We're back where I live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is all about leadership. We have a special guest today, Sydney Brown. Sydney is into leadership. She's into creativity and she runs a shoe company, the likes of which you have never ever heard before, I'm sure. Welcome to the show, Sydney. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so delighted to know you would meet you and have you have you here with us today. So let's talk about this fabulous brand you're developing, Sydney Brown out of New York, LA and Porto. Porto Portugal. Yes. Talk about it, will you? Yeah. Well, yeah, I started this company about nine years ago and it had been a response to there being no vegan sustainable shoes on the market. And so, yeah, about nine years ago, I had a New Year's resolution to stop buying leather and I had always felt so conflicted about leather and I'd been a vegetarian for so many years and so I made this New Year's resolution and within about a week of that I had a big event in LA and I needed shoes and I realized that there were no sustainable luxury options on the market and there was this huge hole in the market and so I then took that upon myself to solve and so I found this amazing shoemaker in LA and so I apprenticed with him for about a year and I learned the craft from pattern making all the way through lasting which is putting it, shaping it to the form and so, yeah, so it began that way and I started making bespoke shoes for weddings and for events and then I moved forward and started my own brand and with the very first collection we were invited to show in Paris and so then it went from there so it's been quite a journey. I've seen photographs of your shoes and they're really beautiful. I didn't see anything from men. Are you doing men also? We're doing sneakers for men and we have a few styles that are unisex so. Yeah, I want that. Yes, yeah, you look great.  Great, yes. You can use that. Anyway, what's different about this? Well, you're appealing to millennials and Generation Z. Exactly. You're appealing to a whole new world of consumers. Tell us about how you have found them and how you reach them. Yeah, well, I think the biggest thing when we were switching from or we were not using leather and so we had to find so many alternatives and so the plastic situation is so horrific and so we ended up just exploring the materials and so this has been the main kind of breath of my work and so we started to develop them and kind of explore organic fibers and then also recycled materials and right now the plastic pollution situation is so horrific and the marine plastic is just this unbelievable problem and especially here in Hawaii where we're feeling this so dramatically and so right now Americans are using about two million bottles like plastic bottles every five minutes and so it's just unbelievable this this plastic crisis that we have and plastic is a design failure there's no way of getting rid of it and this is what's so challenging and so we're working now with a lot of NGOs and different government organizations to collect the plastic and then clean it break it down so shred it and then melt it and then develop polyester fibers and then to weave those and create materials for those so we're so we're working on upcycling and so but this is just one of the the pieces the I think you know initially people had used leather for shoes and then the synthetics and the the plastics then began to develop and the next stage will will really be the the biomaterials and I'll speak about that more more in a second but I think everyone now is feeling this this crisis in terms of of the marine plastic and in terms of just the the the climate the climate crisis in general and so I'm really now working on you know solving this and really following the supply chain I think a lot of people don't realize that fashion is the the second largest polluter globally this outside of big oil and after big oil and so it's this incredible problem that we have and so yeah so there's so much work that can be done and that needs to be done so so one example I've I've just now created the first biodegradable stiletto and so generally shoes are made with molded plastic and so and then they're covered with or the heels excuse me are made with molded plastic and then they're covered with the upper material and so I've now created a stiletto that has the wood it's kind of wood pulp and then a resin and then a steel rod down the middle for stability and so this has been so exciting and Natalie Portman actually wore our very first prototype on Saturday Night Live which was so exciting and so I think the the millennials and the Gen Z's are you know the Greta Thirdbergs of our time are now you know moving forward and they realize that this is a crisis and you know that they've said now that by 2025 the coral will be dead you know the world the world's coral will be dead and so by 2030 or so the oceans will be dead and I think a lot of people don't understand that we're you know getting most of our oxygen from the ocean you know 20% or so is from the trees and you know the various rain for us but 60 to 80% is from the the phytoplankton and the small marine you know plants in the ocean and so if we're losing this then we're really entering the sixth extinction and we will become the dinosaurs soon and there's no way we're going to be able to get a billion people to mars by 2040 you know so I mean this is an absolute emergency and so I think millennials and Gen Z's are are so conscious of this and they know that the world soon will be so much different and so it's an emergency for everyone to step forward. I hope people realize it you know I can't help but think of Dustin Hoffman and the graduate and he's with his the father of his girlfriend I guess and a swimming pool in that movie and the father leans out to him he says young man it's all about plastics. Yes that's a very thing it's like at the time this is what this is supposed to be in the 60s I guess it's all about plastics meant that that was the modern high-tech approach to materials of you know all kinds of products and in our lifetimes or at least in my lifetime anyway you know all that has changed that then you see you