Dell Technologies World 2025: Day Three (Distributed AI and Telco vs. IT musings)

Author: Peter Jarich, Head of GSMA Intelligence

Dell Technologies World runs for four days – from Monday through Thursday. As with many events, the last day is a great time to connect with exhibitors and take in some demos in a more relaxed setting, all while helping yourself to all the swag that companies don’t want to haul home. That’s the theory, at least. With meetings in London on Thursday afternoon, I was on a plane early Wednesday evening. No extra Dell-branded Stanley cups or mouse pads for me! 

Instead, I spent my last day at Dell Technologies World taking in more exhibits, doing a little presenting, and thinking about the intersection of the Telco and IT sectors. 

• How to Think About Distributed AI. It’s no coincidence that the myriad edge AI use cases and showcases at Dell Technologies World align with work we’re doing at GSMA Intelligence; I was there, in part, to present some of our research. You can check out the deck from the red button above. A key message was simply to think about what we mean by “edge.” Where the concept can stretch from just outside a hyperscaler datacenter to the telco network, enterprise premise or even an IoT device, the term is clearly broad. That’s why it’s useful to think about “distribution” vs. “edge;” the edge is no single location.  
• How to Think About Monetization. From a network strategy perspective, operators are more concerned with new revenues and customer experience than with OpEx and CapEx efficiencies. We often position this as “making money” vs. “saving money.” Regardless, both are part of how new technologies are monetized. Cutting costs and delivering efficiencies may not add to top-line growth, but do contribute to profitability. In other words, AI use cases which do drive network or operational efficiencies are still part of the monetization story.
• Diverse Demands vs. Diverse Capabilities. Of course, if telcos (or anyone else) with distributed AI want to sell the value to customers, they need to know what the customers care about. What their use cases require. While we’ve all been trained to think edge networking is about latency, it’s also about resiliency, data sovereignty, energy efficiency, and cost containment. Most use cases will benefit from a combination. Understanding what that combination looks like is key to targeting sales and marketing efforts.  
• A Telco vs. IT Myth. I ran into a handful of analysts I knew this week at Dell Technologies World. I stood out, however, as the only one with a primary focus on the Telco vertical. To be fair, I could tell this positioned me as something of an odd duck at an IT focused event where servers and PCs and AI integration dominated the discussion. Of course, even if you ignore the fact that AT&T and Verizon were exhibitors at the event, the idea of a thick dividing line between the Telco and IT markets is ludicrous. Dangerous even. Telco is one of the largest verticals for IT sellers. That means operators are putting lots of IT gear into their operations. As mobile networks get increasingly virtualized and embed distributed AI, that will only accelerate. Sure, this was my first visit to Dell Technologies World, but I doubt it will be my last.