 還好我第一天6/2去，人很多但該看該問的都有滿足 29:40 N1X事前預熱，OEM狂漲市場熱烈反應，但我覺得… 32:00 N1X的規格與基本資料 33:00 ① N1X跟GB10核心是一模一樣的 34:10 ②粗估售價 11.5/14萬 ，跑agent效能過剩，不上不下 36:55 ③消費電子需求，價格彈性比CSP雲端低很多 38:22 ④PC使用的習性難改 39:23 ⑤ARM架構的相容性 詳細文章與圖表: https://www.big-econ.com/index.php?sec=article&ID=4091 -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

開盤前30分鐘，08:30 - 09:00 讓我們一起解讀財經時事 。 參加財經皓角總經訂閱： 新友會員 https://jackalopelin.com 老友會員 https://yutinghao.finance 我的粉絲專頁 https://reurl.cc/n563rd 網站參加會員手冊 https://reurl.cc/rvvqAr 如有疑問，歡迎來信 jackieyutw@gmail.com """"" ♥️ 打賞網址 ：https://p.ecpay.com.tw/B83478D """"" (不提供退款服務) 《早晨財經速解讀》是游庭皓的個人知識節目，針對財經時事做最新解讀，開播於2019年7月15日，每日開盤前半小時準時直播。議題從總體經濟、產業動態到投資哲學，信息量飽滿，為你顛覆直覺，清理投資誤區，用更寬廣的角度帶你一窺投資的奧秘。 免責聲明：《游庭皓的財經皓角》頻道為學習型頻道，僅用於教育與娛樂目的，無任何證券之買賣建議。任何形式的投資皆涉及風險，投資者需進行自己的研究，持盈保泰。

- 黃世聰 姚惠珍 封開平 謝晨彥 劉寶傑

Nvidia stapt de PC-markt binnen met de Spark chip, een system-on-chip die AMD, Intel en Qualcomm onder druk zet. In deze aflevering van Techzine Talks bespreken we de technische details van deze innovatieve chip met gedeeld geheugen architectuur, waarbij CPU en GPU één geheugenpool delen tot 128GB.De Nvidia Spark richt zich voornamelijk op AI-developers en gebruikers die lokaal AI willen draaien. Met specificaties vergelijkbaar aan een RTX 5070 maar dan in een geïntegreerde oplossing, kan deze chip de laptop- en desktop markt op zijn kop zetten. We analyseren de voor- en nadelen van het gedeelde geheugen systeem en wat dit betekent voor prestaties.Ook bespreken we de concurrentie met Qualcomm's ARM-gebaseerde chips, de rol van Microsoft, en waarom Intel en AMD zich zorgen moeten maken. Fabrikanten als Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus en MSI kondigen al eerste modellen aan, met Microsoft's Surface Ultra als vlaggenschip. Maar wordt dit een succes of een kortstondig avontuur?Belangrijkste onderwerpen:• Technische specificaties Nvidia Spark system-on-chip• Gedeeld geheugen architectuur: voordelen en nadelen• Vergelijking met Qualcomm, Intel en AMD oplossingen• Welke fabrikanten stappen in en wat zijn de verwachtingen• Prijsstelling en beschikbaarheid (herfst 2025)• Impact op de AI PC-markt en toekomst van Windows on ARM• Waarom Nvidia's timing perfect is na afloop Qualcomm exclusiviteit• Geheugen tekorten en implicaties voor smartphonesChapters:0:08 - Introductie Nvidia Spark0:51 - Wat is een system on chip1:19 - Gedeeld geheugen architectuur4:30 - Nvidia komt op de PC-markt5:44 - Qualcomm en Windows op ARM7:03 - Specificaties en prestaties23:42 - Fabrikanten en marktimplicaties26:13 - Toekomst en concurrentieKeywords: Nvidia Spark, system on chip, AI PC, gedeeld geheugen, Windows on ARM, Qualcomm Snapdragon, laptop chips, GPU architectuur, MediaTek, AI development

[깊이 있는 경제뉴스] 1) 반도체 호황이 불러온 주담대 격차? 저리 사내대출 논란 2) 엔비디아, AI PC용 칩 공개.. 개인용 컴퓨터 시장 진출 3) 장례식장·상조회사 줄폐업.. 장례문화 간소화 영향 - 김치형 경제뉴스큐레이터 - 이승형 아시아경제 기자 - 손희애 경제뉴스큐레이터

June 1, 2026 | Season 8 | Episode 17AI is moving faster than most of us can comfortably process, and markets are pricing that speed in real time. We take a sober look at the artificial intelligence boom, the surge in chip stocks, and what happens when portfolios quietly tilt too far toward one story. Along the way, we anchor the excitement to something investors can actually use: historical perspective, market structure, and practical asset allocation decisions.We rewind a full century to the Roaring 1920s and the wave of disruption from cars, mass electrification, and radio. The lesson isn't that change is painless, it's that new technology tends to build entire ecosystems of jobs, businesses, and productivity, even while it wipes out older industries. That same push-pull is showing up today as AI tools rewrite workflows, data centers scale up, and regulators scramble to catch up.Then we zoom back into the present: why market leadership rotates, how narrow market breadth can be a warning sign, and why IPO hype can distort fundamentals. We dig into bubble talk with SpaceX-style valuation math, track key headlines around NVIDIA's push toward the AI PC, and highlight an “AI adjacent” opportunity in energy through SLB's digital strategy and its partnership with NVIDIA. We close with a global reality check: the UK bond market and rising gilt yields as a reminder that debt, confidence, and politics can move interest rates fast.If you want clearer thinking in noisy markets, listen now, then subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review so more investors can find it.** For informational and educational purposes only, not intended as investment advice. Views and opinions are subject to change without notice. For full disclosures, ADVs, and CRS Forms, please visit https://heroldlantern.com/disclosure **To learn about becoming a Herold & Lantern Investments valued client, please visit https://heroldlantern.com/wealth-advisory-contact-formFollow and Like Us on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn | @HeroldLantern

Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve Not every voice at Dell Technologies World last week belonged to a vendor. For a partner perspective on the week’s biggest themes, In The Channel sat down with Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve – a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider, Dell Titanium partner, and Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Brown walked away from DTW with deskside agentic AI as his headline takeaway, particularly after hands-on time in a Dell lab showcasing NemoClaw – NVIDIA‘s enterprise-governance take on the OpenClaw open-source agent framework. “They’ve set it up closed by default – it can’t leave the box,” Brown says. “That’s a safety net that really opens the conversation.” That said, he’s clear-eyed about where most of his public sector and enterprise clients actually are. “Broad scope, it’s ahead. The hardware is going to follow it.” The tokenomics reality landed hard too. Brown shared a personal story about spending a hundred dollars testing Claude on a single flight – a relatable example he’s started using to frame the real cost implications of unmanaged AI usage, well before any on-premises or local inference conversation begins. On cyber resilience, Brown says he’s had to evolve his approach: “I got to be more of a jerk. I was being too nice.” His firm’s managed backup practice has seen firsthand the damage when clients – and even other MSPs – treat backup as a checkbox. When you show up after a ransomware event to find the backup server was on the same domain and hit just as hard, the conversation changes. And on Canadian data sovereignty, Brown goes beyond the standard data-residency talking points. FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, he argues, represent far more serious legal exposure than most clients realize – even those who believe a Canadian cloud region is sufficient protection. The conversation also covers the AI PC refresh cycle colliding with supply chain pressure, the end-user adoption gap that’s undermining Copilot investments, and what Dell’s revised partner incentive structure signals about where the growth opportunities are. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Last week, I was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell’s big annual customer and partner event. Over the course of the week, I had a number of conversations that I’ll be bringing here on In the Channel. Last week, we featured three Dell executives. This week, we’re bringing you some partners. Today, we start on that partner perspective, specifically from one of Canada’s top Dell partners. Nigel Brown is CTO of Microserve, a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider that has earned Titanium status with Dell and taken home Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Microserve serves an enterprise and public sector-heavy client base, which means Nigel’s job is regularly about taking what gets announced on a stage in Las Vegas and translating it into something that makes sense for organizations that don’t necessarily move at conference speed. I caught up with Nigel on site at DTW last week. We covered a lot of ground – deskside agentic AI and what it’s actually going to take to make that real for customers, the very real cost of token economics, why he’s had to be, as he put it, more of a jerk about cyber resilience, and why the Canadian data sovereignty conversation is more urgent than most people realize. Let’s get right to it. My chat with Nigel Brown. Nigel, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Nigel Brown: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: So you guys are here, obviously, as a Titanium-level Dell partner, consecutive years as the Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada. What’s your overall read on this week? What made your ears stand up? What caught your attention? What are you taking back to both your team and to your customers when you go back to Burnaby? Nigel Brown: That’s a really good question. It’s also a big one. There’s been a lot of announcements, a lot of dialogue over the last couple of days. I’m trying to process that a little bit, assuming you were going to ask me that. I think the biggest takeaway I had – everybody’s heard of OpenClaw, everybody’s heard all the IT people are terrified of it, so it’s more, how do we get rid of it in our environments? Seeing this whole push around deskside agentic AI, especially given our market where we play a lot with clients – I actually had the opportunity, I did the lab today because I couldn’t resist seeing what it’s like. The governance and security wrapper on it totally makes sense and it’s opened my eyes. I think that’s probably the biggest. Beyond that, I would say the Dell hardware being able to run frontier models, seeing Gemini running local for sovereignty conversations – I think that’s a really good thing to see as well. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, obviously you touched on one of the big stories this week, which is deskside AI – the idea of physical infrastructure that’s at or near the customer’s desk, either in the data center or right there in the PC, that’s processing the models locally. It sounds like something that you’re interested in. I’m curious where it lands for your customers. Is it something that’s a conversation point, or is it ahead of where they are in the AI discussion at this point? Nigel Brown: I would say broad scope – I don’t want to lump all my customers into one bucket – but broad scope, it’s ahead. I don’t think you’re seeing a lot of organizations ready for it. We also deal heavily with public sector enterprise accounts, for example. We’re doing more and more in the commercial market where you’re going to see a little bit more playing and adoption within tech teams. But in ours, yeah, I’d say we’re definitely ahead right now. So it gives you a chance to get in there and pitch the idea as something new and plant those seeds. Once I get it past my IT and security folks, then that’s where it’s all going to start. If I can’t get it through mine in a good conversation, then I’m never going to be able to with our clients. Robert Dutt: But it sounds like there’s at least that – from your comments on OpenClaw, it sounds like there’s that door, that area of interest. Nigel Brown: Seeing it today under the NemoClaw and Viya umbrella – yeah, I think there’s definitely something there. They’ve set it up closed by default. It can’t leave the box. That’s what I saw in the lab today. So until you set up essentially like a firewall rule to allow it to do something, it’s a safety net that I think really opens the conversation and allows the idea of end users actually playing. Those are really early adopters anyway. And how could I integrate agentic AI into organizations? Robert Dutt: Man, how often does it come back down to governance with AI? Nigel Brown: Oh, absolutely. That’s pretty much the name of the game everywhere. And so we’re doing it well, and many are still scrambling. Robert Dutt: You touch on you guys having a lot of public sector, healthcare, education, all those kinds of verticals – not always the fastest to move on new tech. Along the lines of the previous questions, but sort of taken out a notch – how much of what the AI announcements we’ve heard this week translate directly to where your customers are at, versus how much needs to be, shall we say, adapted for the reality of your accounts? Nigel Brown: Well, you go to any of these events and it’s, “We’re behind if we’re not doing agentic AI everywhere.” Reality is, it’s just not true. I think it’s very forward-thinking – or very optimistic – to think we’re all moving that fast. It’s headed in that direction quicker and quicker. Executive tables are always the ones sitting there going, “We want it, we need it in our organizations, we’re going to get left behind.” So it’s very top of mind. But some organizations have very niche deployments – they’re figuring out the right solutions. Healthcare – I’ve seen it, they’ve done some phenomenal things in radiology and other areas. So it’s picking up. We’re dealing with one client right now that’s looking at online pharmacy and they’re looking at a huge Dell compute cluster to run AI on. So you see it, but it’s not commonplace. It’s not every organization. Certainly as you get into municipalities and things like that, it’s Copilot at best – that’s really where they’re trying to play – and their user base just isn’t adopting, not even close. Robert Dutt: So it sounds like there are at least a couple of steps that need to happen to get to the point of, A, using what’s already in place and, B, potentially looking at building out something internally – and the stuff that’s been talked about here a lot, the idea of running those AI workloads internally on the data center side. Nigel Brown: Yeah. I think it’s going to get there for sure. Right now the conversation has to be outcomes – not “I want AI.” And right now it’s so heavily, “Well, I know I need it, I don’t know what for yet.” I’ve seen it even in some peer groups – the dialogue is, “Well, we’re going to do AI, we’re going to build agents.” So, what for? And then there’s a long pause. Driving outcomes conversations is where it’s going to start, in my opinion. The hardware is going to follow it. And that really ties into, well, where are you going to run it? Do you understand token economics – or tokenomics, whatever the buzzword is right now – and that’s a really big deal. For me, getting that message out really loud and clear around the cost of tokens – I’ve done it, I’ve gotten burned. I spent a hundred bucks on a plane because I wanted to see Claude do something cool. And you’re going, wow, if I can do that in 10 minutes, think of what larger organizations will spend if they don’t find a smarter way to run it. Robert Dutt: That’s a good point – it’s not something you necessarily understand, but it’s something you can sure feel if you start to have adventures with the stuff. Nigel Brown: Well, exactly. And all it’s going to take – like I said, a lot of organizations started with Copilot under the Microsoft umbrella, because it was like an easy button. It was there for them, it was already set up. I am worried about some of those days changing, where that subscription turns into usage-based models. And we’ll see where that goes. You’re seeing it with Anthropic, you’re seeing it with Perplexity. I bounce off my limits all the time. Most of what I’m doing I can wait till tomorrow – but it’s easy to get out of control. Robert Dutt: And user computing is pretty core to what you guys do. There are a few things going on there – Windows 11 end-of-life support coming in October, the AI PC push coming from every direction at the same time. I’m curious if those two things are coming together in customer conversations as one refresh decision, or are they still separate tracks – the need to modernize for the Windows upgrade versus the need to modernize to get the most out of AI workloads? Nigel Brown: I think the end-of-support conversation and hardware refresh, honestly, is the biggest driver of the conversation that I’ve seen. And then that leads into, well, do I need an AI PC, and why, and what’s going to run on it? Everybody’s exploring and curious about it. There’s more skepticism about whether you need it now. Robert Dutt: How is that hitting along with the current fun situation with hardware constraints and prices spiking? And we’re hearing pretty directly from Jeff Clarke that, you know, telling customers, let us know what you want as early in the process as you can. I think the natural addendum to that is, make decisions knowing you might have this machine for a little bit longer than you previously expected. Nigel Brown: Totally right. So it’s very much my dialogue with our clients – it’s future-proofing. You better do it now. You don’t want to be stuck with a machine that can’t run an NPU for the next five years. So even if right now there’s skepticism about how much is going to run on it today, I think it is an important conversation to have and make sure that we’re ready for the moments where we’re really seeing workloads and inferencing running on device. You have to have that conversation now and pre-plan for it. But yeah, it’s been – especially in public sector – a hard conversation to have right now. Supply chain – we’re like a broken record. It still surprises me how many clients we talk to that haven’t seen this coming, that don’t know it’s real, or you get the ones going, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up in September, I’ll just wait till then.” Oh man. Brace for it. We’ve got to be ready. It just feels like a conversation on repeat these days – and it’s more than worth it, making sure we’re doing model selection with the future in mind. Robert Dutt: I find it’s a fun time to be a partner in that particular space. Nigel Brown: Well, you know, quote volume has quadrupled, because that same customer deal might take four different passes before they’ve made it through, especially in government. Pricing validity is a real challenge. It’s a moving target – no decision ever gets made fast. Robert Dutt: I want to talk a little about cyber resilience – another big topic here at the event. You guys run a managed backup practice, I understand, and you’re doing a lot of what vendors are asking MSPs to evolve towards. When you get into a customer environment today, what’s the most common gap between what they think their backup situation looks like and the reality of the situation? Nigel Brown: That’s an interesting question. It’s a real mixed bag. I always start with, “How confident are you in your ability to recover?” And most leaders – business leaders, outside of IT – there’s like a long pause. “Well, I don’t know.” Okay. Have you ever tested your recovery capability? No. Well, that’s where we’re going to start. And in other dialogues, they think they’ve got the backups running, but nobody’s been looking at them – they’re coming from doing it themselves, or maybe a mom-and-pop IT person taking care of it. They’re not watching, they’re not looking at tools, they’re not getting alert notifications on whether it’s keeping up and whether they’re protected. So that’s very foundational. Warning new clients – it’s just, let’s take them on that journey, do an assessment of the whole environment, make sure we’re protected. And a lot of conversations are, “Do you know that you’re not protected? Like, if you got ransomware tomorrow, there’s nothing I could do to help you, even though I’m your MSP.” That’s a scary reality. I’ve seen that have to go back to boards and make some tough decisions, find budget and solve it. They usually do – they react fast – but you’ve got to make the risk abundantly clear. Robert Dutt: That makes sense. In talking to Rob Emsley, who’s on the marketing team for the cyber resilience side at Dell, he was saying that 97% of cyber attacks now are specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because it turns out that’s where all the stuff is. Does that match what you’re seeing, and has that shift changed what you’re recommending to customers about what being protected really means for them? Nigel Brown: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed our messaging. I’d like to think we were maybe ahead of the curve in talking about storage and immutability – some of these key elements of, well, you just need it. That’s how we run our hosted service for clients that use it. And if we’re building out an architecture for another client, it’s just fundamental these days. You can’t even consider a solution that doesn’t include immutability protection, being able to spot bad things happening. But I’ve seen it – we’ve come into a disaster client where, “Hey, we got ransomware, can you help us recover?” And you go to the backup server to find out it was ransomwared too. “Do you have any tapes floating around?” It’s a tough chat to have. You see that less these days, but you definitely see the attempts – people trying to do it. And even other MSPs – I hate to say it – they’re not mature enough in how they’re protecting. They took the backup server, joined it to the domain – it’s just another device on the network. And sure enough, that’s exactly what gets hit because they didn’t plan it out. So it’s all planning and doing it right in the first place. Robert Dutt: It’s a checkbox as opposed to something that’s more firmly thought through. Given that, how do you approach it with customers? Do you come at it as, “This is something you should do, these are the reasons why, this is the potential downside” – or is it a thou-shalt kind of conversation? Nigel Brown: You know, a pile of years ago, after seeing an incident hit a new customer, I kind of resolved – I’ve got to be more of a jerk. I hate to say it. I got to be a lot tougher in my stance. I was being too nice. So yeah, in all things on this, my position is to generally take a pretty firm line. It’s all about risk, though. And to business leaders especially, that’s a term they understand. I’m not telling them, “Okay, you need this type of backup solution and it’s going to do these things.” It’s all about, how do we address the risk that you have right now? Leave it to us to figure out the details as we design the solution. Rarely do we get into the weeds of it unless it’s a larger client where we’re dealing with a large IT team that has opinions. But usually in those larger environments, there are groups that are already aligned – they know what they should be doing, maybe just haven’t done it themselves yet. The new architecture is absolutely going to include all those steps. So it’s an easier conversation to have. In some ways, it’s giving them permission if you’re coming in as a new supplier – it’s the stuff they’ve wanted to do, but haven’t really had the air cover to make the case. Robert Dutt: Yeah, you come in as that outside opinion to say, this is how it needs to be. Nigel Brown: And our job is often more of just a translator for those IT teams to their leadership – to help support the business case. Robert Dutt: I want to talk about the Modern Partner Platform and some of the partner program changes that have rolled out this week. One of the big things is obviously the revised incentive structure, with cyber resilience particularly called out as a premium rebate area. From your seat as a Titanium partner, what does the new structure tell you about where Dell sees the biggest growth opportunities for partners? Nigel Brown: Well, I think it does exactly that – it says where the growth opportunities are. And largely there was no surprise. In my opinion, when you look at it, it aligns to how we want to lead deals, it aligns with the conversations we’re already going to have. Now it’s just helping incentivize that dialogue. Nothing surprising there – I just see better alignment. Robert Dutt: Let’s play a little bit of “anything can happen here.” Vendors like Dell are starting to build agentic AI into their programs, their portals, their tools – all the stuff you guys work with every day. Where do you see the most genuine value for an organization like your own in vendors – agentifying, for want of a better word – their partner programs and tools? And the flip side: are there any potholes you’re watching out for as that rolls out? Nigel Brown: You know, the more the merrier – more tools you can bring in is great. We’re always excited to see what they come up with. But to me, the bottom line is back to outcomes. It’s about reducing friction in the sales process. What do we want our sellers to do? We want them out selling. Living in a partner portal trying to find what they need, deal registration, all of those things that can be painful – sometimes it’s just admin work taking you away from conversations with clients. Reduce friction – that’s the name of the game. Do I want to see more AI-generated marketing content? No. We can do that ourselves – one prompt, feed something in, done. To me, the more you can expose what matters to us and reduce friction, the better. It keeps us doing what we should be doing and not sitting there doing admin work. Robert Dutt: It sounds like based on that comment, what Dell and a lot of its peers are doing is already on track – because I’m sure they’re asking these exact same questions of partners around the world right now. Nigel Brown: Oh, they’ve got way smarter people than me working in these massive organizations. They know the outcomes we want to achieve. And I’m excited that we’re at a point in time where we can see some of this come to fruition. Ten years ago, this was never a reality. Robert Dutt: What’s the biggest misconception you think your customers have about what it means to be AI ready right now? Nigel Brown: I think it depends on who the conversation is centered around. If it’s C-suite leadership, it’s back to, “We want AI, I don’t know what for, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.” There are tough conversations to be had. AI readiness is really, is your data ready? We heard that on stage this morning. Most organizations we walk into – it turns out they’ve got no data governance. So, let’s define some of this, let’s build some process, look at the right tools. In the Microsoft lens, we do a lot around Microsoft 365 and modern workplace. Well, then it’s a Purview conversation. And they get confused – “Why are you talking about DLP and Purview? I thought we were talking about AI readiness.” That’s exactly what it’s all about. The other big one I think they’re not taking seriously enough is the end-user adoption side. I’ve seen organizations – you go into their portals and have a look with them – their adoption of Copilot, where they’ve spent a whole pile of money, is abysmal. So then the dialogue is, “What you actually need to do is get your users excited. Train them, show them the cool things.” I think we’ve been really successful doing that inside our own organization, and now that’s something we deliver to our clients as well – we need to get your teams ready and thinking differently. At a C-suite level, they’re usually surprised at the path it takes, or in some cases how long it might take to get there. “Your data is in such rough shape – you’re two years away. You need to build a foundation before you can really consume it.” Now, some of the announcements this morning – okay, that starts changing the equation. We could get there faster if we have the right infrastructure in place. Robert Dutt: For a variety of reasons, the Canadian data sovereignty question feels like it’s getting louder. And I have to imagine, especially in your public sector footprint, how are you helping customers think through AI infrastructure decisions when data residency and compliance are an increasing part of the equation? Nigel Brown: It’s a non-negotiable for most of our enterprise and public sector clients. It’s going to run on-prem. They cannot afford to run on cloud. Yes, they want the latest models, the frontier models, the cool bells and whistles as we all do. But really – I presented at a conference last year on exactly this topic, why it’s important to bring it back on-prem. Never mind the tokenomics conversation – now there’s just more ammunition. I chatted with one IT leader, a commercial client, not public sector, who was all proud of how he’d migrated everything to cloud. We were in a session where they talked through the tokenomics challenge and another reason why sovereignty matters. And you watch the look on his face go, “Wow, I’m going to have to start building a data center again. I thought I got out of that.” And he was sitting there with his CEO in the room for that conversation. Kind of a wake-up call. So my dialogue is, let’s talk through what does the Patriot Act mean? What does FISA Section 702 mean? It’s a little bit scary, and people are shocked – “I thought running in Google Cloud or AWS, running it in a Canadian location was good enough.” No. That provider has access to your data. Have you heard of the CLOUD Act? That’s nothing compared to FISA 702 – they don’t even need to ask. They can just go and get it. And that’s pretty scary. So yeah, a lot of our job now is just sharing and communicating the right things to our clients and making sure they’re aware. Robert Dutt: Aside from your efforts to bring that education – do you find that the level of general awareness is on the rise? Are we getting to more of a discussion about how to solve for this, rather than still defining the scope of the problem? Nigel Brown: I would love to say it’s more mature. The reality is no – it’s still early-stage conversations. You get anomalies. We were with some clients who are way ahead and have just deployed Azure Local on Dell infrastructure. They’re doing amazing things, moving fast. So now it’s more, “How can I partner with you to go share this message? Why you went there, why you built it this way, what are you doing about it?” But no, it’s going to be a continued push – much like the supply chain story here – these dialogues just repeat as you walk into client after client. Robert Dutt: Last one for me – along the same lines as the first question, but a slightly different lens. What’s one thing from this week that you think will genuinely change what Microserve brings to customers in the next 12 months? Nigel Brown: I come back to where we started – the whole side of agentic AI. That was not on my radar, not in a serious way. “Let’s play around with this, let’s lab it out, see where it’s getting explored.” When you see a name like Dell behind what we’re doing, that got me more excited than I would have thought. I want to pilot inside our org. And if we can start building something that works here, then absolutely – taking that to clients and saying, “Okay, look at the GB10s, look at the GB300s, let’s move up the ladder.” There’s a tangible path that gives them more value than trying to build massive solutions right out of the gate. There are quick wins there, and that’s what excites me – showing a customer how there could be a quick win if we did this right. And it ties into the last thread we were pulling on – “Okay, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have all this stuff running on public cloud, so where’s it going to run?” And you’re not talking megawatts and massive data centers here. All I want to do is automate tasks and do some of this lower-level stuff. I think that’s going to be an interesting entry point for a lot of clients – making it more accessible. Everybody’s used ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their tool of choice is, so they’re into prompting. Nobody’s really understanding Copilot or understanding agentic – it’s a big buzzword. That’s our job. We can show them a slice of the possible, mock up these use cases, and those are quick wins. Then it is something deployable at scale – you just move it from the little box to a bigger box. The more people take advantage of it and keep moving up the scale, you don’t need to go spend millions upfront to play around with something like that. It’s going to open more doors. Robert Dutt: No shortage of interesting opportunities. Good luck getting out there and chasing those, and thanks again for making the time this week. Nigel Brown: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Are Copilot Plus PCs truly delivering the local AI power Microsoft promised, or are buyers still ending up with hardware that can't keep pace? Paul breaks down the latest specs, features, and what the next wave of chips means for your next upgrade. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit bitwarden.com/twit