see these incredible photographs of seabirds who have died from plastic and all kinds of animals in the sea and elsewhere who have died from plastic and then we thought well not a good idea to have plastic and it's out of control and then finally you because you represent more you know than just you know shoes you represent a whole idea which could carry over into so many other products to reuse the plastic. Can you talk a little about how you do that don't get too technical with me just talk about how you reuse the plastics and take you know a shoe or any object of plastic and make it into another shoe or some other object. Yeah well so for example the plastic that we're using yeah is ground down and then melted and then fibers are created and then woven into materials and so but the challenge is that this you know we're upcycling but we're just continuing this cycle and there's really no way of getting rid of it and so the future I think of footwear and of materials in general are the biomaterials and these are so interesting and so we've been working on development of for example we just developed a sole that's made out of rice husk and that's so exciting and so and then we're using pineapple fiber and fennel and you know apple and cacti and toxic algae blooms and and so many different materials and with the biomaterials it's so interesting because the the bio fabrication movement is moving so quickly and for example they're you know the this biologists are programming E. coli and then they're creating self-healing materials and then the the thing that I'm most excited about is the bio fabricated leather and so that's building collagen in a petri dish so actually growing the collagen and so you can grow it you know like you would in Oregon or you know in your in medicine and so they can actually grow it and they can embed properties like durability breathability color pattern you know all of these things and then the ideal scenario would be to grow it in the actual pattern piece so that then there's no waste in cutting so so this is extremely exciting and this will be the future for sure oh yeah definitely not only shoes for so many other things yeah but you know I wonder though let me ask you this question you know I go out and buy a pair of leather shoes or you know even plastic shoes or cloth shoes I'll see what am I wearing today I'm wearing this kind of plastic kind of looks like leather kind of strong last me a while okay not too expensive yeah how does that compare with the kind of shoes you're talking about are the kind of shoes you're talking about going to last longer are they going to have the same you know resilience to weather and wet and cold and all the other elements that shoes have to go through or they're going to fail sooner well I mean we've been so we've been working on this now for nine years and you know so far so good you know it's also depending on on the the style of shoe and everything so but yeah up until now we've had about the same you know abrasion we've been doing abrasion tests and things like that and it's been about the same so yeah so it's really exciting and yeah this is this is definitely the step forward so what kind of reception have you had in the marketplace I mean I know what your market is and I know what you know we believe I agree with you certainly that the millennials and the generations these are going to be interested hopefully to for their own survival in the next generation you know this kind of renewable product this kind of environment friendly product but have they responded to your concept here in a business sense have they have they floated your boat so to speak well yeah it's so interesting I'm nine years ago when I began people thought that this was so niche and there would be no market for this and now it's you know I think because of the global the the climate crisis the demand is just growing incredibly and so I think people are yearning for a connection back to nature and when people see you know the logo on my products they realize that this is a symbol of change and so people you know are so ready for this and so the reception has been incredible and it's you know we can't even keep things in stock it's moving so quickly now so yeah so it's really exciting well let's talk about your factories I'm fascinated with that you know it's not like people wake up one morning and say I think I'll build a factory you have to have a lot of ideas and creativity you have to have a market you have to have capital to build a factory so your first factory was in Los Angeles but the demand outgrew the production because you couldn't meet couldn't meet all the orders so what happened in in Los Angeles and where'd you go from there yeah well when I initially started the brand we were working in Portugal in the UK and because we hadn't really understood the materials and the constructions the construction has to be so much different because we're not using leather and so we had a lot of trial and error in the beginning and then because I had studied in LA and I knew the footwear community there I decided to bring it back to Los Angeles and to build my own factory and my own staff and then we had about three years of heavy R&D and really just you know re-engineered the shoe and so we completely followed the supply chain so if there are about 15 components generally in a shoe we would either find sustainable suppliers or if we didn't if we couldn't and they didn't exist then I just had to figure it out myself and and partner with you know the experts in the industry and so for example we didn't have a proper vegan glue that worked with our materials and so I found the the top adhesive scientist in you know from Italy, Portugal, the UK, America from from many places and worked collaboratively with them and after four years or so we were able to perfect that so but it was extremely challenging and the financially it was it was a terrible struggle and so I to be as frugal as possible I actually moved into the factory and I lived on the floor for the for those three years and I had no shower or toilet which was also extremely challenging so um but then yeah thank god the demand grew and then I was able to find an incredible factory in Portugal