Dell Technologies CTO Elliott Young on revolutionizing client engagement with generative AI

“We’ve got to the point where generative AI is helping us win opportunities,” says Elliott Young, who is Chief Technology Officer of Dell's B2B division in EMEA, and at the forefront of the firm’s artificial intelligence initiatives. 

Elliott’s team has introduced generative AI to optimize the sales and marketing behind $500m in weekly IT product and service sales. The team is focusing on how generative AI can transform business operations, enabling deeper customer engagement and tailored solutions. “It’s not just about maintaining a competitive edge; it’s about using AI to fundamentally reshape how Dell understands and responds to client needs,” he says. 

"Are you going to be the people who put your arms around generative AI and embrace it or will there be some other department that gets there first?"

Our Global Account-Based Marketing Benchmark study revealed just 7% of marketers have expanded their usage of generative AI across multiple areas, and the majority are still exploring use cases. But Elliott urges marketers to demand the budget and freedom to embed the technology quickly and deeply. “Are you going to be the people who put your arms around generative AI and embrace it or will there be some other department that gets there first? If I make a change to a component inside a laptop, no one's going to see that unless you open it up. But when marketing makes a change, everyone knows about it. So, marketing should grab their fair share of the pie.” 

Intelligent lead generation

Our data shows that tone of the early top use cases for generative AI in marketing is ‘engaging clients more effectively and improving the customer experience.’ Elliott explains what this looks like for Dell’s customers. 

For years, Dell’s sales teams have wrestled with scattered data and generic leads. Their AI-driven strategy aims to synthesizes data across departments and solve this “scattershot” approach. “If you've got an account team of 20 people from Dell focusing on an enterprise customer, someone might be trying to sell laptops while another pushes storage and another tries to sell a server.” Orchestrating this is hugely complex. 

With generative AI trained on all Dell’s CRM data, it’s able to create detailed briefings for salespeople, showing key customer interactions. Now, sales are armed with context and insights that speak directly to the client’s unique needs. “We’ve got to the point where it’s helping us win opportunities. It can review the deal, advise on where we can provide a more tailored experience, and tell us why the deal might be lost.”

Event excellence

Ahead of a major event in Germany this year with 5,000 attendees, Dell’s sales reps faced the challenge of personalizing conversations with each visitor. “If I'd asked marketing to write 5,000 meeting plans just in case someone turns up at the booth, they’d have baulked,” says Elliott. Using generative AI, Dell’s marketing team could summarize all recent customer interactions, including business priorities, and align them with key product announcements. This information was condensed into a one-page briefing note, accessible via the salespeoples’ tablets. “When a customer from Boeing approached the booth, we could look up prompts for what we should talk to them about. It was all right there on the handset.” 

“If you’re not making content accessible to generative AI, you may have shot yourself in the foot.”

Amplifying the marketing message

As generative AI becomes more prevalent, marketing now has a new target audience and a new question to answer: ChatGPT. Today, AI-powered tools are not just consumers of data – they're digital gatekeepers, funnelling which content reaches human buyers, and thus are increasingly influencing decision-makers. 

For years, Dell's marketing department populated their website and social media channels with content, with some questioning who was going to read it.  But as it turns out, the real audience was artificial intelligence. “Now, when a customer goes onto ChatGPT and asks, ‘What’s PowerFlex?’ or ‘Why is Dell Storage different?’, it answers those questions with incredible accuracy and quality.” 

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT disseminate your message for free. “If you’re not making content accessible to AIs, you may have shot yourself in the foot. And if your competition is doing it, they’ve already amplified their message.”

“You need a human in the loop to ensure quality and avoid AI hallucinations.”

The human touch 

At its core, Dell’s client engagement still relies on personal connections – conversations, relationships, and human intuition. Despite the technological prowess of generative AI, Elliott emphasizes the importance of human judgement. “These generative AIs do something that other computer systems don't do – make stuff up. You need a human in the loop to ensure quality and avoid ‘AI hallucinations’.” 

By harnessing generative AI, Dell is redefining client engagement and elevating personalization to a once unimaginable level. The question isn’t whether generative AI will revolutionize the industry, but rather how companies will adapt and embrace this shift, ensuring that human creativity and insight remain at the core of their strategies.

In the end, the future isn’t just about technology; it’s about the people who harness it. “The most successful will be those who use AI to augment what they do today, not replace it.”

Learn more about generative AI in marketing, as well as how to elevate your ABM strategy to see better returns, in our Global Account-Based Marketing Benchmark report.