Are Copilot Plus PCs truly delivering the local AI power Microsoft promised, or are buyers still ending up with hardware that can't keep pace? Paul breaks down the latest specs, features, and what the next wave of chips means for your next upgrade. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit bitwarden.com/twit

Are Copilot Plus PCs truly delivering the local AI power Microsoft promised, or are buyers still ending up with hardware that can't keep pace? Paul breaks down the latest specs, features, and what the next wave of chips means for your next upgrade. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit bitwarden.com/twit

Are Copilot Plus PCs truly delivering the local AI power Microsoft promised, or are buyers still ending up with hardware that can't keep pace? Paul breaks down the latest specs, features, and what the next wave of chips means for your next upgrade. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord. Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit bitwarden.com/twit

Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Today’s episode of In The Channel comes to you from the floor of Dell Technologies World 2026, where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory has been dominating the headlines. But what does that mean for partners who aren’t selling multi-million dollar deployments to the Fortune 500? To find out, we sat down with Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Ashby breaks down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom, explaining how partners can start small by deploying “AI supercomputers” like the Dell Pro Max GB10 directly to SMB desktops to unlock local, highly secure agentic AI workflows. We also dive into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can help customers escape “prototype purgatory” by narrowing their focus, and the massive opportunity remaining in traditional data center modernization—including the staggering claim that Dell’s new 18G platforms can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. We also touch on how Dell is leveraging its Customer Solution Centers to help partners de-risk these complex deployments before the customer signs the PO. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re coming to you today from the floor of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory and new agentic AI capabilities have completely dominated the Day 1 headlines. But as we know, the keynote hype doesn’t always translate immediately to the loading dock. To understand how partners are supposed to actually size, architect, and sell these new AI infrastructure solutions, I sat down with Alan Ashby. He’s the senior director of Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales at Dell. We dig into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can get mid-market customers started with an AI supercomputer right at their desk, and why the traditional data center refresh is still a massive and highly lucrative play for the channel. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Alan Ashby. Alan, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Robert Dutt: Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales. That’s a broad title. A lot of ground to cover there. To set the stage for MSPs, solution providers, folks listening to this, what can you tell me about what your team actually does kind of day-to-day when it comes to working with partners around infrastructure and AI solutions? Alan Ashby: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got a handful of folks that, you know, we’re aligned and dedicated to the partner ecosystem focused across the Americas. We have a couple of primary roles. So from a pre-sales perspective, helping support our partners from a technical enablement, understanding our product portfolio, understanding how to position the products correctly, both amongst the portfolio itself, but also kind of competitively in the marketplace. We also run what we call a technical account plan with our partners. So, you know, supporting them on their certifications, their enablement motions, etc. And then we also run what we have a program we call Heroes for our partners. So Heroes is our foundational enablement motion for partners. We run in the Americas somewhere between 15 and 30 regional face-to-face sessions every single quarter. Those we’d love to see partners participate in, try to do them all over the country. And those are deep dive sessions, you know, going through products and roadmaps and futures and how to position products, etc. And, you know, those have been an enablement motion for the last several years and been incredibly successful. Robert Dutt: All right. We’re hearing a lot this week, obviously, about the expansion of Dell AI Factory and the idea of bringing AI on-premise to the edge, closer to the enterprise itself. And from an infrastructure perspective, you’ve got PowerRack, the pitch there being you go to live customer workloads from kind of the box to deployed in six hours and change. For a partner who’s trying to sell into the mid-market or the enterprise, you know, how does that kind of speed of value fundamentally change the conversation that they’re having with their customer, whether that’s the CEO, CIO, or the business leader? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time for our partners with what the market’s putting out there for us. You know, when we look at, you know, you mentioned the mid-market space, I actually think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to go support those customers, especially with some of the agentic workflow processes that we announced today with some of the platforms. You know, it may not be those 100 million, 200 million dollar opportunities, but almost every single small business and medium business, you know, you start with maybe a product like the Dell Pro Max GB10, and you start there and you start building out that agentic workflows, you know, building out automated dashboards with AI assistance built into it. You know, a lot of great things that a partner could go deliver that everybody can see value in. Sometimes in that mid-market space and small business space, it’s easier to get started on some of these agentic flows because they don’t have data that’s kind of messy. They don’t have legacy debt from a data center infrastructure perspective. And then from a larger enterprise or commercial customer, you know, we have seen a number of very good successes across our partner ecosystem with delivering services and value to our customer sets collectively, you know, to help customers really try to find value through their AI journeys. Understanding and identifying key use cases or workloads that they think they can get value out of it, understanding the infrastructure, the architecture that’s designing it right. You know, early days, you know, we had a lot of times where, you know, customers and partners struggle with just, you know, how do we deploy this thing because power and cooling needs are maybe bigger than what I was expecting and, you know, managing through that challenge. So partners have a phenomenal opportunity, I think, to help provide that value to our customers collectively together. You know, every one of our partners, they bring a unique skill set and differentiators on their own to the marketplace and help support those customers to that kind of their own journeys together. Robert Dutt: What is that infrastructure pitch down to that, especially that mid-market or even SMB customer? In the past, there was interest in doing it, I think often they would end up, if they were going to do it, doing it on public cloud, because the alternative was a big old infrastructure solution that doesn’t really fit them, unless maybe a partner can bring it on and kind of do a multi-tenant kind of situation there. But where are we at in terms of having right-fit infrastructure to make that work? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think, you know, even the stuff that we announced today on stage, you know, products we announced at GTC, I think really helped kind of build out that situation and story for a small customer to be able to scale. You think about going back to the Dell Pro Max GB10, you know, you can take that device and you can, you know, run a small business basically off that depending on the concurrent users and be able to move up from that to some of our Pro workstations all the way up to the GB300. You know, we can run a model as big as a trillion parameters, it’s kind of crazy what you can do on a desktop, you know, and that doesn’t require any unique power requirements, I can plug that into a normal outlet. And then I could scale into, you know, actual infrastructure depending on the size of what the need is. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of opportunity for partners to think through, you know, how do they help customers scale through that. And so we talked a lot today at the show around, you know, the economics of everything. And in the long term, it’s going to be very challenging economically to run things in a public cloud. Yeah, on-prem is going to be a massive opportunity. And the fact that Michael today even talked about things about running foundation models and open source models on-prem, you know, your data is fully secure, you manage it all yourself. You know, it’s a lot easier to think about how I actually, you know, pull and extract value out of those different solutions. Robert Dutt: Well, and that’s the pitch right for the desk-side agentic AI solution is the idea, I think that the number was 87% reduction in token cost and in terms of comparing the cost of acquiring, deploying, running the solution on-prem. I think the break-even was three months or something like that against running the same kind of solution in public cloud. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that’s where customers are challenged today is, you know, you can have a lot of different, you know, foundational models and, you know, some of the agentic tools that are out there today that are subscription-based, cloud-based. And you can run through usage real fast without getting a lot of value out of it. When you start thinking about deploying stuff on-prem, you know, you know exactly what your output per day could be, and you can scale accordingly. Robert Dutt: How does that change how a partner approaches both selling and thinking about running, maintaining that infrastructure as opposed to something that’s all outsourced to the cloud and has those significant question marks of cost attached? Alan Ashby: I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re still figuring out, to be honest. You know, I think a lot of partners are trying to understand that and every customer is going to be a little bit in a different spot in their journey. And I think, you know, that’s where some of our partner ecosystems have tremendous value to help meet them where they are and help them take that first or second step forward to try to be able to deliver overall value to the company. Robert Dutt: Do you see that kind of time to value, that reduction in overall costs being something that can get unstuck some of those classic cases of AI workloads that are getting put into prototype, into test phase, but never quite see the light of day, partially perhaps because of that economic headwind that you discover when you start trying to scale these things? Alan Ashby: I think there’s that. I also think sometimes some customers probably try to maybe bite off more than they can chew at one time. And I think when we start thinking about these AI use cases, sometimes we’ll talk with some customers and partners helping them through them. They have, you know, two, three dozen things they want to try to accomplish out of one solution or one opportunity. It’s how do we narrow that down a little bit to where we actually extract value out of that particular use case that you’re trying to drive value with. And we’ve seen some really great success with some of our partners being able to help, you know, negotiate and navigate partner customers through that journey. You know, I think it takes a skill set that’s unique, and we’re starting to see more and more of our partners, you know, invest in and put attention to building out dedicated AI practice teams, helping them understand the skill set. The market’s moving incredibly fast, unlike ever before. And so, you know, it takes somebody who has a real passionate interest and a lot of curiosity to understand how these things all work together and all the pieces fit together and how do you take advantage of everything as you go forward. Robert Dutt: How do you see the co-delivery model evolving over time as you say, things are moving fast. When it comes to deploying AI factories, I think we heard earlier that, you know, the model is sort of Dell handling deployment and management of the overall environment while partners are being asked to focus on the application, the vertical, those kinds of things. How do you see the role of the channel, I guess, especially professional services and advisory-type partners evolving? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that to your point, I think it’s evolving. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities here from an educational services perspective, consulting services perspective, services for our partners, you know, very few customers, especially when you think about, you know, a traditional commercial customer, mid-market customer, know exactly what to do and what to do next. You know, they might have started a pilot out in the public cloud. And then they’re trying to figure out where to go from here. And like, there’s a lot of service opportunity for our partners there. When it comes from, you know, other deployment services, I think there’s opportunities there for our partners, you know, depending on the solutions. When you look at post-delivery of the product into the customer, I think that there’s even more opportunity for partners of how, once things are deployed and installed, what’s next? And how do you help customers really extract value out of the infrastructure they spent a lot of money on, and have pretty high expectations of the ROI and the benefits they get out of it? I think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to help those customers through that journey. I think there’s a big opportunity for partners to take a product like our GB10, GP300 products and say, how do I go show you how to build an agentic workflow on those systems that can deliver value for your customers? You know, those are all going to be partner-delivered opportunities. Robert Dutt: All right. It sounds like even though it’s relatively early in the process, we are at the point where some of those next steps are becoming clear then. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the question is, how fast do things change? You know, and it’s one of those things like I look at the agentic opportunities, probably one of the biggest things that can bring value for our partners. We’re really looking for a partner ecosystem that has the skill sets to deliver those for customers. Robert Dutt: Speaking of things changing, moving from traditional virtualization workloads to AI is a pretty big shift in how you think about structure, infrastructure, especially around storage, IO, networking, GPUs, needless to say. How’s the pre-sales team helping partners to figure out what the right size is for these solutions, both for current state and future state, so that you’re not either over-provisioning or under-provisioning customers? Alan Ashby: That’s a great question, actually. I mean, we’ve done a lot of things internally at Dell to get better ourselves and have the right talent and resources to support the partner ecosystem. You know, we have teams that can help support partners, both from a sizing, scoping of the opportunity, all the way down to configuring and deploying that solution if the partner needs that help. We’re also trying to help up-level our partners to be able to do it on their own. It’s kind of self-service and building the tools to help them through that motion. A couple of years ago, we started launching AI workshops, the different skill sets to help up-level and help that motion for a lot of our partners. The partners that have participated in those have seen a lot more success than those that didn’t. We do those multiple times a quarter and encourage partners to participate through those motions. We have an AI workshop multiple times a quarter in North America, and we go through every step of the phase from how do you have a conversation with a customer all the way through, how do you narrow down use cases, to all the way to how do you actually develop, design, and build the systems for what you need. Robert Dutt: Along those same lines, but a little bit more customer-facing and kind of looking at the economics of it, AI projects carry a lot of financial and technical risk for CIOs. What resources are there, whether it’s proof of concept, technical validation, or specialty engineering teams that partners can tap in to kind of prove the math and de-risk a solution such as AI Factory for customers? Alan Ashby: Yeah, there’s a couple of them actually, and I encourage all partners to kind of look at the options. We have at Dell, we have what we call our Customer Solution Centers, and those Customer Solution Centers have the ability to be able to work with a pre-sales specialist, a pre-sales expert on various different solutions. We have data centers where partners can take advantage of and leverage to be able to do proof of concept for customers, proof of value with those folks, and that can vary from any size of the architecture, from small all the way up to very large, and help support them through that. Also encourage partners to reach out to their Dell teams and how do you take advantage of those CSC resources. It’s a very simple process, but work through Dell teams. Same thing would be to go spend time with us in our labs. We have a great lab up in the Hopkinton area where AI factories are manufactured and built, and love to take partners through that facility to be able to see what’s possible there. We have an AI lab down in Austin to help them through that as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities. I would say the other one is we have a lot of partners also building out their own capabilities, their own labs, and we’ve helped support them through that as well. I think that they’re providing some amazing value to their customers, being able to do their own POCs and demonstrations and whatever it might be to help support that customer throughout the process. Robert Dutt: AI obviously gets the big headlines because it’s the 2020s as it is. But customers still have traditional enterprise apps and aging infrastructure that is going to need a refresh. I guess, how does your team handle guiding partners around going after the new shiny thing, the big opportunity that’s out there versus the kind of day-to-day operational challenge of standard data center modernization and refresh? Alan Ashby: Yeah, it’s hard when they have two of these really big shiny objects out there that have a lot of potential value for customers, both with AI but also just traditional data center modernization. We’ve seen a really great success over the last year of helping customers, I would say, clean up the data center, think through what they’ve got today in there and how to modernize it and right-size everything. When you look at some of the things that we’ll announce here at the show, it’s pretty exciting, honestly. There’s some great announcements we had in the Day 1 keynote, Day 2 keynote will be just as exciting, more from an infrastructure perspective of things. I’m really excited what we’re doing just with traditional servers and we’ve seen a lot of great success by our partner ecosystem over the last several quarters with them going in and helping customers look at consolidation of those environments. Our 18G server platforms, which we’ll announce, can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. That’s kind of crazy math when you think about that. It’s easy now to think about how do I help customers free up space and modernize things that makes it so AI is possible in their own data centers; consolidating racks in the servers is kind of a crazy concept. Then you think of how we’re looking at modernizing just traditional architecture with HCI architecture and the disaggregated architecture providing real value for customers with right-sizing, both compute capacity and storage capacity to be able to extract as much value as possible across the ecosystem of the portfolio. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, any other, I guess hidden opportunities for partners, things that maybe don’t get the big attention of the desk-side AI or PowerRack or some of those things, but still represent—sort of along the lines of the data center example you just gave—opportunities that are worth pursuing, that are worth looking at, but maybe not quite the highest profile? Alan Ashby: I mean, 100%. It’s easy to get excited with what we’re doing in AI. The market’s obviously kind of dictating a lot of that, but there’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of money to be made for our partners to be able to focus on classical data center architecture. We’ve got some great solutions. Our Dell Private Cloud is one that’s extremely exciting for partners, the opportunity to be able to help those customers through that process and think through that. I also am extremely excited with what we’re doing around the security front with our data protection portfolio, our PowerProtect product lines. Security is one that I think in the age of AI, we need to think through security differently. There’s some additional opportunities for partners to think about how do they provide those services, those extra value pieces to help make sure all of these customers are ready for what could be an AI security threat. Robert Dutt: I assume there’s a better together story to be told there between the hardware, the infrastructure, and the cyber protection. Alan Ashby: 100%. That’s one of the biggest values that we have at Dell. There’s inherent value between the products themselves being able to support each other differently, but also they have the large Dell value prop with the Dell supply chain, our security chain, how we build products. Everything provides value across the entire portfolio. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest misconception you see customers have around the idea of deploying on-prem AI in particular? Alan Ashby: That’s interesting. The big one I would say is where do I get started and how big do I need to get started? I think that we saw early days, a lot of customers thought initially you had to just get in line for supply on large GPU systems when you could run a lot of workloads, really interesting and exciting AI workloads on a server with a PCIe-based GPU, and now even more so with some of the other platforms with workstations or GB300, GB10. The biggest misconception is just thinking about how big I have to get started. I would encourage almost every executive, every leader of every company to start thinking differently about you probably should have an AI PC in your office and on your desk. You should have one of our, I always call it an AI supercomputer on your desk with the GB10. It’s about who’s going to be the most curious. There’s nothing that limits you from capabilities with what the models can do today. We really just need people to start using and playing and practicing and helping support the overall value to the customers and to our partners. Robert Dutt: It’s an interesting concept that a computer with a better NPU or GPU on board can unlock that curiosity towards AI and ultimately drag to infrastructure refresh down the road, I think. Alan Ashby: I think the key thing is you don’t have to be a coder. You don’t have to be a developer. Really today, anybody could be a developer. You could build your own application if you wanted to. You can build your own dashboards if you wanted to. You can run it 100% on-prem if you wanted to. You can use a coding assistant to help you manage through that. All you have to do is understand how to talk to it. How do you manage it like an individual and how do you manage it like an agent? It’s a secondary employee that helps you basically give you superpowers. Robert Dutt: If an MSP wants to get serious about the data center and AI with Dell, what’s the first step if they’re already in terms of certification, competency, that kind of thing that they should be looking at? Alan Ashby: Yeah, again, the portfolio is changing very quickly. I would say that table stakes obviously is having a good understanding of our compute platforms with what we’ve got put together with NVIDIA. That’d probably be step one. Step two would be thinking about what you can provide from a storage perspective and how you take advantage of both PowerScale and ObjectScale and all the way up through our lightning file systems, having good understanding how you can deploy that for your customers at scale. Then the other one would be how do you work closely with the Dell teams? That’s one of the things that is always encouraging for partners to think through is Dell has this incredibly large sales force that can help give them scale, give them opportunity. How do you share as a partner? How do you share your value back to the Dell teams? Make sure that they understand where you can be supportive of their customer experience. How do you work collaboratively with the Dell teams across the ecosystem? So forth. Tons of opportunity. We’re always looking for partners that have the right skill sets and the right capabilities. Our Dell teams want to bring them into customer accounts because we need their support. We need their help. Robert Dutt: Acknowledging this might be a wide range, what are some of those common threads that make for a good partner for you in terms of skill sets, areas of focus, that kind of thing? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think it’s evolving over time. Today, I look at partners that have unique skill sets are incredibly important. Partners that have a competency across our portfolio. Table stakes of having competencies around our compute platform, our storage platforms, but then thinking even deeper, how do you have competency around some of our more isolated platforms like what we do in our unstructured storage space with PowerScale and ObjectScale and access scale that we announced today? Same thing with our data protection portfolio, our cyber resilience platforms, our SRP platforms, like partners that have deep technical specialty expertise in those areas, they’re always going to be needed and valued in our partner ecosystem. AI is one other area to differentiate a partner from, but there’s a lot of those opportunities. Even today with our Dell Private Cloud, I always tell partners that whenever you see a pivot change in our portfolio, like we did when we launched the Dell Private Cloud, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself as a partner from other partners. To jump in early and be able to build the skill sets that our Dell team is looking for out of a partner to support their customers. Our Dell teams are always looking for those partners that can help lead the charge, especially from a technical perspective with the customers to validate the solution themselves to be able to provide that extensive value to the customer themselves. Robert Dutt: All right. Last one for me, without naming any names or with naming names, should you feel like doing so? What’s the most creative, unexpected, surprising use case for a Dell AI factory that you’ve seen a customer deploy thus far? Alan Ashby: Wow, that’s a hard one. I mean, there’s a lot of really interesting ones I’ve seen. I mean, early days, some of the ones I thought was some of the most exciting stuff that we did with Amarillo County in Texas. It’s a county that there’s a lot of languages natively spoken there and the community there needed to provide basically language services to a very large broad-based set of individuals in the community in their native tongue. And the Dell team worked closely with those folks to make that happen. All the way down there to where we got a number of partners helping small entities, both commercial and public entities, really think about how they can drive agentic workflows and some of the things that are dealing around that with dashboarding. Chat, agents, obviously is an easy one. And then helping customers through kind of how do you do code assist models. Those are probably the really big ones that we see from a use case perspective from our partners. Robert Dutt: No shortage of opportunities. Alan Ashby: Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable how many there are today. Robert Dutt: Thank you for taking the time. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. This is great. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Alan Ashby from Dell. I’d like to thank Alan for his time, carving out a few minutes for me amidst the chaos of day one here at DTW. My big takeaway from that conversation is that you don’t have to be deploying a multimillion dollar PowerRack system to get into the AI game with Dell right now. Between the new desktop workstations running localized agentic workflows and the massive 13 to one server consolidation plays they’re seeing in the traditional data center, there’s a very practical immediate path towards revenue here for partners in the mid market. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Dell Technologies World, please do take a second and follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your audio. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, always hugely appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for channelbuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo There are not many conversations where you get both the global architect of a vendor’s partner program and the Canadian channel chief in the same room. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded the week after Lenovo 360 Acceleratewrapped up in Austin, we had both: Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and programs at Lenovo, and Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief. The headlining number from the conversation is the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure. Jeff confirmed that Lenovo has reduced its active global incentives from 2,300 down to approximately 200 – a 92 per cent reduction – while maintaining the same total investment pool. The analogy he reached for: the same pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger. The earning power stays; the complexity goes. For Canadian partners, Craig noted that over 90 per cent either maintained or improved their tier status in the move to the new Lenovo 360 Authorized, Gold, and Platinum structure. Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo The conversation moved quickly into services. Lenovo is targeting a 15 to 20 per cent partner revenue mix from services and solutions within the next one to two years. Craig pointed to TruScale as the on-ramp, noting Canadian partner feedback has consistently positioned it as more flexible than competing offerings in market. On AI, Jeff described a “reimagination of enablement” – moving partner portals from static, backward-looking data tools into agentic AI-driven platforms that are intuitive and forward-looking. Craig pointed to Lenovo’s CIO Playbook as the practical tool helping Canadian partners move customers from proof of concept to proof of execution on their AI investments. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. You want to understand how a global technology vendor thinks about its partner program, not the press release version, but the actual mechanics of how design decisions get made and how they land in markets like Canada. Today’s conversation is a fairly rare opportunity. We have at the same time the global architect of the Lenovo partner ecosystem and the Canadian channel chief. Jeff Taylor is executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo, responsible for the Lenovo 360 framework that governs how the company works with partners worldwide and for the new consolidated partner ecosystems and program structure for the international markets that Lenovo unveiled earlier this year. Craig Taylor is senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo, a 2026 CRN channel chief and the person responsible for translating all that global framework into real outcomes for Canadian partners on the ground. We recorded this conversation just after Lenovo 360 Accelerate, the company’s annual North American partner event wrapped up in Austin, Texas. So this is about as fresh a read on the state of the Lenovo partner ecosystems you’re gonna get. We covered the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure, the push towards services-led selling and recurring revenue, how AI is reshaping both the partner conversation with customers and Lenovo’s own approach to enablement, and how Canadian partners should be thinking about a volatile period in hardware pricing. And yes, they’re both named Taylor. We had asked some questions. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor. [Music] Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, how are you? Robert Dutt: Very well, thank you. Craig Taylor: Excellent. Good afternoon, Robert. Robert Dutt: Interesting situation, one of those channel journalist dream situations, chatting with both the global architect of the partner program and the Canadian channel chief at the same time. And as fate would have it, you’re both just coming back from Austin. Jeff, for people who weren’t there in the room for Accelerate this year, the event was themed “unified as one” — pretty deliberate choice of words, I dare say. What were you trying to signal with that framing? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, well, I mean, obviously one with our partners is probably the first and foremost thing, but also to represent Lenovo holistically. From Motorola all the way through our devices, tablets, PCs, etc. and then into the data center. So we are one company and as an extension of that, one company includes our partners and the whole intent of the event was to bring everybody together and unify. Feedback has been really, really positive and it’s, you know, it’s only been a week, but lots of really good discourse and wonderful event. Robert Dutt: Craig, from a Canadian perspective, what did the Canadian attendance look like and what did Austin feel like compared to previous Accelerate events from a Canadian partner point of view? Craig Taylor: Yeah, our Canadian partners had very positive feedback to Jeff’s point. We’re always very well represented in these types of North American based events. We always punch above our weight class, I’d like to say. So all of the key strategic partners across our ecosystem were there in present and actively participating in our discussions as to how we’re going to strategize for our next fiscal year. Robert Dutt: Jeff, one thing that stood out for me from Austin was the choice of putting Jay McBain, Steve Brazier and Tiffany Bova on stage together, three analysts who ostensibly compete against each other in the market. Curious what the goal was in putting them together and what came out of that conversation that you think partners should take away. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, the moderator of that panel was with Alex Smith. So we had four great analysts all on the stage at the same time. I think if you take a step back and just look at the theme overall, what we’re trying to accomplish at Accelerate, it was really about industry topics. So we had representatives from the US Department of Energy as an example, talking about power and what’s happening at a governmental level. And part of that was to get these four analysts together who, as you say, they mix in a lot of the same circles, but they’d never been on the stage at the same time. And the idea was to propagate a little bit. And in some cases, they were aligned in a lot of their messages to the channel. In some cases, they differed. And it was a really lively and engaging conversation. And folks at Lenovo, we engage with these folks all the time, but having them all together, kind of representing their unique perspectives on the market right now was super valuable and engaging. Robert Dutt: So to dig into what you guys have been doing on the partner side of things, back in March, you announced the new consolidated partner ecosystem and programs, International Markets Organization. Now that Accelerate’s happened, partners have had a chance to hear it explained in person. What’s the clearest way to explain what operationally changed and what didn’t? Because from the outside, centralize where it makes sense can go a lot of different directions. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, look, I think the easiest way to explain it is we now have a single common framework across the globe. That framework is a guidepost, very intentionally set up as a framework, because execution has to remain local. And the input, the guidance, the feedback that we receive from our Canadian partners, from Craig, representing the viewpoints of those Canadian partners is absolutely critical to what we’re doing. And so by, you know, over time, as we had a lot of different markets and a lot of different geographies kind of expand over time as the company grew, there was similar objectives happening in multiple markets. And maybe the execution model was slightly different. And we thought by kind of bringing some of that together, we could simplify and we could gain efficiencies for our partners. But it’s really important to understand that the execution happens locally, sales happens locally, channel partners happen locally. And so it’s one really about standardizing the framework and not centralizing execution. Robert Dutt: How has that landed here in Canada, both with Canadian partners and in terms of how things operate for you, Craig? Craig Taylor: Yeah, the feedback has been really positive, Rob. You know, from a Canadian perspective, it’s all about leveraging our local teams and our local relationships, which haven’t changed. And feedback from our partner community is we are often best in class when it comes to how we represent our organization in front of the partner ecosystem. What I think is what more exciting for me now is we’re elevating those relationships to be consistent as to how we’re going to market with our partners. Consistency in the programs, consistency in the incentives, and also how quickly we can execute. What that means is our partner facing team can spend more time in market with our partners trying to win opportunities together with our mutual customers. Jeff Taylor: And if I could add, Rob, real quick, I mean, this was a very thoughtful process. This wasn’t something that happened kind of quick and without a lot of forethought. We have been working on this for years through the introduction of Lenovo 360 as that kind of framework itself. And then over time, as we’ve built some meat on the skeleton, the timing was just really right for us to go do this. But again, that premise of local execution is probably the most important thing. Robert Dutt: Well, I know that internally you guys have kind of had the mantra of “global might, local fight” internally for a while now, kind of being applied to the partner org, it seems here. I guess I’m still a little curious where there is a certain tension between global consistency and local relevance. You’ve kind of unpacked it, but where does that actually land in terms of which side takes the lead? Jeff Taylor: Yeah. So let me give you some real tangible numbers and examples. Three years ago in market across the globe, we had 2,300 active incentives in the market. I’m going to repeat that. We had 2,300 active incentives in the market. So if you think of your investment pool as a pizza, right, and you divide that 2,300 ways, the relative impact of those individual slices can be quite small. Now, what we found in talking to markets was that there was absolutely a consistency and intent. And maybe that intent was new customer acquisition, or maybe it was growth targets, or maybe it was something else. There was consistency in intent, but the execution was different, and that created operational complexity. It created our ability to report seamlessly and consistently over time more of a challenge than simplification. So in just the last two years, we’ve gone from that 2,300 partner incentives to about 200. So almost a 92% reduction without any change in investments, any negative change in investments, because the intent was still there, right? The intent was consistent across the globe. So that’s one where we centrally can look at the forest through the trees. We can see an opportunity for simplification. Then we can bring that to the markets while still driving that strategic intent that we want to accomplish with our partners. So that’s just one example. Craig Taylor: Yeah, well said. Just to add to that, Rob, one of the things that was very important was to make sure we had local input to the global framework that was being created at Jeff’s level. So we had many conversations as to what our market needs and demands were, and make sure that we shaped it to be properly represented within the framework. That worked out very, very well. We also are allowed to have some nuances in this organization as well. And so what we’re allowed to do is perhaps if a certain pathway doesn’t make sense to the Canadian market, for example, being more of an SMB-based market, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to make those changes to make sure that we service our partners the best that we should. And kind of beef up that SMB-facing side of things. Robert Dutt: Yeah, that makes sense. Jeff Taylor: It’s really interesting. It’s interesting, Robert. From day one, we called Lenovo 360 a framework and not a program from day one. And the whole idea was that we wanted to ask three basic questions like, how do you best engage with your partners? How do you best connect with your partners and how do you best grow with your partners? But depending on the conversation, the answers to those three questions might be different. So as an example, if you’re talking to a traditional hardware solution provider, you have answers for those three questions. If you’re talking to a GSI or an MSP or an MSSP, same questions may be very different answers. And so the whole idea with this framework was to be able to flex accordingly. And that went down all the way to the market level. So Craig mentioned that Canadian being more oriented towards an SMB type of approach, the framework has to flex to be able to support that. Whereas in other markets, it may flex a slightly different way, but it’s still all about engaging, connecting and growing. Robert Dutt: OK, back to your pizza point, Jeff, and one of my favorite, probably apocryphal Yogi Berra quotes, “cut my pizza in four slices, please, I can’t eat eight.” Curious, though, for a partner who looks at it and says, “all right, well, I used to have three incentives applied to my business and now there’s only really the one. The math doesn’t work for me.” What’s sort of the answer for them? Because the earning power says we didn’t take away the earning power. Jeff Taylor: So again, it’s the intent stays the same. The earning power stayed the same. The whole idea now is operationally, it should be easier for… the intent was that it would be easier for the partners to have a path towards that earning power. So instead of Jenga or a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, the intent here was to simplify that. So it’s a clear path to that earning potential with the same intent around growth, acquisition, those types of things. Craig Taylor: Yeah. And Robert, one of the things our partners have been asking us for is to provide more direction, focus as to where they want us to go win together in the market. And I think by simplifying these programs, it’s also allowed us to provide more focus to our partner community in the ecosystem to make sure that we’re winning together in the areas that we want to win. Jeff Taylor: And Robert, it goes beyond just traditional incentives programs, too. So we’ve simplified things like our certification programs. I’m going to get this number slightly wrong, but in the ballpark, in the last two years, we’ve driven 80,000 new certifications globally through some of the simplified changes that we’ve made. So all of these things, it’s look at the globe and then apply it locally. And again, with the full intent of making it as easy as possible for the partner. Robert Dutt: As with most partner programs slash framework changes, updates, you’ve acknowledged that some partners will land at a different tier under the new structure. How are you managing the transition and what should a partner do if they feel the new placement doesn’t reflect where they’re actually at in the relationship with Lenovo? Jeff Taylor: We’re very conscious about that. And I think, Robert, you know, any time there’s even a small change in some type of construct within the program, there’s some unfortunate circumstances associated with that. But we really tried to minimize it. And I’ll just give another example to hit a tier level. We have a volume requirement. OK, that’s the framework. But what that volume requirement is, it’s going to differ by market. So, you know, it might be very different in the U.S. than it is in France, than it is in Canada, than it is in Indonesia, as an example. And the whole intent there was through our analysis was to kind of minimize those impacts as much as possible while still creating the right type of incentive and the right value associated with each of those tier levels. Craig Taylor: And to that point, Robert, it was very thoughtful in Canada as to what the thresholds should be in order to properly reflect our market. And what’s happened as a result of that is over 90 percent of the partners have either maintained or actually improved their tier status as a result of the simplification and restructuring. What we’re doing with that remaining 10 or less than 10 percent is getting out in front of our foot, making sure that we have those discussions, working together through joint business plans to determine how we’re going to get them not only to the next threshold, but have a future plan to get us to the one after that and up-tier them as we continue our relationships with them. Robert Dutt: The services shift. Jeff, you put out a specific target there in recent interviews. 15 to 20 percent of partner revenue mix coming from services and solutions over the next year or two. The services business, as I understand it, has grown in the channel for the last five years or so with channel growth outpacing overall growth. That’s certainly real numbers and real growth. What’s driving customers towards the as-a-service and TruScale model specifically right now? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s one word. It’s complementary. Our strategic approach is to have complementary services to those of our partners. We want to be able to ensure that our mutual end users are getting the best possible experience that they can get. In many cases, those services are provided 100 percent by the partner themselves. But in other cases where they don’t have those capabilities, our job is to complement those with the service capabilities that we have. The idea is that, first of all, I think you know Robert, the services space, like the TAM, is massive. There’s so much opportunity really for everybody to play in a meaningful way. You just have to be smart about it. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is communicate. If there is an instance in which maybe there’s a perception of competing for services revenue, we’re going to communicate. We’re going to talk. We’re going to figure out what the best solution is for that end user and then move forward that way. Craig Taylor: Yeah, the other thing I would add and maybe another word for thought is flexibility as well. Feedback from our Canadian partners is that the Lenovo TruScale offering is much more flexible than other competitive offerings in market. Because we understand that not all customers look and feel the same. So this allows our partners to scale with us during their journey as they create more of a services-led go-to-market motion for their customers. Jeff Taylor: One of the conversations, Robert, that came out, you mentioned the Accelerate event last week in Austin. Obviously, a lot of discussions around AI and a lot of discussions around how do we best build an AI practice to go serve customers, whether they’re small businesses or large enterprises. And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of solution providers right now because they see that market exploding and they want to get it right. And this is a great example of where Lenovo can come in and partner with our partners on developing an AI practice that includes not just hardware and software, but also services. Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner to whom Lenovo still means primarily ThinkPads and infrastructure hardware, what’s the first move usually looked like for a partner who wants to shift towards services with you guys and where are most partners sitting today against that 15-20% target? Craig Taylor: Yeah, great question. I think Jeff mentioned it earlier. It’s about communication. Often, it’s a miss when we don’t understand the partner services capabilities. We are a channel-led organization. We’ll continue to be with our services engagement in order to scale and address the Canadian customers. We need the channel and we will continue to work with the channel in order to win in services, but we have to understand what it is they can offer. So our team is working very closely with our partner community through this joint business partner plan in order to understand and make sure that we’re aligning their services capabilities with the needs of those customers. That’s first. Second of all is internally, we’re making sure that we have a motto of sell with, sell for, and sell through the channel. And so our Lenovo customer-facing sales teams understand the importance and the value that our partners are bringing to our mutual customers. And together, we’re winning more than we ever have before. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, there’s almost like a macroeconomic driver here as well. So partners are, and we’re seeing this globally, that there’s a realization that to maximize the value, to increase the multiple on their valuation, a move towards MRR or ARR models is extremely important, right? And those are services-led models. And so we are seeing a lot of these traditional partners who are very accustomed as us being a PC or an infrastructure provider, really needing our help in moving towards this recurring revenue model that’s going to increase their valuation and their multiples. So we’re seeing that trend everywhere right now, probably more so in North America than anywhere else, but it’s definitely happening globally. Robert Dutt: To that point where I wanted to go next was the MSP pathway. 3,000 partners signed up globally, 150 million or so last year for you guys, real proof point. You’re expanding to new geographies. What can you tell me about where that pathway is at in Canada? And as you’ve expanded geographically, are there any new developments on the Canadian front, either announced at Accelerate or along the way? Jeff Taylor: Why don’t I take kind of the big picture and then Craig can go deeper into Canada? Again, this move towards recurring revenue models is happening everywhere. And so not only has Lenovo’s growth in that space been even better than expected, dare I say, we’re seeing it, the growth of MSPs just in pure numbers globally is growing very, very rapidly. And again, I think it’s this financial macroeconomic driver that’s making that happen. To go back to our framework around engaging, connecting and growing, those answers are so different with an MSP than they are with maybe a traditional Lenovo partner. And so we spent the first year developing this program by listening, literally going to conferences, setting up a booth. We had MSPs coming up to us saying, “What are you doing here?” And we would be like, “We’re just listening. We just want to hear what motivates you and what is your business driver.” And so that was the genesis of creating this program because we wanted it to be bespoke specifically for those MSPs that are just operating in a kind of a different way than traditional VARs or traditional service providers. And now I’ll hand it over to Craig. Craig Taylor: Yeah, no well said. And you’ll see that the way that we’ve set up the Lenovo 360 for MSP pathway is the solutions hub within our online support and the way that we work with those partners looks different. The incentive stack is aligned to the needs, as per Jeff’s saying, and we have dedicated campaigns and road shows and community engagements in order to make sure that we’re addressing the needs of those MSP partners. What’s most exciting in Canada is it’s actually opened up a new route to market for us and new partner relationships where we haven’t had them before. You know, I would say that until this pathway was created, we were probably under penetrated from a Lenovo Canada perspective within the MSP community. Now the opportunity is vast. The partners, those MSP related partners are interested in working with Lenovo more than ever. And I think together we’re going to go win in the market. Robert Dutt: Are we still in the early innings of operationalizing that and realizing that or is that something that’s sort of matured with the program being out there? Craig Taylor: I think we already had a head start. And so, you know, some of the relationships with the key MSP partners in the Canadian ecosystem, those relationships already existed. I think this is now an opportunity just to extend our reach and better support the masses of MSP partners that are in the Canadian marketplace. So we’re well down the path, but no pun intended. But I think this framework actually allows us to go even deeper and have more intimate relationships with this set of partners. Jeff Taylor: I think globally, if I could interject here, we’re probably in the second inning of a nine inning game. There’s so much more we can and we’ll be doing with this MSP community. And at the same time, there’s tens of thousands of MSPs out there. So the opportunity is huge and our interest and our investment kind of matches that opportunity. But we still have many innings to play here. So we’re excited about it. Robert Dutt: I don’t know if you guys have noticed over the last few months, but memory costs have been a little bit volatile. You guys, you know, Ryan McCurdy was out in front of that publicly and the Top Choice Express model guidance for pricing some of the ISG deals. Real things that partners are navigating. How do you counsel a partner who’s trying to manage customer conversations when prices can shift before product ships? And what specific tools or protections do partners have inside Lenovo right now that they need to know about? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, again, I’ll just kind of take the big picture here. Lenovo culturally within our partner community has always been one based on trust and communication always. And we’ve navigated tough waters before, whether that was the pandemic or this situation that’s affecting the entire industry. And our approach is complete candor, open communication. We don’t hide behind any potential downside or any risk. We’re very communicative up front as we get information, we share that information. That can at times be frustrating for partners, but at the same time, if they, you know, at the end of the day, when they take a step back, they really appreciate Lenovo just being super transparent. It is a tricky deal right now. It is complicated and things are moving very quickly. I do not envy our sales folks and I don’t envy our partner sellers out there right now because there’s a lot of tricky, tough conversations that have to happen. You had mentioned Top Choice and Top Choice Express. We have invested in a model for Top Choice Express where we do have a supply. We can commit to an order to ship SLA that other vendors can’t right now. And again, I think that’s very well received by the partner community. It may be that the exact configuration is slightly different, but at a time like this, it’s a great way for us to service those customers collectively with our partners and with a high quality solution from Lenovo. Craig Taylor: Yeah, just to add to that as well, I would say resiliency and agility have always been built into our supply chain. We currently manufacture in over 30 locations in 10 different markets worldwide. That global footprint allows us to be more agile as we go to market during these challenging times. Recently, Gartner has rated us as the number eight most robust supply chain in the world. I think that’s going to work to our advantage as we go and continue through these challenging times. Robert Dutt: Switching to AI, you guys have posted 72% year-over-year growth in AI-related revenue. I want to unpack that a little bit. Jeff, where’s that coming from? Is that AI PC, infrastructure services, mix of all three through the hybrid AI advantage program and the Nvidia work? What does the enablement for a partner who wants to build an AI practice actually look like? Jeff Taylor: Lots of questions in there, so let me make sure I can get them all back. In terms of our mix, it really is cross portfolio. We are leading the way in AI PC, which is fantastic. I think we’ve just scratched the surface on that device side. I still think some consumers and users are wondering, what is the real AI value here? Those use cases will continue to come and we’ll continue to see that market expand. In terms of our infrastructure business, everywhere from being able to service the big hyperscalers all the way into the enterprise and the SMB space is a testament to the strength of our portfolio. That growth is represented from everywhere from the hyperscalers to enterprise to mid-market to SMB. Again, on the services side, we talked about that a little bit ago. It’s really about partnering to make that happen. We are very fortunate to have partners. You had mentioned Nvidia, also Intel, also AMD, all the silicon guys are very much working with us on making sure that, A, the solutions are there, and that, B, the way we’re enabling those solutions, which is also a little bit different, Robert. We have to be enabling around outcomes and not around feeds and speeds. You have to be talking to customers about what are they trying to accomplish. It’s not feeds and speeds anymore. How we’re enabling our partners, Craig had mentioned our Lenovo 360 Solution Hub as an example. It is an outcome-based platform where our partners can come in and learn what’s available from an outcome’s perspective. The solutions, the hardware and the software is really incidental to the conversation around the outcome itself. I think all of those things play together. Robert Dutt: Craig, where do you find Canadian partners are with AI at this point? There’s a spectrum with some building real AI practices, many still figuring out what the first customer conversation looks like. So I guess both acknowledging there’s a range of answers, where do you find partners are at? What’s the realistic, most common entry point for a mid-market focused Canadian partner? Craig Taylor: Yeah, to answer the first part of the question, it is a vast spectrum as to where each partner is on their AI journey. But rest assured, because of the Lenovo services portfolio, we can actually support each of those partners independently and complement their offerings as they scale their AI journey. I would suggest that many of them probably are moving from proof of concept with their customers to now proof of execution with their customers. More and more, there’s a demand on measuring an ROI on the AI investments that have been made. And I think that’s where partners and customers are looking for Lenovo for some direction. We recently created a CIO playbook, which actually helps our customers and partners be able to capture what that ROI is and what the financial returns are getting as a result of their AI investments. And feedback from that from our partner community has been very good. The other thing I would suggest is that because these AI workloads are now going from modeling into the cloud, now into being actually practically used within the customer sets, it creates a massive opportunity for our infrastructure solutions group business. And you heard Jeff mention that several times. One of the things we’re doing with our partner community is making sure that we’re over-investing with their technical architects and solution architects within the partner community to drive even more familiarity with the Lenovo solutions around AI playbook to make sure that we’re being suggested, recommended, and considered when customers are coming to them for advice. Robert Dutt: Jeff, Austin’s in the rearview mirror. You got the program changes out. New org is in place. What have you done for me lately? What does the rest of 2026 look like? And what would tell you by year end that this consolidation worked the way you wanted it to? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, first, I’m going to take a nap. I’m tired. There’s a lot that has to happen. I mean, the first thing is we have a commitment to our partners and to our partners like Craig, our internal partners, that everything continues to move from a local perspective, that we want to make sure that whatever changes we’re making, services our geographies, services our markets, and most importantly, services our partners. So that’s kind of the first priority in my mind to go do that. The second thing, and we briefly mentioned this before, is I think the world of enablement is changing quite a bit. And I think AI is driving that. And we throw around the word transformation quite a bit and things still aren’t really transformative. They’re more evolutionary. I actually think at this point, we’re at a transformative part in terms of channel management. So we are investing heavily in our digital platforms to move from just kind of basic LLM models into AI agents and eventually into agentic AI that’s going to completely change the way that we enable all of our partners, big and small. It’ll be more efficient. It’ll be more intuitive. It’ll be more timely. It’ll be more forward-looking than backwards-looking. I think, Robert, you know most portals are somewhat static and kind of represents yesterday and not tomorrow. I think all of that is going to change. And so a big focus for myself and working very closely with our IT and digital transformations organizations is this reimagination of enablement in this world of AI. And you’ll see more and more from Lenovo in that regard. Robert Dutt: I think that is going to be one of the most interesting things from a partner program structure point of view over the next couple of years is how you and your peers address those challenges and really potentially change the shape of what programs and enablement look like. It’s exciting. Jeff Taylor: It really is an exciting time for us channel nerds that have been around for forever. This is like, “Yes, we’re going to be able to rock the world. It’s going to be great.” Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner listening to this, what’s the one thing that you want them to do differently or think differently in their relationship with Lenovo over the next little while? Craig Taylor: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about some of them already. We need to continue to protect and grow the core, which is our client computing and PC business. We have to grow at a premium to market. And I think we’re well positioned for that. I need the channel community to help us to continue to accelerate our ISG, our infrastructure solutions group business, around the data center to make sure we continue to drive relevance, focus on those technical relationships and leverage Top Choice Express, which will better service all of our customers by getting the right products in their hands quicker. We talked about helping our customers and our partners on this services-led selling journey. So we’re going to spend more time on that. But the last two, I think, are probably where a majority of my focus will be for the second half of the year. The one is continuing to make sure that we demonstrate ourselves as the easiest partner to do business with. So whether it be through our portfolio like Top Seller and Top Choice, whether it be the program optimization that Jeff and his team are doing fabulous work on, or whether it be the alignment of our portfolio coming together to represent one Lenovo, that’s going to be the key to our success and where our partners should continue to challenge us. Internally, I’m challenging my team to operate and act like an owner of your own business. And so we’re empowering our people to make decisions in market in front of their partners in order to have a more agile relationship with those customers. We’re enabling them with the right tools. And then finally, we’re educating them properly to make sure they represent this more complex portfolio of offerings that continues to be positioned in the marketplace and satisfy our customers’ business outcomes. So a lot for the second half of the year, but I’m very bullish that we’re positioned properly for success. Jeff Taylor: Robert, if you don’t mind, I would add just one quick thing there. And you had mentioned, like, we are in difficult times right now with memory and price increases and things like that. Partners are smart. They are going to lean on the partners that they trust, and they’re going to lean on the partners that have been there with them, or their partners that have been with them through these difficult times previously. And while nobody wants this situation, I think Lenovo is actually in a really good spot right now because we are that trusted advisor and have been for years. It’s not just words, right? It’s years and years and years of building relationships, the work that Craig and his team have done in Canada. You know, we have these relationships that allow us to navigate these waters maybe better than others. Robert Dutt: And my last super serious question to end this is, I’m basing this on an inference off a small sample size of two. But do you guys have any problems finding Taylors to run the channel orgs in all of the countries you operate in worldwide? Jeff Taylor: Go ahead, Craig. Say what you always say. Craig Taylor: Listen, I like to tease Jeff that he’s my dad, but our age delta is probably much more closer than makes that physically possible. But hey, listen, we’re going to take the best of the best. We happen to get two Taylors on this call with you, Robert. That’s what you’re getting today. And we’ll look for more next time we meet. Jeff Taylor: He’s definitely the better of the two. So it’s a funny thing. We were actually talking in Austin about how we might be able to mess with you a little bit, but we just don’t have to. Robert Dutt: Good to know. And Craig, I’ll send you the audio clip of him saying you’re the better one for your performance review. Craig Taylor: As long as that is your final edit, Rob, I’m happy. Robert Dutt: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. It’s been a fun conversation and we covered a lot of ground very well. Thank you. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, thank you, Robert. Craig Taylor: Yeah, look forward to seeing you soon, Robert. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor, both from Lenovo. I’d like to thank both Jeff and Craig for the time. It’s genuinely not that often you get the global and local perspective on the same conversation at the same time. And I thought the dynamic made for a richer discussion than either could have delivered on their own. A few things were taken away from this one. The incentive consolidation is real and it’s significant. Going from 2,300 active global incentives down to about 200, a 92% reduction, while keeping the total investment pool intact. Meaningful simplification. Jeff’s pizza framing is a good one. Same amount of pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger and more impactful. Earning power stays, operational complexity goes. If your business has been navigating a patchwork of overlapping incentives, the cleaner path to earning should be welcome. On the tier transition, Craig was direct that over 90% of Canadian partners either maintained or improved their status in the move to the new authorized gold and platinum structure. If you’re in the 10% that didn’t, the message was clear. Get in front of your Lenovo rep, build a joint business plan. There’s a path forward, but you have to start the conversation. The services shift didn’t seem like a someday conversation. Lenovo’s targeting 15 to 20% of its partner revenues from services and solutions over the next one to two years. TruScale is available and more flexible than a lot of partners probably realize. The partners who are going to win here are the ones who can articulate their own services capabilities clearly, so Lenovo can align around them rather than compete with them. On AI, I found Jeff’s forward-looking comments on agentic AI and the reimagination of enablement genuinely fascinating. Most partner portals are, as he said, static. They show you yesterday, not tomorrow. That is going to change. And how it changes will shape how partner programs actually function. Worth paying attention to across the industry. And for the hardware volatility piece, Top Choice Express is the practical answer right now for partners trying to manage customer conversations when prices are moving before product ships. If you’re not comfortable with it already, your first call tomorrow should be with your Lenovo rep. Oh, and yes, we did keep the clip of Jeff saying that Craig is the better Taylor. It’s in the edit. You’re welcome, Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely do help the show find a wider audience in the Canadian channel community. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