that was sustainably powered and it cut against technology and so we were able to take the whole package that we had developed and move it there and teach them and work with them and so um yeah so it's been quite a journey yeah wow so uh your shoes um don't have animal arts to them correct they don't uh and they and they're vegan is a does that mean that I can I can uh eat a shoe at some point are they animal in some way well I don't know how good they would taste but ideally they would be able to biodegrade and so this is what we're striving for so and the other the other thing I wanted to ask you about before the break anyway is you have this fabulous program that really struck me you know in the software industry it was a time when you bought software that was it um now you go buy software and you subscribe to it like adobe is a good example you subscribe and so it goes on and on and it becomes part of your intellectual life I suppose to be an adobe person well the same thing with these shoes which I hadn't heard before you take a shoe and you can return the shoe to cindy brown the cindy brown will remake the shoe into a new shoe tell us how that works exactly so yeah so at the end of the life cycle um so we're now welcoming the shoes back and we give an incentive to the customer to return the shoes back to us and then just like the ocean plastic we take it and we grind it down and melt it and then 30 of that can be used for a new sole that we can we can put into the new sole material and then the 70 we can recycle and so we're now to do more than 30 now it's a bit unstable and so we're trying to grow that but yeah we're welcoming all the shoes back so that there's no outside weight nothing lost yeah perfectly efficient exactly okay that's cindy brown she she runs a company called cindy brown llc she is all about leadership and we're gonna have a short break we'll be right back we'll talk about we'll talk about the market as it is going forward and the shops that she is going to build we'll be right back thank you aloha i'm kisha king host of crossroads in learning on think tech hawaii on crossroads in learning our guest and i discuss all aspects of education here in hawaii and throughout the country you can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich and live in and educate we are streamed live on think tech biweekly at 4 p.m on mondays thanks so much for watching our show we look forward to seeing you then aloha aloha my name is duration i'm the host of finding our future here on think tech hawaii i'm here every other tuesday from one to one thirty p.m here on this show i cover issues around sustainability um you know global issues that matter for young people for future generations and other social justice issues so please join us it's live streamed on think tech hawaii and also uploaded on youtube right we're back with cindy brown a mistress of shoes so to speak in all in leadership and we want to talk about exactly what she's going to do going forward for a minute and i saw it in your in your uh your book your uh pitch book uh that you were going to build shops here and there what's your plan yeah well over the next few years we're going to slowly be rolling out we'll have a flagship store in new york city um and then to roll out from there and um before shoes um i had been a music promoter and i lived in japan for many years and in fact your education was in music wasn't it um i i had a minor in music yes um and i i went to japan yeah i went to japan to do a master's in sound design and um and so i was working with i i'm from detroit originally and so the the techno and house music culture is very strong and so um so i began promoting shows in japan and i ended up representing labels and artists from all over the world um at the end of my tenure there um and so i have so many connections still with with the with the music community and so i wanted to provide a space for the shoes and also for events and just to create kind of a communal space where people could um yeah share ideas and and you know move their the vision forward so to speak so yeah so we're hoping to roll these out within the next couple years yeah so these these are more than just ordinary retail stores these are stores with experience right exactly consistent with your your whole mission of saving the planet if you think yeah but but uh i just wonder where where can i get them i mean for example you know the natural question would be in amazon can i go to amazon can i go now will i go later uh they're not on amazon but on our website and then we're in shops we're in i guess over a hundred shops now in 13 countries and so we're all over the world and japan has been our largest market since the beginning and so um so that's been so wonderful well let's talk about let's talk about design going forward and uh you call you you have a word called practic what what is that um well uh so we're yeah i mean we're we're just we're expanding the line and so and we're starting bags now and so within the next few work weeks we'll have bags launched and so that's really exciting and we have a designer from blends yaga who is is handling all of the bag design i'm i'm doing shoes but i need help and support with the bags and so yeah so we're thrilled with this and and just to slowly be expanding the brand so one of the bags made of and um perhaps if i can't eat the shoes i can eat the bags um what's in the bags so yeah and so the bags we're using a lot of the marine plastics and so um this is the the main ingredient uh or the main material um and then various linings and things like that so um so they're not quite editable but hopefully soon in the future well you know it's interesting we've lived an interesting time in human history when maybe we don't pay enough attention to the environment and don't pay enough attention to climate change and um you know there's there's going to be a price to pay for that yeah but hopefully businesses like yours can sort of smooth out the rough corners and make life easier and make us feel what did you call it ethical footwear yeah this whole picture is ethical yeah well and hopefully yeah and we'll be you know continuing to expand and um i think one of the biggest