Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver the rapid expansion of IT demand ushered in through digital innovation. “It's a scale issue,” says John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies. “Without autonomous operations, it becomes impossible to keep up with the growing opportunity to become a more digital business using human effort alone.”

The main hurdle to autonomous operations, says Roese, is more psychological than technological. “You have got to be open-minded to this concept of rebalancing the work between human beings and the machine environments that exist both logically and physically,” he says. “If you're not embracing and wanting it to happen and you're resisting it, all the products and solutions we can deliver to you will not help.”

Technology and infrastructure-driven AI and ML discussions are expanding beyond IT into finance and sales—meaning, technology has direct business implications. “Selling is a relationship between you and your customer, but there’s a third party—data and artificial intelligence— that can give you better insights and the ability to be more contextually aware and more responsive to your customer, says Roese. “Data, AI, and ML technologies can ultimately change the economics and the performance of all parts of the business, whether it be sales or services or engineering or IT.”

And as companies gather, analyze, and use data at the edge, autonomous operations become even more of a business necessity. “Seventy percent of the world's data is probably going to be created and acted upon outside of data centers in the future, meaning in edges,” says Roese. “Edge and distributed topologies have huge impacts on digital transformation, but we also see that having a strong investment in autonomous systems, autonomous operations at the edge is actually almost as big of a prerequisite…      to make it work.”

Show notes and references

What is autonomous operations?

Perspectives on the impact of autonomous operations