The dominant structural shift identified is the emergence of agentic AI as a direct operator within multi-system business environments, triggering a governance and accountability gap. Vendors and cloud platforms—including AWS, Stripe, and Cloudflare—are enabling AI agents not only to recommend actions but also to directly access payment rails, provision infrastructure, and execute transactions. This movement turns automation into an operating model issue rather than a feature deployment, as the identity, authority, and accountability of non-human actors become central operational questions. Primary evidence is drawn from a range of industry signals. According to an AMD-commissioned IDC report, 81% of enterprises are engaged in AI PC adoption and 61% are embedding AI into workflows. AWS has expanded managed agent packaging for AI deployments, Stripe has launched the Link wallet allowing AI agents to process payments on users' behalf with controls on payment credentials, and Cloudflare has demonstrated agents autonomously provisioning cloud resources with enforced monthly spend limits. While these statistics carry vendor-driven optimism, the combined actions of these companies confirm a shift from advisory AI to operational AI. Related developments reinforce this trajectory. The SolarWinds survey reported by Computer Weekly finds 71% of IT workers experiencing higher demands due to AI, with only 19% noting reduced cognitive load, reflecting operational burdens rather than efficiencies. Similarly, Forrester data cited by The Register highlights a change in CIO responsibilities from system building to outcome governance as agentic AI exposes gaps in decision rights and process completeness. Security risks are elevated, as the Kela report counts 2.86 billion stolen credentials in a year, indicating that agent-driven credentials can trigger machine-speed purchases and changes, compounding the challenge of oversight and recovery. Operational implications for MSPs are significant. Without explicit governance, spend limits, approval paths, and audit trails, MSPs face increased liability and support burden when AI agents initiate actions across client systems. The episode underscores that automation is not just a technical project but a contract and service design issue; if accountability is not clearly defined, MSPs bear the risk and cost of unauthorized transactions and exception handling. To mitigate exposure, there is a need to formalize agent governance as a priced, intentional service encompassing identity management, financial controls, and documented operational guardrails before agentic AI is deployed in client environments. 00:00 Agents Take Over 04:39 Who's Accountable? 06:48 Who Owns This? 09:58 Why Do We Care?    Supported by:  NerdioScalePad    Upcoming event:  The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera

Frances Edmonds, head of sustainable impact at HP Canada For Canadian IT solution providers, sustainability has always been something to think about – eventually. Frances Edmonds says the clock is running out on “eventually.” Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, a two-time Clean50 award winner, and one of the most recognized voices in the country at the intersection of technology, procurement, and environmental responsibility. On this episode of In The Channel, she makes the business case for why Canadian MSPs and resellers need to be fluent in sustainability today – and what being fluent actually looks like in a sales conversation. The data from HP’s own Amplify Impact program is striking: over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability report winning new business as a result, and self-assessment scores among participating partners have improved 59% since 2021. But the more urgent signal is in the procurement numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement represents organizations with $105 billion in combined spend – and among them, OECM (the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace) is already applying a 12% weighting for ESG criteria in bid documents, scored at both the OEM and channel partner level. That’s not a coming wave. It’s already in the water. Edmonds also makes a compelling case on the AI front: Edge AI carries an estimated 90% lower environmental impact than Cloud AI – a stat with real implications for how MSPs frame hardware refresh conversations with clients who have sustainability or data sovereignty mandates. Resources mentioned in this episode: HP Amplify Impact program OECM – Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace Bob Willard’s Sustainability Advantage – free tools for sustainability planning Climate Fresh training – available through HP Amplify Impact CBSR – Canadian Business for Social Responsibility Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We talk a lot on this show about the “how” of the channel — how to build a practice, how to manage a migration, how to secure a client. Today we’re looking at a different kind of how: how to win deals in an environment where your customers care as much about your carbon footprint as they do about your hourly rate. My guest today has been living this story for 30 years. Frances Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, and she’s one of the most recognized voices in the country when it comes to the intersection of technology and sustainability. HP’s own data shows that over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability are seeing measurable impact on their win rates. What does that actually look like for a Canadian MSP in 2026? We’re going to dig into the shift in procurement rules, including some hard numbers on ESG weighting in Canadian bid documents, and why the rise of Edge AI might actually be the biggest sustainability story of the year for the channel. Let’s get right into it — my chat with Frances Edmonds. Frances, thanks for taking the time. Frances Edmonds: You’re very welcome. Robert Dutt: You sit in a unique place in that you’ve been focused on sustainability for a while now — long before it was a mainstream business conversation. Can you give us the quick picture of what your role is at HP Canada today, and how that has evolved as the story has evolved over time? Frances Edmonds: Sure. My title today is Head of Sustainable Impact — that’s the name of our sustainability program. And I practice what I call CSR 2.0: corporate social responsibility 2.0. I spent the first half of my career really getting HP Canada to the point where we could call ourselves Canada’s most sustainable technology company — you can find all the proof of that at hp.ca/sustainableimpact. Then we took a look around and said: sustainability from a business context in Canada isn’t really advancing. We’ve got a few leaders, but the vast majority of Canadian businesses aren’t doing very much — including our channel. So we thought: how do we change that? In a capitalist economy, the demand signal for sustainability performance in suppliers comes at the ballot box of procurement. About eight years ago, we switched our strategy to focus on how do we change how Canada buys. That’s really my job today — to encourage everyone in the industrial economy to add sustainability into their procurement criteria and decision-making, so there’s an incentive for all companies to step up and do more. Robert Dutt: Is that all? Frances Edmonds: [laughs] Well, on top of all the other things we do to maintain being Canada’s most sustainable technology company. But I don’t do this alone — sustainability is a team sport. We require all players to come to the table and bring their relative strengths. One thing we’re doing right now: we’re onto our fourth cohort working with a nonprofit called CBSR, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. We teach sustainability professionals at some of Canada’s largest companies — Walmart, Canadian Tire, the banks, insurance companies — how to work alongside their procurement teams to implement sustainable procurement. We partner with nonprofits like Green Economy Canada, CBSR, other industry associations, and customers and partners to drive the change that’s necessary. Robert Dutt: You mentioned there’s still a need to mature how organizations across Canada are approaching this. The Amplify Impact data shows that 70-plus percent of partners report winning new business by leading with sustainability — that’s a striking number. When a Canadian MSP or reseller is actually leading with sustainability in a sales conversation, what does that look like in the room? Frances Edmonds: It really depends on who the customer is. Some customers have sustainability goals, but the people the MSP is actually talking to don’t know that — there’s often a gap between what the corporation is committed to and what the people doing the buying or the IT implementation are aware of. So you have to do your research: understand where the customer is coming from, what the opportunity is, and then align what the MSP and the OEM are doing on sustainability with the customer’s actual pain points. Do they have difficulty managing products at end of first life — the most common issue? Do they understand where their security vulnerabilities are? If you think about managing print, for instance — you’d normally do a print assessment and find printers 15 or 20 years old sitting on the network. That’s a huge security vulnerability that nobody’s really paying attention to. Helping customers with pain points like that — showing them the opportunities, whether it’s getting value back from end-of-first-life equipment to help fund new purchases, or moving into buying as a service — that’s really the sweet spot for both an MSP and a customer to maximize their sustainability performance. Robert Dutt: Is this primarily a large enterprise and government discussion today, or is it moving into the mid-market and down into SMB? A lot of partners are working with smaller businesses who may not have a strong sustainability mandate at the top of their priority list. Frances Edmonds: I think it’s quite spotty, honestly — I see bid documents from across the country in all sectors of the economy, so it’s hard to generalize. One advantage small businesses have is that they’re often purpose-driven, and the owner can make a decision quickly. “I’m buying from a company that puts ocean-bound plastics into their products” — and that’s a faster decision than getting a university to change its procurement policy, which can take three years of approvals. What I am seeing that’s changed over the eight years I’ve been working in this area: before, people didn’t really understand the link between sustainability and procurement. Today they understand it, and the people who want to do it differently often just have inhibitors in the way — or they default to “this product’s carbon footprint is two kilograms less, so I’ll buy it.” That’s not really how sustainable procurement works. You need more information to make a well-rounded decision. Sustainable procurement is still about getting the best value for the goods and services you’re buying — but now you’re also looking at the most sustainable or circular option from the most sustainable or circular supplier, in alignment with your own organization’s goals. And governments, whose sustainability goals range from zero poverty to life below water and everything in between, have a tremendous opportunity to practice this. Robert Dutt: You’ve spoken before about sustainability scoring in RFPs and procurement documents. Where does that stand in Canada right now — is this something MSPs need to be ready for today, or is it still a coming wave? Frances Edmonds: There’s always opportunity for competitive advantage because each customer has a different focus — whether it’s bridging the digital divide in Indigenous communities, disability inclusion, or a dozen other areas. But let me give you some numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement just issued their latest annual report. They represent broader public sector organizations with $105 billion in combined spend. Twenty-seven members have sustainable procurement embedded in their policies. Fourteen have a dedicated full-time person working on it. And one of the best examples to date: OECM, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace, publicly states that they’re applying a 12% weighting for environmental, social, and governance items in bid documents — scored at not just the OEM level, but at the channel partner level as well. Robert Dutt: So if I’m a partner who wants to get ahead of this — with so many angles and approaches to consider — what’s the minimum literacy they need to have in a procurement conversation today? What should they know cold? Frances Edmonds: The universal language is carbon. What are your carbon emissions? How are you working to reduce your carbon impact? That question is coming in some form from customers, regardless of sector. We know our products are carbon-intensive: 80% of a notebook computer’s carbon impact is determined before it ever reaches the customer — it’s in how it’s built. So understanding where carbon sits in the system, and how customers can help reduce it, is the first place to start. Through the Amplify Impact Program, HP offers a wide range of training — from basic 101s all the way through to what we call Climate Fresk. That’s a three-hour workshop that helps a group understand the interconnectedness of climate change and what they can do about it. We deliver it to partner leadership so they can understand how important this is to their business. We’re actually running one next week, and partners are welcome to attend. Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s hearing this and thinking “I’m interested, but where do I start?” — what are the tools and resources inside Amplify Impact that are actually moving the needle? Frances Edmonds: The Amplify Impact Program basically took 80 years of HP’s expertise in sustainability leadership, put it into a web-enabled system, and made it available to partners for free. Everything a partner could possibly need is in there. If you’re not in the program yet, I’d strongly encourage you to join — it’s free and straightforward to get started. You sign a pledge to commit to the program, then complete an online self-assessment. With AI enhancements, it benchmarks you against your peers worldwide and gives you a customized action plan to improve your scores. The results have been meaningful: since we launched in 2021, self-assessment scores globally have increased by 59%. Partners redo the assessment annually, and we’re seeing steady progress. In Canada specifically, we’ve seen over 6,000 sustainability courses completed by partners and employees — which tells you the interest is there at the individual level. For anyone outside the Amplify Impact Program, Dr. Bob Willard at Sustainability Advantage offers a whole suite of high-quality tools for free. That’s another strong place to start. Robert Dutt: How has the partner conversation in Canada on this evolved over the last five years, and where does it need to go next? Frances Edmonds: Let’s look at the economic situation partners are in today. Prices are going through the roof, availability is constrained. What does a logical customer do in those circumstances? They start thinking about buying for durability and longevity — and that leads right into the “as a service” conversation. This is about deepening relationships with your customers. Customers don’t want a one-time fix anymore — they need a partner at the table. And selling as a service, with a longer and deeper customer relationship, is where the market is going. We’re moving away from selling boxes to selling services, and sustainability is just another one of those services that’s part and parcel of that shift. I always think of security and sustainability as two sides of the same coin. That’s what customers need — and we can deliver both. Robert Dutt: Security as a service is certainly well-established. Where do you see sustainability as a service in terms of maturity and adoption? Frances Edmonds: Within the Amplify Impact Program, for instance, if a partner wants to measure and manage their carbon footprint, HP has negotiated a globally discounted rate for partners to acquire a software-as-a-service tool to do exactly that. They become carbon-literate in a hands-on way and understand how to report on it to their own stakeholders — employees, investors, customers, whoever. In some cases, we even allow partners to use MDF to pay for that software. We’re essentially paying them to get started with carbon management. Robert Dutt: I have to ask about AI — it’s the conversation everyone in the channel is having right now. There’s a real tension between the push to build AI infrastructure, which is enormously energy-intensive, and sustainability goals. How should partners be navigating that for their clients? Frances Edmonds: Great question. Let’s start with the distinction between cloud AI and Edge AI. Edge AI — which, in a country of small and medium businesses like Canada, is where AI is really going to drive productivity — is estimated to have greater than 90% lower carbon impact and to be more secure than cloud AI. So we’re already on a winner there, assuming we can get AI-enabled devices into the right businesses. At its simplest: most tech people don’t actually know the relative carbon footprint of doing a Google search versus running a generative AI query. Can we just educate people to use the right tool in the right place? Don’t burn your carbon budget on something where a Google search would do. When you get into the ethics of AI use broadly, that’s a much longer conversation — and I’d like to see a lot more guidance documentation coming out on that front. Robert Dutt: That’s quite telling — that much lower footprint at the edge also speaks to what solution providers control, and brings in data sovereignty, security, many different factors. Frances Edmonds: Exactly. Security is the other piece — and they really go hand in hand. Robert Dutt: One last question: what’s the one thing you wish more MSPs and resellers understood about sustainability that they’re currently either getting wrong or overlooking? Frances Edmonds: Even when partners have made real investments in becoming more sustainable — gone through the training, completed the program — I don’t think they’re maximizing that return on investment by actually selling with sustainability. And I think it often comes down to the people taking the education not being the people making the go-to-market decisions. But as we see this shift into selling as a service, I think it will come along with it naturally. If you think about WXP — HP’s Workforce Experience Platform — there’s sustainability built right into it alongside security. The opportunity to delight customers with sustainability is real, and it’s not hard to do. It’s really just about making sure everyone knows, understands, and can connect it to what the customer actually needs. Robert Dutt: Some great advice in there. I appreciate you taking the time to share where things stand and where you see them going. Frances Edmonds: Thank you. From Canada’s most sustainable technology company — listed as one of the top 100 most sustainable corporations worldwide — this is near and dear to my heart. We’re here to make a difference, and this is one of the ways we do that. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And it’s a conversation HP Canada has been having consistently for a while now — so it’s clearly not just an Earth Month thing. There you have it — Frances Edmonds from HP Canada. I’d like to thank Frances for her time today. It’s rare to talk to someone who can bridge the gap between high-level environmental goals and the gritty reality of a municipal RFP response, and I think she gave us some real clarity on where that line is being drawn right now. And as always, I’d like to thank you for listening. My big takeaway from that conversation is that sustainability is becoming a hard technical requirement, much like security. When you hear that organizations like OECM are moving toward a 12% weighting for ESG in their procurement documents — that’s not a nice-to-have anymore. That’s a gating factor. If you’re an MSP and you aren’t literate in this space, you’re essentially spotting your competitors a 12-point lead before the conversation even starts. I also found Frances’s point about Edge AI particularly striking. The idea that processing at the edge carries 90% less carbon impact than the cloud is a powerful narrative for partners — especially when you layer in the data sovereignty benefits we discussed. It’s a rare triple-win of performance, privacy, and planet that fits perfectly into the AI PC refresh cycle we’re seeing right now. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow or subscribe to In The Channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. Ratings and reviews are always hugely appreciated — they really do help other Canadian channel pros find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Eric Arcese, vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies Dell Technologies vice president of global partner marketing Eric Arcese joins In The Channel ahead of Dell Technologies World, and his central message for Canadian partners is worth sitting with: the AI Factory is Dell’s story, but the seams around it belong to the channel. Arcese describes looking at the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA topology slide at a recent Dell Tech World and seeing the “gaps, the seams” – the services, the data work, the outcome-level integration – as the real opportunity for partners. As enterprise AI adoption moves beyond hyperscaler buildouts into mid-market and commercial customers, those gaps are where Canadian MSPs and VARs have natural advantages: proximity to the customer, industry intimacy, and the ability to make the technology real. On the VxRail-to-Dell Private Cloud transition, Arcese frames the shift around the economics of AI – disaggregated infrastructure lets customers independently scale GPUs, storage, and networking for specific workloads. Hypervisor choice is preserved across Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and others, and partners building Dell Private Cloud practices can access up to 10% incremental incentives. The AI PC conversation moves past the usual productivity pitch. With over 500 million PCs still running Windows 10 and enterprise fleets averaging three to five years old, the refresh is as much a security imperative as a performance one – a stronger entry point for MSPs already in the endpoint security conversation with their customers. The episode closes with a preview of the Global Partner Summit at Dell Technologies World, May 18-21 in Las Vegas. Demand signals replacing traditional leads, AI-assisted quoting and deal registration, a “modern partner-centric transaction ecosystem” – the “simple, predictable, profitable” mantra is getting operational substance. The details come in May. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Dell Technologies World is coming up in May, and for the Dell partner community, it’s the biggest event on the calendar – the place where the direction for the partner program gets set for the year ahead. As we head toward that, there’s a lot for Canadian resellers and MSPs to be thinking about. The partner program has been evolving. The shift from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud is still very much unfolding. The AI infrastructure opportunity is reshaping what customers expect and what partners are expected to deliver. The question of where a Canadian MSP or VAR actually fits into all of that – that’s a real and pressing one. To help me make sense of it, I sat down with Eric Arcese, Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell Technologies. Eric’s been in the industry for over 25 years, with roots going back to the EMC era, so he’s been watching and shaping how the Dell partner ecosystem operates for a long time. We talked about where partners fit in the AI story, the VxRail transition, the AI PC refresh, and what you can expect from the Global Partner Summit in May. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Eric Arcese. Robert Dutt: Eric, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Eric Arcese: Thanks, Robert, for having me. Robert Dutt: You’re the Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at Dell. Can you give me a sense of what that actually means day-to-day? What are you responsible for, and what does the Dell partner community look like from where you’re sitting? Eric Arcese: Well, the partner community has been a tremendous growth engine and a critical and existential part of our go-to-market in everything that we do. We have partners around the world, we have some of our very best in Canada, and our partners really bring our technology to life with our shared customers around the world. We can’t do what we do in the market without the phenomenal partners that we have. In my role leading global partner marketing, that is to make sure that our story resonates, that we’re bringing that value proposition to life for our partners. They have choices, just like customers do, each and every day – who they’re going to invest in, who they’re going to work with, what they’re going to focus on learning, how they’re going to enable their sellers, their pre-sales folks. And we want to make sure that our partners feel really good about working with us, building businesses with us, developing practices with us, and ultimately growing with us in the markets that they serve for the customers that we collectively support. I love what I do. I’ve been in tech for over 25 years, here at Dell for over 25 years as well, and I could not think of a place I would rather be. Supporting our very best partners in Canada and around the world, and all that we do – that’s a little bit about what I do. I work very closely with my team around the world, and with our regional marketing folks as well, to make sure that that last mile of what we deliver for partners is well-aligned and adds value to partners in the ecosystem. So that’s a little bit about what I do, Robert. Robert Dutt: I feel like 2026 is a bit of an inflection point for the partner community writ large, and the definition of a Dell partner seems broader than it’s ever been. You’ve talked about partners moving beyond reselling into being architects, advisors, ecosystem builders – all that kind of good stuff. What do you see as the state of the Dell partner community right now, and how have you seen that picture change over recent months, and I guess the last year or two? Eric Arcese: Robert, you and I have both been in tech for the last couple of decades, and there have been different chapters, different inflection points. What we’re seeing now is a moment like we’ve never seen before. This is obviously all driven by AI, but it puts infrastructure, solutions, integrations, and outcomes at the forefront of everything that our partners deliver and everything our customers are demanding. So we’re in this moment that’s existential in tech and everything that we do, where we need to accelerate time to value with infrastructure. And when it really dawned on me, Robert – it was a couple of years ago, at a Dell Technologies World; you might have been there too. We had this announcement, and we called it the AI Factory with NVIDIA. And we had a picture on a slide – like so many of you have seen, with a chevron – data coming in on one side, use cases and business outcomes on the other, but layered through all of that, you had services, AI, software, infrastructure. And there were gaps when I saw this slide, and I was thinking to myself: the gaps, the seams, that’s where the opportunity lies for our partners around the world. Dell is the infrastructure provider of choice. We are the leader in everything that we provide – right from commercial PCs, to storage, to servers, AI servers – and stitching it all together through the topology upon which we develop those outcomes creates a huge opportunity for our partners. So that’s what gets me really excited about the moment. We’re meeting the moment. Our technology is meeting the moment, our partners are meeting the moment, and we’re working each and every day with those partners to deliver real AI-driven outcomes around the world. And some customers get it – and those that don’t, won’t be here very long. So there is this urgency, and we see that in our demand across the board. And I won’t go into earnings from last year, but you’ve probably seen that the year that we just posted, we’re seeing that come to life in every market. We’re seeing that in Canada, no doubt about it as well. It’s hard not to get excited about it. This is a very special time indeed. Robert Dutt: So the AI Factory – definitely been a centrepiece of the story for the last couple of years, as you point out. When I look at it from the perspective of my audience – from the MSP or the VAR serving mid-market and SMB customers – the massive GPU cluster buildouts feel like they’re kind of happening somewhere else. Can you help me fill in the story for the regional partner who isn’t doing hyperscale deployments and where they fit into the AI infrastructure story at this point? Eric Arcese: It’s a great question. I think that’s a little bit of the elephant in the room, right? The first couple of years, it’s like – yeah, you’re reading about these multi-billion-dollar deals, but where are they happening? And those deals were happening at the hyperscale level. The next question is: when is there enterprise AI adoption? When does a traditional enterprise customer really start embracing AI at every level? And you know what? We’re seeing that now. The trajectory of that growth is accelerating, and it’s terrific to see. To your point, Robert, those first couple of quarters, first year or two – the question was: what about enterprise adoption? And that’s where our partners are incredibly well positioned to make it real. What are the outcomes? What are the use cases? What are the business processes we’re going to focus on to bring that infrastructure to a place where it’s adding real value? The people in that workflow who make that real – that’s our partners. Dell’s partners. Because our partners in Canada are incredibly intimate with the industry, the customer, the use cases, the business priorities – whether it’s in the public or private sector. We’re providing that infrastructure at Dell Technologies, but our partners are making it real because they have that intimacy. They’re pressing the flesh, they’re working with customers each and every day, they know what those priorities are, and they can reconcile where those investments need to be made to help accelerate time to value. So with all of that comes a massive services and consulting opportunity. It’s not just the infrastructure – it’s the value-added services that our partners are building upon that infrastructure. And we’re seeing some terrific practices getting built with our partners around the world. When we work together, we win together, and we’re seeing that each and every day. Robert Dutt: Can you make that just a little bit more concrete for me? What are the consulting-type services you see partners bringing to bear right now – especially for that partner serving, let’s say, a 500-person financial services firm? Just to set an example of a mid-market-type opportunity where there may be an AI Factory angle, but it’s not the hyperscale wheelhouse. Eric Arcese: You know, if you think about it – four or five years ago, you and I would be having this conversation and it would be about a cloud-first model, and then we’d probably evolve into hybrid cloud, using public or private cloud based on the right workload. Now the way we think about it, it’s not a cloud-first model. It’s more around data. It’s the data model. Making sure we have the right data on the right workload, because if you plug an LLM or any AI-driven workload or a GPU behind suboptimal data, you’re going to get suboptimal outcomes. So when we think about where a partner is going to focus – irrespective of the industry, whether it’s public sector, banking, telco, manufacturing – I think starting with a real inventory of what that data topology looks like, and what the business outcome is that we’re looking to achieve. And no matter what industry the customer is from, one quickly realizes they’re all in the data business. Our partners can, number one, do a great assessment of where that critical data is and where it’s living. And number two, marry that data to the right business outcome in terms of what they’re trying to deploy. So I think it really starts with the data, and building practices that understand the workload, the industry, the vertical, and the data – that is key. And that creates a lot of opportunity. We talk about servers, storage, client, PCs, and networking all the time, but that is where that data is going to live, and we’re going to build that AI practice off of it. That initial assessment – where an AI practice starts – all begins with data, Robert. It’s really having that data-informed conversation. And then a lot of this is a change in mindset, in terms of what you’re doing with that data and what the expectations are. Robert Dutt: All right. From one reference architecture to another – talk about the transition from VxRail to Dell Private Cloud. Michael Dell’s been pretty direct about the direction. And I know you have roots going back to EMC, so it might be a bit personal. But for a partner who’s built a real practice, a real business, around VxRail over the last decade – what does that transition actually look like, and where do you see the services opportunity opening up as customers make that move? Eric Arcese: Robert, it’s such a great question. Because for years we talked about converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure – packaging, which made a lot of sense. You package a pre-architected and engineered system and you deliver it, to drive an accelerated business outcome. Time to value of infrastructure. The industry, with our partners, built a multi-billion-dollar business and a new market that was very well received. Then you wake up a couple of years later and now we’re talking about disaggregated infrastructure with Dell Private Cloud. And one may wonder: wait a second – we thought it was all about putting it all together and delivering it with speed. What’s changed? And I had to ask myself the same question, Robert. What’s changed? Well, the economics of AI have changed. The centre of gravity in terms of what is needed for these AI outcomes has been driven by a huge development – and that development is the GPU. The GPU is the accelerator of all the processing. And sometimes you need more GPU investment than you would need in storage, than you would need in client. You still need them across the board. So when you think about that economic backdrop of AI, the economics lend themselves to a more disaggregated infrastructure where you can dial up storage, server, networking, depending on what is needed for that specific workload, LLM, or AI platform that you’re rolling out. Also – customers want choice. They don’t want to be locked into one hypervisor. Maybe they want to work with Red Hat. Maybe they want to work with Microsoft. Maybe they want to work with VMware – they’re a VMware shop. Maybe they want to work with Nutanix. Allowing customers to have that choice empowers them, but it also creates opportunity for our partners, to your point, Robert. Because our partners are ultimately going to help our shared customers navigate those choices and reconcile those priorities from a hypervisor perspective, to optimize whatever application they’re rolling out. So it’s really about customer choice. And for me, the coolest thing to see is how quickly this has evolved. We’re doubling down on customer choice. Partners earn up to 10% incremental incentives. We’ve really built a program to drive profitable practices around Dell Private Cloud and strengthen and deepen those relationships. So we’re seeing this real shift from pre-packaged hyperconverged infrastructure to disaggregated infrastructure that’s truly optimized and tailored to Dell Private Cloud. Very exciting to see, Robert. Robert Dutt: Pivoting to the device side of things – the AI PC refresh is a significant cycle for the channel right now. For the Canadian VAR or even an MSP selling into the commercial market, what’s the marketing story that you’re giving them to make that conversation land? Especially with customers who are already stretched on IT budgets and might be looking at that three-year-old PC and saying, “good enough to get me through another year.” Eric Arcese: It might be. But it probably isn’t. And it’s not just the productivity benefits you’re going to see with an AI PC – it’s the security requirements that we’re all going to need. Because AI is terrific for the good, but it has also empowered the bad actors to get to where we work every day. Last year was all about the tech refresh from Windows 10 to Windows 11. We still have over 500 million PCs running Windows 10, and enterprise fleets averaging three to five years of age. So customers definitely need to act on that – to bring that AI capability to the edge, but also to meet the security requirements we need to protect that edge from reaching into the core. We started naturally in the data centre in our conversation today, Robert, but that edge – where are you working every day? What are you touching every day? It’s your PC. That’s your workforce. That’s what’s in front of you, whether at work or at home. And there’s just a tremendous opportunity there for our partners. We’re the number one commercial PC provider in the world, and it starts with what’s in front of you each and every day. We’re excited about that opportunity. That hasn’t gone away. We had a terrific CES, and there’s just more greenfield opportunity for our partners in Canada to win with Dell’s PC portfolio. Robert Dutt: Bouncing around a little bit from topic to topic here – you guys made some program changes for 2026, as most vendors are wont to do from time to time. The Titanium incentives probably being the most visible of them, but there’s also this broader “simplified, predictable, profitable” philosophy underneath it. From a marketing standpoint, what’s the message you most want partners to internalize about what Dell is committing to this year? Eric Arcese: One of the things I love about partner marketing, Robert, is the work is never over. And you can appreciate that – you’ve been in the channel just as long as I have. The work of creating a simple, predictable, profitable motion for our partners really never ends, because everything we talked about just keeps evolving. We want to make sure we have a simplified motion – taking friction out of the system. We want to make sure it’s predictable: you know what you’re going to get, you know how we’re going to engage with you. And it’s profitable: you want to make sure that you’re making money working with Dell Technologies in Canada. So we’re doing a lot around demand signals – how do we accelerate what used to be a lead, which is now a demand signal, the outcome of many different predictive analytics and data points on the markets that we serve with our partners. We want to make sure we’re simplifying that lead management and fostering seamless collaboration in that motion. We also want to make sure that from a deal reg perspective, we are managing opportunities together and protecting where our Canadian partners have invested. We want to do all of that to accelerate engagement, simplify processes, and empower our Dell sellers with a smarter and streamlined motion. And then quoting and buying – we want to make sure we are priced to win across the board, and we’re building a modern, partner-centric transaction ecosystem that connects product discovery to order management in one end-to-end platform. You’re going to be hearing more and more about that in the months to come. I think you’ll be at Dell Technologies World with us, so I’m excited to share more there. That mantra of simple, predictable, profitable – that work never ends. We’re seeing the fruits of our labour here and the success we’ve had in Canada over the last couple of years. And we’re really proud of the work that we’ve done. We’re very grateful and humbled by so many amazing partners in Canada that have really doubled down on Dell across the board, across the portfolio. Because when you have a great program that rewards the right investment, and you have wonderful people – I love the alliteration of portfolio, program, people – there’s nothing you can’t do. When we work together, we truly are winning together in Canada. Robert Dutt: To your point that it never ends – it just keeps evolving. You rightly pointed out we’re not too far away from Dell Technologies World, and the Global Partner Summit is a big part of that. There’s been some preview of a new integrated partner experience that sounds like it goes beyond a typical program update. Without asking you to scoop your own announcements – although if you want to, please feel free. Eric Arcese: Ha – I’ll be good. I’ll do my best. Robert Dutt: What’s the problem you’re aiming to solve for partners with this platform approach? What’s the philosophy behind what we’re likely to see roll out in the near future? Eric Arcese: What we talked about – meeting the moment – it is a truly special time. And we want to make sure our partners have the speed to deliver what we collectively need to for our shared customers, and the scale to do it across every market, across every part of our portfolio, across every partner type. What you’ll see at Dell Technologies World – as you always do – is the product of investments we’ve made over not just the year, but over years. From a portfolio perspective, programmatically, you’re going to see how when partners invest and build their practices and businesses on Dell, they will be rewarded. And then you get to spend time with our people who support our partners in Canada and around the world. Not to mention, we have a great time in Vegas, as one always does. So it’s the place to be. We’re a couple of weeks out and we’re seeing the excitement and anticipation building. We have a lot to share at our Global Partner Summit at Dell Technologies World. Robert, I believe you’re planning on being there – we’re looking forward to seeing you and spending time with you as well. And we’re going to have a great representation not just of Canadian partners but the Canadian customers we work so hard serving each and every day. It’s going to be a blast, as it always is. Robert Dutt: You touched a while back on some of the day-to-day operational things that partners tell me they feel the most friction on – not specific to Dell, but across the industry. Deal reg, quoting, lead sharing, the need to do all of that faster at higher scale. Is the vision here to make those kinds of operational experiences meaningfully more autonomous and self-serve? Is AI in the partner platform something partners will feel starting in May, or is that still on the horizon? Eric Arcese: Well, I prefer drinking your own champagne to eating your own dog food – so I’ll go with the bubbly analogy there. But we have very much been, for years now, investing in a very big way in our partner business and the platforms that support those partners. We want to make sure that we’re using an AI-first approach across the board in everything that we do – to take friction out of the system, and to have an AI-first mantra in all we do when it comes to empowering our people and our partners. I look at the AI that we’re investing in to support our partners as a real force multiplier. How do you get the power of the portfolio to our customers? How do you enable our partners to know that portfolio? How do you make sure that when you’re quoting and ordering, you’re doing that in the most efficient way – so that customers aren’t waiting, they’re getting the right configuration at the right time, for the right workload, at the price that makes the most sense, and we’re delivering value? We want partners to be able to deliver that value, because when they do, they grow – and when they grow, it’s good for our partners, it’s good for Dell, and ultimately we’re driving more outcomes for the customers we serve. So you’ll see a lot of that AI in what we deliver from a product perspective, but definitely in how AI supports things like syndicated content, quoting and buying, and all of the programmatic platform upon which our partnerships are built. Robert Dutt: My last question – you touched on 25 or more years in this industry, through the EMC years, through the Dell-EMC merger, and now we’re into the AI chapter. For a partner who’s navigating all of this right now – the infrastructure shifts, the AI opportunity, the evolution of the program – what’s your read on the best opportunity over the next 12 months? Where would you be pointing partners in terms of where to focus? Eric Arcese: Well, if you’re a partner thinking about which relationships you’re going to invest in – with Dell, you have a leader in commercial PCs, a leader in storage, a leader in services. You have the industry heavyweight in infrastructure. And not only that – in a world where we’re seeing some very complicated supply chain dynamics globally, you have the world’s best supply chain supporting you. You have a proven leader that’s committed to partnering in all that we do. And you have tremendous people in Canada there to support you each and every day. So I always think of it this way: if you’re building a business, who are those partnerships you want to create? You want one hand to shake that’s accountable to you, that’s invested in you, that’s committed to you – so that you can deliver on what you’ve promised your customer. With Dell, you have that. And we’re really proud of where we are in the market. This AI moment that we’ve all been afforded is going to create tremendous opportunity – and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Not just for the partner businesses we support, but for the outcomes and problem statements that we’re going to be able to address that we haven’t even fathomed yet. Transformative outcomes across every industry we serve, both public and private. So I’m really excited, Robert. And if I’m a partner, those are the types of things I’m thinking about and why working with Dell is a great bet. And hopefully we’ll all be making that bet in Vegas in May at Dell Technologies World – because that’s what you do in Vegas. You make bets. But it’s an easy one to make with Dell Technologies every day. Robert Dutt: Great point to leave it on. I look forward to catching up at Dell Technologies World and hearing more of the story there. Eric, thanks so much. Eric Arcese: Thanks so much, Robert. I really enjoyed our time together. Much appreciated. There you have it – Eric Arcese from Dell Technologies. I’d like to thank Eric for his time, and of course, thank you for listening today. If I had to pull three things out of the conversation for the Canadian partner to sit with, here’s what I’m thinking. First – the AI Factory framing. Eric described looking at the AI Factory topology slide and seeing the gaps, the seams between the components, as the partner opportunity. The hardware is Dell’s story. The services layer, the data work, the integration, the outcomes – that’s where partners play. If you’re trying to figure out what the AI infrastructure wave actually means to your practice, that’s a useful lens. Second – the VxRail transition. If you’ve built a practice around VxRail, Dell’s message is: the path forward is clear. The hypervisor choice you’ve made is preserved. The economics of the new platform make sense, and there are meaningful incentives to help you build out a Dell Private Cloud practice. The transition is underway and getting ahead of it matters. Third – the AI PC refresh is a security story as much as a productivity story. There are still around 500 million PCs running Windows 10, many of them three to five years old, sitting at the edge of the network while AI is making the threat landscape more sophisticated. For MSPs already in the endpoint security conversation with their customers, that’s a more powerful entry point than “it’s a faster laptop.” And of course – Dell Technologies World, May 18th to 21st in Las Vegas. The Global Partner Summit is the anchor event for partners, and based on what Eric was hinting at around the integrated partner experience and changes to quoting and deal registration, it’s worth watching closely whether you’re going or not. If you found this useful, follow or subscribe to the In The Channel podcast wherever you get your podcasts – we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. A rating or review is always appreciated if you’ve got a minute – it genuinely helps. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In this episode of Next in Media, I sit down with Emily Ketchen, SVP & CMO of Intelligent Devices Group & International Markets at Lenovo, to talk about what it actually looks like to operationalize AI inside a global marketing organization. Emily shares how Lenovo is standing up the AI PC and AI phone category, why contextual and generative AI drove efficiency gains in the brand's Formula One partnership, and what it means to be "the first generation of leaders tasked with managing an agentic workforce." Emily walks through Lenovo's AI governance council, the grassroots prompt library her team built, and tangible and intangible measurement frameworks behind big sponsorships. We also dig into Lenovo's Creator Odyssey campaign — a Sundance-recognized global collaboration — and close on the tension every marketer is navigating right now: how to use AI-driven media optimization without giving up control, transparency, or human judgment. KEY HIGHLIGHTS:

Szó lesz arról, hogyan alakítják át az adatközpontok a környezetüket, miért vált kulcskérdéssé a hőtermelés és a fenntartható infrastruktúra, és milyen válaszokat adhat erre a következő generációs technológia.Megnézzük az AI új korszakát is: azokat a modelleket, amelyek már nemcsak segítenek, hanem komoly biztonsági és geopolitikai kérdéseket is felvetnek. Beszélünk az Anthropic legújabb fejlesztéseiről, az AI-rendszerek erejéről, és arról, hogy mi történik akkor, amikor a mesterséges intelligencia a kiberbiztonság frontvonalába lép.Az epizódban szóba kerül a Lidl eSIM-megoldása, amely jól mutatja, hogyan lépnek be a kereskedelmi szereplők a digitális szolgáltatások világába, és hogyan válik a távközlés egyre inkább a mindennapi platformélmény részévé. Innen tovább megyünk az űrbe is: Amazon, Globalstar, műholdas hálózatok, szabályozási verseny, és az a kérdés, hogy kié lesz a következő évtized kommunikációs infrastruktúrája.Hardverfronton megnézzük a javítható és moduláris Framework laptop filozófiáját, az AI-PC-k felemelkedését, valamint azt, hogyan változhat meg a személyi számítógépek szerepe a helyben futtatott mesterséges intelligencia korában. Közben kitérünk arra is, miért fontos egyre több ország számára a digitális szuverenitás, és mit jelent az, amikor egy állam nyílt forráskódú irányba mozdul el.Nem maradnak ki a fogyasztói oldal kérdései sem: dráguló YouTube Premium, átalakuló digitális előfizetések, változó felhasználói szokások. És beszélünk a legsérülékenyebb pontról is: a hálózati biztonságról. Orosz hátterű támadások, sebezhető routerek, elavult firmware-ek, és a felismerés, hogy a digitális védelem ma már nem csak vállalati ügy, hanem otthoni alapkövetelmény is.Ez az epizód azoknak szól, akik nemcsak követni akarják a technológiai híreket, hanem érteni is szeretnék, mi mozgatja a jövőt. AI, kiberbiztonság, űrtávközlés, fenntarthatóság, digitális szuverenitás és a következő évek legfontosabb technológiai fordulatai – közérthetően, mégis érdemben.