challenges is that uh when we um i mean it just in terms of sustainability in general um some brands say that they're you know 100 sustainable or something like that um but you know what we considered sustainable five years ago is no longer so and so it has to be a constant process of refinement and uh and this is what is so so challenging and what will keep pushing us forward so Sydney there's really something special about the plastic can you talk about it well i think one of the biggest challenges and what i face every day is how to get how to not use it and you know we're bombarded with all the products you know that use plastic and so um i just made a bit a little list here of the the products that i'm using um and so for example like shampoo conditioner deodorant you know we don't need to have these in plastic bottles and so this is just a small example of the the options that are available on the market um but we need to stop using plastic you know full stop and this is an absolute emergency now so um so here are some great alternatives let's talk about price point because i mean if i was watching this uh you know either as a man or a woman i would say to myself well this is very special um but is this going to give me a price point that i can afford or is it going to be you know uh who extravagant for me talk to me about price point now and in the future yeah um well right now um they range from about i guess about 250 to 400 dollars or so and i think the biggest uh challenge in terms of marketing is people assume that if we're not using leather that it should be less expensive and um and in fact the the materials are so complex that they're it's it's more expensive you know often than leather and so um this is just a a challenge with the education and something we're we're working on so yeah well you know you talked about shoes and handbags but you know the biological process involved but develop other other products other clothing products other accessories yeah and i i suppose uh you know that that would be a dream come true because excuse me we have been waiting for biological clothes for a long time and with your technique you could do that couldn't you we could and we'll see in terms of how we're going to expand but we have yeah we have a lot of exciting plans that yeah in the works so yeah so um you're you're going to get bigger but to get bigger you have to have capital you have to approach the capital markets um how how does a company like yours do that um and and how hard or soft is the capital market for somebody uh in the shoe business especially in a sort of a cutting-edge shoe business yeah um well i think um the the shoe business generally is so challenging and i i don't know what the exact statistic is but something like 95 percent of shoe businesses fail within the first five years or something like that so so we've made it past that um that hurdle um but uh yeah we um we've been actively fundraising since the beginning and um yeah people i think now are so much more responsive than they had been a few years ago and so yeah so things are going very well well when they see this show Sydney you know you'll see what happens good okay amazing yeah now let's talk about leadership we can't we can't finish without talking about leadership this is all about leadership and you are clearly the leader of this company yeah but how do you do that i i notice for example they're looking through your book that a good percentage if not most of your critical staff and you know the cadre around your company they're all women or most of them are women is there a reason is that just accidental why do you do that and how do you relate to them in order to be the leader of a company like this well um i it so happens that they they were the most amazing candidates and so that's why i hired them and it wasn't specifically because they were women how do you find them um through networking and yeah just person to person connections so um but yeah it's it's been really incredible and um i you know my my my primary strength is the material development and the product side and i don't have an MBA and um and i wish i i did but um so i'm now able to find women who who are supporting me and and and colleagues who are supporting me and you know and so it's just been it's been wonderful so how do you how do you unleash them you know you're the creative leader of the company but you want all the staff under you to be creative also um and in a way consistent with your creativity but you want to give them a certain amount of room how do you how do you how do you manage them to do that how do you incentivize them encourage them to be creative and to help you move the whole thing ahead which as you said has to be moved all the time always have to be moving forward how do you create a staff that will resonate with that well i think that the biggest point is that they are they believe so deeply in what we're doing and so i don't have to do much luckily in in terms of that and they also realize that this is an absolute crisis and and something needs to be done you know on a global scale in terms of the climate and so they're extremely you know self-motivated and working working towards this so um so i've been lucky and that i have this incredible group of colleagues who are so motivated and and so competent so um yeah so that's been wonderful so you're living in new york right now i am i'm in brooklyn so brooklyn i i want to know i love brooklyn i told you that before yes i'm from queens uh in any event uh you know what what does the new york milieu mean to your creativity and your staff i expect most of them are in new york um well how do you you know engage with the city how does the city engage with you why is why are you in new york as opposed to some other place well i had been in hawaii and the the time difference between hawaii and porto is about 11 hours so that that was so challenging um so new york or the east coast was the closest i could get to to portugal um but um yeah i mean just the energy of the city is incredible and the music and the dance and i mean just the the culture is is absolutely wonderful um and so that that's so energizing and so exciting to be you know around people who are are moving so quickly so but you travel a lot though don't you miss it i do i'm trying to minimize it as much as possible but i i do and my family is based here in hawaii and we've been here for about a hundred years now and so um so this has been a very important base for me you know honestly you don't look that old i think it's great what you're doing sydney i think it's a beautiful thing and i think you've achieved leadership not only among your own company and staff and you know designer professionals but also you know in the world and your company is a statement of leadership less we forget so i want you to know that i really appreciate what you're doing and i think a lot of people do and will and i think you uh you're a great spot to actually have an effect on the way people see the world around them so thank you for doing that great thank you thank you and thanks for showing up and being part of our think tech program we greatly appreciate it and i hope that you'll talk to me later when you get even more incredibly successful okay wonderful thank you so much we're having thank you sydney right


No matter what the challenge we're always ready because we have goals dreams and passions Nothing will stand in our way Anything that tries to hinder our progress will only make us stronger feel empowered and unlock our true potential Life is full of opportunities. So seize them Aristotle said that you are what you repeatedly do so do better be better as a potential is limitless Make hard work a habit not an act your time is now no excuses It's time to be the best version of yourself Let's get it together. Let's set some goals and conquer them Start your 2022 strong with EHP labs


Welcome back to SuperCloud 4, where we're exploring the impact of generative AI. In particular, we're interested in the disruption potential of AI, the importance of quality data, and how organizations can protect their IP and still keep pace with market movements. With me is Jeff Boudreau, the chief AI officer at Dell Technologies. Jeff, good to see you. Thanks for coming into the studio. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. So new role, how come Dell decided we got to appoint a chief AI officer and you must be a popular guy? Yeah, popular guy right now. A lot of interest after we announced it. I just stepping back in regards to how we're thinking about AI and specifically gen AI as we go forward. It's a defining technology of our era. We truly believe that. And if you think about where the industries are going and what is being used for gen AI and how it's disrupting our everyday lives and how people use the technology and how business operate, we think it's extremely important for us to have focus and dedicated leadership in this space, specifically as I would say the boards in the C suites are basically shifting all the money to all AI projects. We thought it was important to really make sure that we had the proper leadership and focus in place at Dell. No question. I mean, we've reported on this.   It's not happening like that. So AI is really stealing from some of these other initiatives, but what excited you about this role? Why Jeff Boudreau? Sure. And before I go into that, I guess to hit your last point. Yes, I'm definitely seeing some, as you would say, stealing from one project to another to really fund this and get this going. But I actually see over the long run, I think it's a huge opportunity for growth and expansion of our TAM, but also the set of services. So from hardware to software to services, it really brings it all together and actually expands our TAM and our opportunity to really help our customers. Now, what it got me excited about the role, it's all about tech. You know, long background, I have, I guess a good mix of both business and technology background. And I have a long track record of leadership. So if you think over the last four years of leading ISG, merging Dell and EMC storage teams together, taking over compute storage network, leading and driving the industry leading technologies and infrastructure, you know, across the domains. Obviously running large businesses, the team was over 25,000 strong. So I've drove plenty of transformation issues. And this was something that we looked at as the new role. So the opportunity to take tech and business, merge those together to really provide a better outcome for Dell, but also for our customers is really, really excited. What does a chief AI officer do? It's a great question. I would say it's early innings as a baseball person. We're in early days. So it's evolving in regards to the definition in the industry. If you kind of look as we just talked about, you look in the industry, you'd say in the heavy technology company, usually it's a very technology centric type person. If you look in other industries, maybe in commerce, you'll see more of a business and marketing slant to this type of role. So they're evolving depending on the industry and the type of company you are. For me specifically, my role in the company is to define and refine our AI strategy. It's about setting governance, policy, practices, guardrails, also responsible for the, I would say prioritization, the development, the implementation of the AI projects that cut across the company. So this is not like BU by BU. This is a true pan company type initiative and that's where the focus and direction comes in from. So I think I'm correct and that Dell doesn't have historically a chief data officer. I think Jen kind of took care of that. And so you kind of leapfrog that. So my question is, are you seeing other organizations institute similar chief AI officers? And then, cause that gets kind of funky, right? Cause you got the chief data officer, which has always been sort of an overlap with the CIO. So what are you seeing other organizations? It's a great question. So do I see others having a chief AI officer? The answer is absolutely yes, it's happening. It's happening in multiple industries. So I won't or can't take credit for being the first cause I definitely wasn't. But I will say it is a morph and I've seen like I said before, there's people coming from the CTO side. There's people coming from the CIO side. There's some people coming from the CTO side. Again, we thought it was important since it's such a big initiative that we had to have the dedicated focus and support and someone that could actually drive the transformation across the company. I have to as part of that, collaborate with all my internal stakeholders. So if you think of all the functions, I don't care if it's legal or finance or sales or services or go to market or supply chain, I got to cut across everybody, working with Jen and Dell Digital in providing a great architecture instead of services for our own internal use so we can have more effect there. So it's a big role that's gonna cut across a lot of different functions. And I look forward to working with Jen on moving our data strategy and our technology strategy so we can realize the potential of AI. Great, at DTW, you guys put together, put on a framework, I think there were like four pillars, your Dell's AI strategy. Can you just sort of review that and what's changed since May? Sure, the strategic framework that we have that you're referring to at Dell Tech World, we have it, I say it's four key areas. It's AI in, AI on, AI for and AI with and I'll unpack that a little bit. So if you think about AI in, that's about embedding AI into our offers so they're more intelligent. And a simple example of that would be something like a Dell optimizer, trying to make our solutions more efficient and autonomous by nature. The secondary thing is AI on. You can think about that as us building world-class infrastructure so customers, partners could run their AI and ML workloads on our solutions. And an example of that would be something like Project Helix where, you know, Dell and NVIDIA both hardware and software came together to build a stack to help our customers really drive or be able to deploy AI and gen AI type use cases in their on-prem or cloud environments. AI for, I really have, it's a two-prong for me specifically, I call it AI for and the first step is that is for ourselves. And as I think about that as it's early innings here, how are we using AI capabilities, tools to help improve Dell technologies, internal processes and business processes. They have a better operational experience for our team members and be more effective. The secondary part of that is AI for our customers. And what I mean by that is taking those lesson learned, those potentially best practices, potentially a new set of service offers we could bring to market or bring to bear for our customers to really help them on their journey. So it's really about sharing knowledge with our customers. And then lastly, the AI with, you know us for a long time. We are embraced in open ecosystem and this is no different. So AI with is about having strategic partners up and down the stack from hardware, software, platform layers into software, aligning ourselves with strategic partners to really bring better set of solutions to our customers. So that might be software company, LLM providers. Yeah, so if you think of the stack, if you think of the stack, I'll start with hardware real simplistically. If you think of the three layers of a modern AI stack. So from a hardware layer, you got infrastructure. So think of what we did with NVIDIA in our GPUs in our 9680s, right? So it's having world-class silicon and our compute nodes to bring that as a foundational element in the hardware. And the software, you start thinking about things like the abstraction layers and the OSs, right? It could be things we're doing with Red Hat and some other OSs, if you will. You come up the stack into the platform where this is where your tools and your models are there really to make the day in the life of the developer much easier, right? So they can develop applications, AI and ML applications for the infrastructure for their enterprise. We do partnerships with that, like say Meta with Lama2, Falcon, I mean, there's a lot of folks in that, there's a lot of people in that bucket and full transverse. It doesn't, more than doesn't. And then you get up into the, in the higher level stack of the application layer. And this is where we did partnerships with folks like in the data area with snowflakes or recently with Starburst, but there's so many more up there. But all the way through the stack, those are just some examples. We're going to be partnering to provide world-class solutions to our customers. The unique thing is you have to wrap that all in services because as you know, right now they're all kind of independent piece parts and our opportunity, I don't know, where I think we're uniquely positioned as being that integrated to bring a lot of those different pieces together in that open environment. And you guys have made some announcements since May. I think there was a reference architecture. I think I saw the financial analysts meeting some things on Apex. Yeah, we've actually, there was a, and since DTW, I guess going back to where you were a minute ago is that that was really setting up, I would say what I call the foundation for us to enable our customers to embrace and drive AI in their own enterprises and organizations. And I would say the key things that we did is one is we expanded our Apex offer. And that was about business agility, workload flexibility, a whole bunch of things in there that we did. And it was great set of work by the team. In addition to that was the introduction of Project Helix. That was the work with NVIDIA hardware software, bringing that together for our customers. The other big one was around cloud native edge. And I know you're going to be talking about edge later on in the conference, but it's really building that software platform in delivering it in a very easy and secure way for our customers to access data at the edge and use that. And then lastly, it was a whole suite of solutions, both for AI and Gen AI solutions. And that was a cut across multi-cloud, a cut across data and data preparation, a cut across security, it's so many different areas that occur on. So a lot of great innovation by the team to really help our customers step forward this journey. Just a few months. Yeah, things happen at best. I want to come back to how Dell is using AI and what you're learning. There's a lot of customers, they're experimenting, you know, they're using things like ChatGPT for marketing copy, writing code, stuff like that. But they're really trying to figure out where the value is. Where are you seeing the value? Sure. And I would say as I think about the customer landscape and kind of what's going on in the industry right now, what I'm seeing and the people I'm talking to across a lot of different industries, it's a, I'd say they're exactly right. They're in the assessing, learning, POCing kind of phase, we're all learning together. With that said, I'd say there's kind of three or four key use cases that are really developing and are maturing. So one is around what I call around customer operations and that's around both pre and post sales and it's around how do we enable our agents and our customers to have a better experience. There's a whole thing around what I'd say content creation and management in that domain. And then there's a lot of things around software product, assuming software developer productivity. It's really about how do we make the team members more efficient in what they're doing and how they can have our developers who are highly thought of, highly paid, very talented people. They're working on the most important things versus kind of the noisy things and we're helping do some of that stuff. Now for Dell specifically, we're leaning into a bunch of different use cases that we're driving. So in the spirit of the AI for, we have a modernization effort going on and really how do we improve our entire operation. One of it's, we're focused on what I call sales and go to market enablement and that's really how do we enable our sellers to be more productive? How do we provide a more personalized experience for our customers as we go to market? The second one I would give you is around our customer operations on the post sale support and we have doing a lot of great and interesting work. So if you talk to some of our customers, they'll tell you, hey, we love your support teams. We always get the right answer. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes too long to get to the right person or get the right answer. And we're doing some creative work with AI and Gen AI to actually flat that entire ecosystem. Almost thinking about giving them a chat GPT or a prompt, if you will, where they can put an error log in and in seconds, tell them through our knowledge bases, our best practices, our white paper guides and tell them in seconds. Basically, here's your error. Here's the specific actions you need to take. Here's a link to actually show you in the knowledge base exactly what the problem was if you want to know a reference. And there's also an opportunity if you're an agent to actually click about and say, and I want to provide a customer communication on a regular interval when something happens. So we can actually take a lot of that latency in noise zone. So those are some of the big ones we're focused on as a team. One real example, I guess a great example I can give you for me in the early days. And one of our products, and I won't use the name, had a memory leak. And this issue had persisted for a period of time. And it was causing some frustration with some of our big customers because they were feeling the pain.  And what it was was, I was throwing cargo at the problem to help one of our customers because I wanted to do the right thing by them. But also taking our talented resources and say, hey, we got to go figure this out. And our teams were looking like, do I write the code wrong? Did I have a syntax issue? What was the problem? So this specific product actually has a part of its open source and a part of it is our controlled IP. We just took the open source, we put it into one of the models and said, just walk it and tell us if you find any issues. And actually within two minutes it came back and actually said, told us you had a order of operation, more or less an order of operations. We just had two of the lines. So there was no syntax issue. So our team was, what they were looking for was right. It was just, it was an order of operation. Do this first and then, yes. And that was causing the memory leak. And within two minutes, something that we'd been working on, I want to give you the whole timeline, but a long time with a lot of money and a lot of frustration, we were able to find that out and it would cost it in less than two minutes. We made the change that same day. We did a test in validation and I had it back in the customer's hands with a fix in less than two weeks. So that to me was the ah-ha. Wow, that's amazing. And back to what you were saying before about the customer and the service capability. So the customer who doesn't get an immediate response, he or she might be starting, they might Google it and not sure if their response is accurate. They're waiting for a response of frustration. So that value there is obviously the customer satisfaction, but it's also the cost of doing that service drops right to the bottom line. So those are the types of use cases that I would expect are really going to start driving AI to gain share. In other words, I'm spending on AI. I'm getting value. Now let's spend more. It might even trickle back to some of the other initiatives that to your point rises all ships. It rises all ships. It absolutely does. And we definitely see as an impact on customer experience which we think will have a direct impact on stickiness and revenue opportunities as we go forward. We definitely see benefits in regards to productivity for our customers and for ourselves, which then they can figure out how do you want to take those resources and redeploy them, right? And some of that could go back to a P&L to be more profitable. Some of that could go back to investing in future innovation or just on higher valued projects versus kind of the noisy projects. So a lot of opportunity there. I want to bring up the power law of gen AI that we developed a couple of months ago. And what this shows is in the vertical axis is the size of the model. So you've got the big cloud guys, you've got the llama twos, you've got open AI kind of on the left hand side. And then the horizontal axis is the model specificity. And then orange line is a sort of historical example of the music industry where you had very few music labels dominated the industry and you had a really long tail. And our premise is with all this open source, you can see those red lines, it's pulling to democratize AI. And then you see in the middle there on premises, the specialized AI, that model highly domain specific models. That's what you just described. Using your data. Now my question is will that, our premises, it'll happen on on-prem. Of course it's self-serving, but will that happen on-prem?  I want to do this in my own estate. I think it could be more cost effective, safer, more secure. What are you hearing from customers here? Yeah, I'd say the big thing I'm hearing from customers is it's, as I said, early innings and it's still immature, I guess, and it's nature in the enterprises truly haven't seen the benefits yet because they're working through this. I would say the biggest trend, or thing I'm hearing from customers is that the concern, a handful of things in full transparency. One is about complexity. Two is around talent. We have the right talent that actually could do the data prep or could I do the build the model, train the model, tune the model, prompt the model, what have you. In addition to have the concern about security, and now is this a tax service bigger or not? And the biggest thing they're talking to me about is IP control, kind of where you just ended. So they are worried about all that stuff. And they're realizing there's an opportunity here in regards to that they could do it a lot more cost effectively and have a lot more control over their data and their security and their IP control if they do it on smaller models, on-prem models with some of these open source tools that allow them to go do that. And that's something that they're all leaning into. So I would say to you right now is we've talked about in the past, all data is not created equal. It is a hybrid world. So I do see a hybrid AI world as well. And depending on the use case, the value of that use case and where you can get the best service that's in a cloud or in a colo or an on-prem type environment, I do think we're going to see a hybrid model. I do believe more of that because of the critical IP, I think more than 80% of the world's most critical IP is still on-prem. I think that it plays to our hand and to your point, that's a huge opportunity. So you described earlier that sort of modern data stack. I'm comfortable that the core infrastructure in the OSes, there's plenty of that that you can bring on-prem that's world-class. Are you confident that the tools and the models and the LLMs that you'll be able to bring that to create as rich of an experience as the cloud guys? The answer, we have to, right? And the quick and dirty, but it's we have to have an easy, but we have to make it a simple on-rim for our customers so they actually can do what they want to do, which is keep their critical IP on-prem. So the answer is, I think we can with the open models. You made the comment about how do we democratize certain things? And you and I were talking before, one of the things that I have in my head is, one of the defining technologies of our time was the World Wide Web in 1989 and that democratized the access to information. And what I'm seeing with AI and specifically Gen AI, that's changing the game, it's democratizing everyone and all of our opportunity to use AI. And so it's democratizing AI and usage. In addition to that though, it's actually democratizing Gen AI specifically, it's democratizing our opportunity to use that information or that data in a more impactful way for our organizations for each other and our data live. So I think that creates just tremendous opportunity and all these different tools, you're gonna see innovation continue to happen. It's still early. So I'm seeing innovation in the Silicon layer and the hardware. So you think about the NVIDIAs, the AMDs and the Intel, there's about 30 or 40 other startups I'm tracking in that space that are all doing some unique and interesting things depending on the use case. Some of that's on the big stuff that we're doing with large language models. Other stuff is going on the small models. Some of it's going for inferencing, especially at the edge and other things. I think at RAG and inferencing. So a lot of stuff going on that space. You come up the stack and you think about the closed models or the open models. You think about what Meta did with Lama 2, some really cool stuff going on in there and what you can do. Obviously what OpenAI has been doing, there's just so much innovation happening. There's a lot of startups in that space that are actually doing some really cool things on what I would call, going back to my old storage days when we talked about data efficiencies where you would compress and de-dupe and thin things. They're actually doing that to the models to make them thinner and easier so you don't need big, huge resources to drive some of that stuff. And it's just, we're in the early innings. You're gonna see so much innovation. Innovation, explosion. Jeff Pedro, congratulations on the new role. You gotta be super excited. I'll give you the last word. Hey, I think it's a first thank you for having me. Let's start with that. I suppose it's more important. And I just want everybody to understand that I do believe that this is an important period in time. I think AI is going to change the game in regards to how we work and how we live. I am, as we say at Dell, I'm a technology optimist. I truly believe it can help us make the world a better place and help really drive human progress in a better way. And I want to be very clear, Dell, we will not be sitting on the sidelines just like every other technology transition. We will be at the forefront. We will be standing side by side with our customers and we will help them bring this open ecosystem together so they can benefit in the most beneficial way to them and their customers. Fantastic. All right, Jeff, thanks again. Thank you. Thanks for watching SuperCloud 4. We'll be right back with more live and on-demand content from our studios in Palo Alto with John Furrier, Rob Streche and myself. More great conversations around AI. Keep it right there.