最新PCサブスクからオンデバイスAI、カラフルなエッジPCまで「情シスの負担を減らす」最前線を見てきた。　4月8日から10日の間、東京ビッグサイト（東京都江東区）で「Japan IT Week 春 2026」が開催された。本展示会は、システム運用、AI／業務自動化、DX技術が一堂に会する国内最大級の商談会だ。

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◯ Mac mini の販売状況 Mac mini、注文しても届くのは夏以降。最大18週間待ちの異常事態 https://gori.me/macmini/165302 Mac mini 注文不可 https://x.gd/8yWu6 Mac miniついに弾切れか？――AI需要で激しく動くデスクトップPC市場 https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/e46a1a3f4135157b011395dfd645381ab33af240 ◯”廃棄チップ”で作ったMacBook Neo、売れすぎてAppleが困っている？次期モデルはA19 Pro・RAM 12GBに進化か https://gori.me/macbookneo/165318 ミボット https://mibot.kg-m.jp KGモータース https://kg-m.jp KGモータース https://www.youtube.com/ @KG_motors ◯Studio Display XDR、発売わずか3週間で最大7万円の値下げ https://gori.me/mac-accessories/mac-display/165147 ◯Meta Horizon WorldsがVRサポートを終了へ https://gigazine.net/news/20260318-meta-horizon-worlds-vr-support-end/ 『VRChat』が今後のサービス継続を改めて明言。競合の『Horizon Worlds』VR版の新規開発終了や『Rec Room』サービス終了の発表を受けて表明 https://...

Ecco i temi principali di questo episodio:

「最新家電、ビジネスバッグ、防災グッズ、新生活のベストバイアイテムを大特集！DIMEデジタル限定増刊号を配信中」　DIMEデジタル増刊号が配信スタート！今回の特集は「日常をアップデートする新生活ベストバイ」と「ストレス激減ビジネスバッグ」、「防災アイテム」です！頻発する公共料金の値上げ……だが、その支出は家電やギア選びで大きく変わる！　そこで、新生活のスタートは〝道具の見直し〟から始めませんか？　白物、黒物、AI PCなど21カテゴリーの生活必需品を一斉点検！第２特集は「通勤ストレス激減ビジネスバッグ20」。王道の定番か、時代を映す新定番か……自分に合う最高の相棒を見つけ、ビジネススタイルを整えよう。あたらしい年度を快適に迎えるために欠かせない情報を凝縮した1冊です！dマガジンはコチラ単号での販売もしております↓【Amazon】【楽天ブックス】特集1：暮らしが整えば、心も整う！ウエルビーイングなベストバイ頻発する公共料金の値上げ、2027年度に迫る家庭用エアコン省エネ基準改正も見逃せない。時間効率や支出は家電やギア選びで大きく変わる。だからこそ、新生活のスタートは〝道具の見直し〟から始めよう。白物、黒物、AI PCなど21カテゴリーの生活必需品を一斉点検！特集2：軽い・疲れない・サマになる！通勤ストレス激減ビジネスバッグコロナ禍を経て、ビジネスウエアの選択肢は大きく広がった。だが、必需品であるバッグはどうか。新調の目安は３〜５年。そろそろ〝第二の顔〞と呼ばれるビジネスバッグを見直すタイミングだ。そこで人気アイテムを擁するメーカーやブランド広報を直撃。王道の定番か、時代を映す新定番か。自分に合う最高の相棒を見つけ、ビジネススタイルを整えよう。特集3：災害発生から３日間生き延びるための防災グッズ地震に加えて豪雨や雪害、大規模火災など、1年を通して災害に見舞われる可能性がある日本。各自治体などでは、危険を回避するための備えを、最低3日分を目安に用意するよう推奨している。この間を安全に過ごすための最新防災グッズを、厳選して紹介する。dマガジンはコチラ単号での販売もしております↓【Amazon】【楽天ブックス】文／編集部

Pre-show- 치폴레 도메인 전쟁팔로우업- KT 보상안"쥬라기 공원이 제대로 동작했다면?"디즈니의 큰 리더십 변화- 본사- 루카스필름유튜버가 만든 영화, 미국 박스오피스를 재패하다맷 데이먼이 말하는 넷플릭스 영화 제작 공식닌텐도 스위치, 이제 콘솔 판매량 2위삼성 볼리, 결국 개발 취소여러분의 로지텍 마우스가 갑자기 먹통된 이유(계속 들리는) 애플 디자인 팀의 좋은 소식에어태그 2테슬라, 모델 S/X 단종한국 독자 AI 모델 경연 대회?GPT한테 건강을 물어보시렵니까"오픈AI, 곧 돈 다 떨어진다?""AI PC, 소비자들에겐 씨알도 안 먹히더라"슈퍼볼 AI 기업 광고 전쟁요즘 맥 미니가 왜 이리도 난리인가애플 인텔리전스 powered by Gemini- The Verge- 디에디트 by 최호섭 칼럼니스트CES의 기묘한(?) 제품들- 왜 다들 로봇에 집착하세요- 인터넷 전화가 돌아왔다- 노래가 나오는 막대사탕- 초음파로 감자를 썰어보세요- 폰을 간이 게임보이로- 맥세이프로 붙이는 물리 키보드- 물리 키보드 중독자를 위한 세컨폰- 레고가 CES엔 어인 일로- 모니터가 52인치??- 사라진 삼성디스플레이의 시제품 (?)

SUMMARY DEL SHOW Futuros en rojo por más incertidumbre comercial: Trump subiría el arancel global de 10% a 15% tras el fallo de la Corte Suprema, presionando el apetito por riesgo. $NVDA prepara su regreso a PCs de consumo con chips para laptops centrados en IA junto a $DELL y $LNVGY, reforzando el “AI PC cycle”. Cripto bajo presión por salidas de ETFs de bitcoin y $NVO se desploma tras datos de CagriSema, mientras $LLY se fortalece.

Neoborn Caveman delivers a marble-mouthed pro-humanity satire on overreach and health truths, highlighting dangers of space solar energy beaming from moving aircraft as unauthorized experiments risking interference, warns against digging deep sand tunnels after Florida teens buried alive in collapse, promotes benefits of standing on one leg for balance and brain health to counter decline, exposes over 20% of YouTube feed as AI slop with high consumption in South Korea and Pakistan, notes Dell admitting low AI PC sales amid subscription hype rejecting ownership, and urges real music over digital butlers.Music guests: Big Bus Dream, Big SexyKey TakeawaysUnauthorized experiments threaten shared futures.Deep sand digging risks immediate death.Balance training preserves brain function.AI slop erodes content quality.Hype rejects personal ownership.Real music sustains human connection.Health demands simple practices.Irresponsibility invites harm.Authenticity counters digital control.You are special and one of a kind.Sound Bites"Energy is not lost, right? It's thermodynamics, right?""beaming solar energy from space could address several drawbacks of today's ground based solar technology.""Don't dig big holes in the sand because you die.""our brains aren't fixed. They are pretty malleable.""more than 20% of YouTube's feed is now AI Slop""America ranks third in AI Slop consumption and subscribers.""Dell admits customers are not buying PCs... just because they have so-called AI.""would you buy something just because it has this sticker AI included?"Join the tea house at patreon.com/theneoborncavemanshow —free to enter, real talk, lives, no ads, no algorithms.keywords: space solar energy, sand tunnel collapse, one-leg balance, brain health, AI slop YouTube, Dell AI PCs, real music, health truths, overreach satire, pro-humanityHumanity centered satirical takes on the world & news + music - with a marble mouthed host.Free speech marinated in comedy.Supporting Purple Rabbits.Viva los Conejos Morados. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

News and Updates: Dell AI PC Retreat- Dell admits AI PCs failed to drive demand, refocusing on gaming and consumers, reviving XPS branding, downplaying Copilot marketing as RAM shortages threaten PC prices. Microsoft and Partner Scramble- Microsoft's Copilot PC push is faltering as Dell says AI confuses buyers, forcing Nadella into hands-on product control while partners revert to traditional hardware selling. Cloudflare vs. Italy- Cloudflare faces a massive Italian fine over anti-piracy blocking, prompting CEO threats to exit Italy, pull Olympic services, and challenge regulations he calls undemocratic censorship. Why iOS 26 Matters- Despite resistance to iOS 26's design changes, Apple urges rapid upgrades because security patches, zero-day fixes, and improved AirDrop protections outweigh temporary battery concerns issues.

本期嘉宾：彭林、十天、森森、蓝白、恺伦本期节目的主要内容有：· 国区 Apple Pay 今天起可绑定 Visa 卡· 苹果版「Adobe 全家桶」发布· 苹果与 Google 官宣合作，Gemini 将支撑 Apple Intelligence· 苹果放弃 Vision Pro 转战 AI 眼镜，首款产品今年发布· 联发科发布天玑 9500s 和天玑 8500 芯片· 戴尔：AI 不是 PC 用户的核心诉求· 俞浩：追觅将成人类历史上第一个百万亿美金公司还有众多观众朋友的热心提问~每周五晚 8 点，爱否直播间，我们一起开心聊天

The tech sector started this year with a bang at CES 2026, the annual event that brings together over 140,000 attendees to share the latest innovations in consumer and business technology.Unsurprisingly, at this year's event AI was a primary focus – with more details on Nvidia and AMD's latest hardware, alongside AI PC innovations by brands like Lenovo.Alongside these headlines, however, we also saw a return to form by companies such as Dell, with the resurrection of the XPS laptop range.What did we learn from CES about what to expect in business hardware over the coming year?In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Mike Moore, deputy editor at TechRadar Pro, to discuss the biggest moments from CES 2026.

Today, we welcome Eric McLaughlin, VP and GM of Connectivity Solutions at Intel, back to the podcast to discuss how the convergence of AI and Wi-Fi is unlocking completely new user experiences. We examine the rapid adoption of Wi-Fi 7 and how the latest standard's unmatched determinism and heightened data rates allow for seamless AI processing on the platform, the edge, and in the cloud. Eric shares his insight on how ISPs can prepare for the upcoming influx of Wi-Fi 7 usage, and we talk about the importance of ensuring 6 GHz access for Wi-Fi. Tune in for more, including a look at Intel's latest AI PC, Core Ultra Series 3, and Eric's thoughts on why industry collaboration is vital to Wi-Fi's global success.For Wi-Fi AllianceFor Membership InfoGeneral Contact

最新的Buzz Word「AI Edge」是什麼? Nvidia一再踩界，Tesla節節敗退? 為什麼AI PC 銷情不如理想? Nvidia五年來首次沒有發佈新款消費級GPU!

This episode of Deep Dive provides a comprehensive recap of CES 2026, highlighting a pivotal shift in the technology landscape from Generative AI (chatbots) to "Agentic AI" and "Physical AI." The discussion focuses on how AI is moving beyond the screen and cloud into the physical world to become the foundational infrastructure of consumer technology. The hosts explain that this new era is defined by "agency"—software that proactively anticipates user needs and executes tasks across devices without waiting for prompts—marking a departure from the passive tools of the past few years. The episode details specific innovations driving this shift, particularly the rise of local AI processing on PCs and smartphones to ensure privacy and speed (the "AI PC" era). It covers major developments in robotics, such as Hyundai's industrial integration of Boston Dynamics and new home assistants from Samsung and LG that aim to be helpful rather than just novelties. Furthermore, the discussion touches on the explosion of health tech following new FDA guidance, featuring non-invasive monitoring and smart wellness devices, ultimately painting a picture of a future where technology becomes an invisible, proactive, and helpful layer in daily life. 這集 podcast 針對剛落幕的 CES 2026 進行了深入的趨勢分析，重點在於人工智慧（AI）的重大轉型：從單純的「生成式 AI」（如對話機器人）進化為具備主動執行能力的「代理 AI」（Agentic AI）與「實體 AI」（Physical AI）。節目指出，AI 已不再只是雲端上的軟體，而是成為各種硬體設備的基礎架構（Infrastructure）。透過 Lenovo 的情境感知筆電、Samsung 與 LG 的智慧家電生態系等案例，主持人解釋了 AI 如何從「等待指令」轉變為「預測需求並主動執行」，真正實現跨裝置的無縫協作。 除了軟體代理，節目也探討了 AI 進入實體世界的硬體突破。重點涵蓋了 NVIDIA 與現代汽車（Boston Dynamics）在工業與居家機器人上的進展，以及為了支援這些「邊緣運算」所需的強大晶片（如 NVIDIA RTX 50 系列與各家 NPU）。此外，討論觸及了 FDA 新規範放寬後帶來的健康科技爆發，例如非侵入式血糖監測與智慧馬桶等。整體而言，CES 2026 標誌著科技正從數位的對話框，大步邁向能感知、移動並協助人類處理實體任務的時代。 Powered by Firstory Hosting

Narwal's new robo vacuum cleaner switches to quiet mode near a baby's crib. Also, AMD announced the latest version of its AI-powered PC chips designed for a variety of tasks from gaming to content creation and multitasking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we sit down with Pavan Davuluri, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Windows + Devices business, to explore how Windows is evolving into an AI-native platform. Pavan leads the team responsible for strategy, design, and delivery of Windows products across the full stack - from silicon and devices to platform, OS, apps, experiences, security, and cloud. With 23 years at Microsoft, he's driven the creation of the Surface line and now oversees how hardware and software fuse together with AI at the center. We explore how Copilot is being deeply integrated into Windows, the engineering shifts required to make Windows a more proactive and intelligent platform, and how Microsoft balances powerful automation with user control. From Surface design standards influencing the broader ecosystem to supporting OEM partners in the AI PC era, Pavan reveals the principles guiding Windows' transformation and what the computing experience will look like in the next five years.Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiMicrosoft Surface: https://www.microsoft.com/surfaceWindows AI features: https://www.microsoft.com/windows/ai-features

Microsoft is redefining the "AI PC" to include almost every machine running Windows 11, putting futuristic Copilot features in the hands of millions overnight. Find out what surprises—from voice-triggered actions to smart app integrations—are landing on your desktop next. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Want access to the ad-free video and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

Microsoft is redefining the "AI PC" to include almost every machine running Windows 11, putting futuristic Copilot features in the hands of millions overnight. Find out what surprises—from voice-triggered actions to smart app integrations—are landing on your desktop next. Host: Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows Want access to the ad-free video and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

AI is changing what we need from our computers—but does that mean you need an "AI PC"? Corey and Grant sit down with Logan Lawler from Dell Technologies who leads Dell Pro Max AI solutions to decode what matters (and what doesn't) when buying or upgrading your next computer. From CPUs and GPUs to memory, NPUs, and traps to avoid, this episode is your practical roadmap for staying future-ready through the next five years of AI-powered work.Dell Pro Max Workstations: https://www.dell.com/en-us/plcp/lp/dell-pro-max-pcs LM Studio LIVE tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai3sBeBdA1Y Kiwix Wikipedia Download: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix One Trainer: https://github.com/Nerogar/OneTrainerJawset Postshot: https://www.jawset.com/Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiCheck out the Reshaping Workflows Podcast: https://reshaping-workflows.simplecast.com/

Microsoft is promising a bold AI-infused future for Windows 11, as the company aims to turn the OS into an AI-powered "agentic" hub. Amid all the Copilot hype, the hosts ask the tough questions: Are these AI features solving real problems, or is Big Tech just chasing a revenue gold rush? Tune in for sharp takes on AI skepticism, notable buzzwords, and the practical impact of Microsoft's ambitious new direction. Windows 11... Windows.ai?? Microsoft announces several new Copilot and AI features in Windows while redefining the term "AI PC" out from under Intel New features: Hey Copilot wake phrase (and goodbye), Copilot Vision is GA, new features coming soon include Copilot replacing Search in the Taskbar, Copilot Actions for local files, Manus AI agent and Filmora integration with File Explorer AI Actions, Zoom integration with Click to Do This is about Windows transforming into an "AI native" agentic OS Which ties into Paul's AI is the End of Apps editorial, where apps became programmable so that they can be controlled by AI - You can see baby steps in Windows 11 in-box apps now Microsoft explains how it will secure agents in Windows because Recall what happened last time Microsoft releases so-called emergency update for Windows 11 after the October Patch Tuesday updates killed USB mouse and keyboard supports in the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). Windows Insider Program: Mobile devices settings improvements, File Explorer improvements, Drag Tray improvements, and other changes head to Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2) channels New Start menu, battery icons, Copilot Vision integration in Taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Voice access improvements, and Click to Do improvements (Copilot+ PC only) head to Release Preview, indicating they will be a Week D preview and then Patch Tuesday release in November Restyle rolling out in Paint across most Insider channels Open AI finally launches long-expected web browser, but only on the Mac because FU, Microsoft Facebook Messenger for Windows is retiring, will chase rabbits on a farm upstate Microsoft What does Microsoft's annual report say about its relationship with consumers? Three core consumer businesses: Windows, Microsoft 365 Consumer, Xbox/gaming Xbox/gaming smallest (500m) but also the most engaged - and also the most discussed in the report Not clear what % of users/revenues is consumer based, but it's not a small number (guessing its at least one-third of each) AI Copilot for Education is coming in December, $18 per student per month Anthropic Claude is coming for Copilot in Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot has AI competition on Samsung smart TVs now Opera Neon is getting an AI research agent Xbox and gaming Xbox president says next console will be "very premium". You know, like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are now available for purchase New wave of games coming to Game Pass across PC, console, and cloud, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, The Outer Worlds 2, and more Following console price hikes, Xbox Development Kit gets a 33 percent price increase thanks to insane U.S. tariffs Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Laptops are upgradeable again and life is good App pick of the week: A grab bag of apps for Windows users RunAs Radio this These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/955 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Sponsors: ventionteams.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows framer.com/design promo code WW outsystems.com/twit

Microsoft is promising a bold AI-infused future for Windows 11, as the company aims to turn the OS into an AI-powered "agentic" hub. Amid all the Copilot hype, the hosts ask the tough questions: Are these AI features solving real problems, or is Big Tech just chasing a revenue gold rush? Tune in for sharp takes on AI skepticism, notable buzzwords, and the practical impact of Microsoft's ambitious new direction. Windows 11... Windows.ai?? Microsoft announces several new Copilot and AI features in Windows while redefining the term "AI PC" out from under Intel New features: Hey Copilot wake phrase (and goodbye), Copilot Vision is GA, new features coming soon include Copilot replacing Search in the Taskbar, Copilot Actions for local files, Manus AI agent and Filmora integration with File Explorer AI Actions, Zoom integration with Click to Do This is about Windows transforming into an "AI native" agentic OS Which ties into Paul's AI is the End of Apps editorial, where apps became programmable so that they can be controlled by AI - You can see baby steps in Windows 11 in-box apps now Microsoft explains how it will secure agents in Windows because Recall what happened last time Microsoft releases so-called emergency update for Windows 11 after the October Patch Tuesday updates killed USB mouse and keyboard supports in the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). Windows Insider Program: Mobile devices settings improvements, File Explorer improvements, Drag Tray improvements, and other changes head to Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2) channels New Start menu, battery icons, Copilot Vision integration in Taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Voice access improvements, and Click to Do improvements (Copilot+ PC only) head to Release Preview, indicating they will be a Week D preview and then Patch Tuesday release in November Restyle rolling out in Paint across most Insider channels Open AI finally launches long-expected web browser, but only on the Mac because FU, Microsoft Facebook Messenger for Windows is retiring, will chase rabbits on a farm upstate Microsoft What does Microsoft's annual report say about its relationship with consumers? Three core consumer businesses: Windows, Microsoft 365 Consumer, Xbox/gaming Xbox/gaming smallest (500m) but also the most engaged - and also the most discussed in the report Not clear what % of users/revenues is consumer based, but it's not a small number (guessing its at least one-third of each) AI Copilot for Education is coming in December, $18 per student per month Anthropic Claude is coming for Copilot in Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot has AI competition on Samsung smart TVs now Opera Neon is getting an AI research agent Xbox and gaming Xbox president says next console will be "very premium". You know, like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are now available for purchase New wave of games coming to Game Pass across PC, console, and cloud, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, The Outer Worlds 2, and more Following console price hikes, Xbox Development Kit gets a 33 percent price increase thanks to insane U.S. tariffs Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Laptops are upgradeable again and life is good App pick of the week: A grab bag of apps for Windows users RunAs Radio this These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/955 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Sponsors: ventionteams.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows framer.com/design promo code WW outsystems.com/twit

Microsoft is promising a bold AI-infused future for Windows 11, as the company aims to turn the OS into an AI-powered "agentic" hub. Amid all the Copilot hype, the hosts ask the tough questions: Are these AI features solving real problems, or is Big Tech just chasing a revenue gold rush? Tune in for sharp takes on AI skepticism, notable buzzwords, and the practical impact of Microsoft's ambitious new direction. Windows 11... Windows.ai?? Microsoft announces several new Copilot and AI features in Windows while redefining the term "AI PC" out from under Intel New features: Hey Copilot wake phrase (and goodbye), Copilot Vision is GA, new features coming soon include Copilot replacing Search in the Taskbar, Copilot Actions for local files, Manus AI agent and Filmora integration with File Explorer AI Actions, Zoom integration with Click to Do This is about Windows transforming into an "AI native" agentic OS Which ties into Paul's AI is the End of Apps editorial, where apps became programmable so that they can be controlled by AI - You can see baby steps in Windows 11 in-box apps now Microsoft explains how it will secure agents in Windows because Recall what happened last time Microsoft releases so-called emergency update for Windows 11 after the October Patch Tuesday updates killed USB mouse and keyboard supports in the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). Windows Insider Program: Mobile devices settings improvements, File Explorer improvements, Drag Tray improvements, and other changes head to Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2) channels New Start menu, battery icons, Copilot Vision integration in Taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Voice access improvements, and Click to Do improvements (Copilot+ PC only) head to Release Preview, indicating they will be a Week D preview and then Patch Tuesday release in November Restyle rolling out in Paint across most Insider channels Open AI finally launches long-expected web browser, but only on the Mac because FU, Microsoft Facebook Messenger for Windows is retiring, will chase rabbits on a farm upstate Microsoft What does Microsoft's annual report say about its relationship with consumers? Three core consumer businesses: Windows, Microsoft 365 Consumer, Xbox/gaming Xbox/gaming smallest (500m) but also the most engaged - and also the most discussed in the report Not clear what % of users/revenues is consumer based, but it's not a small number (guessing its at least one-third of each) AI Copilot for Education is coming in December, $18 per student per month Anthropic Claude is coming for Copilot in Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot has AI competition on Samsung smart TVs now Opera Neon is getting an AI research agent Xbox and gaming Xbox president says next console will be "very premium". You know, like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are now available for purchase New wave of games coming to Game Pass across PC, console, and cloud, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, The Outer Worlds 2, and more Following console price hikes, Xbox Development Kit gets a 33 percent price increase thanks to insane U.S. tariffs Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Laptops are upgradeable again and life is good App pick of the week: A grab bag of apps for Windows users RunAs Radio this These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/955 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Sponsors: ventionteams.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows framer.com/design promo code WW outsystems.com/twit

AI is changing what we need from our computers—but does that mean you need an "AI PC"? Corey and Grant sit down with Logan Lawler from Dell Technologies who leads Dell Pro Max AI solutions to decode what matters (and what doesn't) when buying or upgrading your next computer. From CPUs and GPUs to memory, NPUs, and traps to avoid, this episode is your practical roadmap for staying future-ready through the next five years of AI-powered work.Dell Pro Max Workstations: https://www.dell.com/en-us/plcp/lp/dell-pro-max-pcs LM Studio LIVE tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai3sBeBdA1Y Kiwix Wikipedia Download: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiwixOne Trainer: https://github.com/Nerogar/OneTrainerJawset Postshot: https://www.jawset.com/Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiCheck out the Reshaping Workflows Podcast: https://reshaping-workflows.simplecast.com/

Microsoft is promising a bold AI-infused future for Windows 11, as the company aims to turn the OS into an AI-powered "agentic" hub. Amid all the Copilot hype, the hosts ask the tough questions: Are these AI features solving real problems, or is Big Tech just chasing a revenue gold rush? Tune in for sharp takes on AI skepticism, notable buzzwords, and the practical impact of Microsoft's ambitious new direction. Windows 11... Windows.ai?? Microsoft announces several new Copilot and AI features in Windows while redefining the term "AI PC" out from under Intel New features: Hey Copilot wake phrase (and goodbye), Copilot Vision is GA, new features coming soon include Copilot replacing Search in the Taskbar, Copilot Actions for local files, Manus AI agent and Filmora integration with File Explorer AI Actions, Zoom integration with Click to Do This is about Windows transforming into an "AI native" agentic OS Which ties into Paul's AI is the End of Apps editorial, where apps became programmable so that they can be controlled by AI - You can see baby steps in Windows 11 in-box apps now Microsoft explains how it will secure agents in Windows because Recall what happened last time Microsoft releases so-called emergency update for Windows 11 after the October Patch Tuesday updates killed USB mouse and keyboard supports in the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). Windows Insider Program: Mobile devices settings improvements, File Explorer improvements, Drag Tray improvements, and other changes head to Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2) channels New Start menu, battery icons, Copilot Vision integration in Taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Voice access improvements, and Click to Do improvements (Copilot+ PC only) head to Release Preview, indicating they will be a Week D preview and then Patch Tuesday release in November Restyle rolling out in Paint across most Insider channels Open AI finally launches long-expected web browser, but only on the Mac because FU, Microsoft Facebook Messenger for Windows is retiring, will chase rabbits on a farm upstate Microsoft What does Microsoft's annual report say about its relationship with consumers? Three core consumer businesses: Windows, Microsoft 365 Consumer, Xbox/gaming Xbox/gaming smallest (500m) but also the most engaged - and also the most discussed in the report Not clear what % of users/revenues is consumer based, but it's not a small number (guessing its at least one-third of each) AI Copilot for Education is coming in December, $18 per student per month Anthropic Claude is coming for Copilot in Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot has AI competition on Samsung smart TVs now Opera Neon is getting an AI research agent Xbox and gaming Xbox president says next console will be "very premium". You know, like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are now available for purchase New wave of games coming to Game Pass across PC, console, and cloud, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, The Outer Worlds 2, and more Following console price hikes, Xbox Development Kit gets a 33 percent price increase thanks to insane U.S. tariffs Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Laptops are upgradeable again and life is good App pick of the week: A grab bag of apps for Windows users RunAs Radio this These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/955 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Sponsors: ventionteams.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows framer.com/design promo code WW outsystems.com/twit

Microsoft is promising a bold AI-infused future for Windows 11, as the company aims to turn the OS into an AI-powered "agentic" hub. Amid all the Copilot hype, the hosts ask the tough questions: Are these AI features solving real problems, or is Big Tech just chasing a revenue gold rush? Tune in for sharp takes on AI skepticism, notable buzzwords, and the practical impact of Microsoft's ambitious new direction. Windows 11... Windows.ai?? Microsoft announces several new Copilot and AI features in Windows while redefining the term "AI PC" out from under Intel New features: Hey Copilot wake phrase (and goodbye), Copilot Vision is GA, new features coming soon include Copilot replacing Search in the Taskbar, Copilot Actions for local files, Manus AI agent and Filmora integration with File Explorer AI Actions, Zoom integration with Click to Do This is about Windows transforming into an "AI native" agentic OS Which ties into Paul's AI is the End of Apps editorial, where apps became programmable so that they can be controlled by AI - You can see baby steps in Windows 11 in-box apps now Microsoft explains how it will secure agents in Windows because Recall what happened last time Microsoft releases so-called emergency update for Windows 11 after the October Patch Tuesday updates killed USB mouse and keyboard supports in the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE). Windows Insider Program: Mobile devices settings improvements, File Explorer improvements, Drag Tray improvements, and other changes head to Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2) channels New Start menu, battery icons, Copilot Vision integration in Taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Voice access improvements, and Click to Do improvements (Copilot+ PC only) head to Release Preview, indicating they will be a Week D preview and then Patch Tuesday release in November Restyle rolling out in Paint across most Insider channels Open AI finally launches long-expected web browser, but only on the Mac because FU, Microsoft Facebook Messenger for Windows is retiring, will chase rabbits on a farm upstate Microsoft What does Microsoft's annual report say about its relationship with consumers? Three core consumer businesses: Windows, Microsoft 365 Consumer, Xbox/gaming Xbox/gaming smallest (500m) but also the most engaged - and also the most discussed in the report Not clear what % of users/revenues is consumer based, but it's not a small number (guessing its at least one-third of each) AI Copilot for Education is coming in December, $18 per student per month Anthropic Claude is coming for Copilot in Microsoft 365 commercial Copilot has AI competition on Samsung smart TVs now Opera Neon is getting an AI research agent Xbox and gaming Xbox president says next console will be "very premium". You know, like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are now available for purchase New wave of games coming to Game Pass across PC, console, and cloud, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, The Outer Worlds 2, and more Following console price hikes, Xbox Development Kit gets a 33 percent price increase thanks to insane U.S. tariffs Tips & Picks Tip of the week: Laptops are upgradeable again and life is good App pick of the week: A grab bag of apps for Windows users RunAs Radio this These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/955 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Sponsors: ventionteams.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows framer.com/design promo code WW outsystems.com/twit

Microsoft is significantly enhancing Windows 11 by integrating artificial intelligence capabilities, transforming the PC experience into what the company calls the "AI PC." This new initiative allows users to interact with their computers using voice commands through a feature called CoPilot. With functionalities like CoPilot Actions, users can delegate tasks such as editing files and troubleshooting issues directly to AI agents, which operate in secure environments to ensure data safety. This shift comes as Windows 10 reaches its end of life, prompting a wave of hardware upgrades as consumers and enterprises seek AI-enabled PCs. Salesforce has also made strides in the IT support sector by launching AgentForce IT Service, a conversational support suite designed to streamline employee assistance. This new system moves away from traditional ticket-based support to real-time solutions delivered through platforms like Slack. By automating incident management, AgentForce aims to reduce the time employees spend on IT challenges, which can lead to significant productivity losses. The service integrates with major companies, enhancing its utility and positioning Salesforce as a competitor in the help desk market. Research indicates that organizations that are well-prepared for AI are more likely to successfully implement AI projects and achieve measurable benefits. Cisco's AI Readiness Index reveals that companies integrating AI into their core functions see substantial gains in profitability and productivity. As enterprise spending on AI infrastructure is projected to double by 2026, the focus is shifting from training AI models to deploying them effectively in business operations. This trend underscores the importance of having a robust infrastructure to support AI initiatives. Finally, Microsoft has announced the end of support for Office 2016 and 2019, urging users to migrate to newer versions like Microsoft 365 Apps or Office 2024. This transition presents an opportunity for managed service providers to engage clients in proactive discussions about software upgrades and security measures. As unsupported software becomes a liability, providers can align these upgrades with other IT improvements, ensuring clients remain compliant and secure. The emphasis is on guiding clients through these changes to enhance their operational efficiency and maintain a steady revenue stream for service providers. Four Things to Know Today: 00:00 Windows 11 Enters the AI Era as Microsoft Launches Copilot-Powered PC Experience05:31 Salesforce Enters IT Support Market with Agentforce, Targeting Productivity and PSA Disruption09:06 AI Advantage Comes to Those Prepared: Cisco, Gartner, and Anthropic Signal Shift to Embedded Intelligence13:10 End of Support for Office 2016 and 2019 Raises Security Stakes, Opens QBR Opportunities  Sponsored by:  https://mailprotector.com/mspradio/

This episode explores the massive revenue growth of OpenAI and Anthropic and what it means for their business models. With Anthropic hitting a $7 billion revenue run rate and OpenAI reaching $13 billion , the discussion weighs their strategic futures, including the push into enterprise versus consumer markets and the potential for new revenue streams like advertising. In the headlines, NLW covers Claude's important new 'Skills' feature, Microsoft's AI PC push, and Spotify's new deal with music labels.Brought to you by:Is your enterprise ready for the future of agentic AI?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit AGNTCY.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit Outshift Internet of Agents⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Google Gemini - Try NotebookLM today https://notebooklm.google.com/KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Blitzy.com - Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blitzy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to build enterprise software in days, not months Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://robotsandpencils.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://besuper.ai/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? nlw@aidailybrief.ai

Good morning, tech fam! In today's FLYTECH Daily — your 10-minute shot of tech made fun and easy — Nick and Michelle break down the top 5 stories shaping the tech world this week: