Dell’s new Irish head has a sense of deja vu. But in this case it’s not an illusion of memory, because Jason Ward really has been here before. In fact, as the new head of Dell’s operations in the north of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Ward is going back to his roots in more than one way. Not only is he also managing director of Dell Technologies Ireland, a job he left two years ago, he will also run Dell’s business in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and the Baltics. Among his previous roles was head of enterprise for Dell in the Nordics.
So it is quite familiar territory. But this time around, it comes with extra responsibility – and new technologies to deal with, namely artificial intelligence.
You get the impression Ward hadn’t intended on returning to the Irish business so soon, but Catherine Doyle’s departure in June to lead Microsoft’s Irish business forced a change. Still, he is enthusiastic about the future. He always takes a role for two or three years before looking for a new challenge, he says, drawing inspiration from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
“Hoffman wrote a really good book called The Alliance. He talks about tours of duty as you work with an organisation – moving from either geographies, locations, departments or areas within the business to learn, challenge yourself. I’ve sort of always adopted that philosophy.
“I’m curious and I’d like to be challenged, so I think I’d get a little bit bored if I was doing the same thing day in, day out after a couple of years.”
Things are certainly changing at a fast pace. AI is altering the face of the business, both for customers and Dell itself. The technology is now at the root of everything Dell is developing for the future. AI PCs, servers to run applications, software to help businesses take advantage of the technology.
The company has been in Ireland for 30 years. Once heavily involved in manufacturing here, the business has transformed since the dark days of 2009, when Dell announced it would move manufacturing from Limerick to Poland, shedding 1,900 jobs in the process.
Dell now employs more than 4,500 people here, more than at its peak of manufacturing in Ireland. And if things go as Ward hopes, the new generation of AI tools will help fuel that further here.
“The company is continuously transforming itself,” he says. “It’s embracing new technology, new innovation and, particularly now with what’s happening in Gen AI, Ireland is going to be a pretty cool spot to be when it comes to innovation. A lot of large technology companies gravitate towards Ireland, so I think a lot of incubation around AI will perhaps happen in Ireland.”
But, he warns, Ireland is on the brink of missing out on this large opportunity. The problem? Data centres, or the lack thereof. Dell may not own data centres, but it provides infrastructure for them.
Scandinavia has become a hub for data centres in Europe, with companies such as Meta and Google locating key facilities in the cooler climate. Ireland too has attracted much investment from data centre companies, although a recent pushback against the facilities has seen the number of approvals slow.
Much of the debate on data centres has centred on energy needs, but Ward isn’t convinced we are approaching it correctly.
“We really need to seriously consider how we review our planning around data centres, fast-tracking – they are going to be a critical component of every country’s infrastructure in the years ahead. In Ireland, we’ve got lots of wind, lots of hydro, wave energy that we should be utilising to power these data centres. And I think expediting planning permission in those areas is critical.
“The fact that we have all of that at our fingertips, if we don’t embrace that, capitalise on it, we’ll definitely miss a huge opportunity.”
AI is only expected to increase the demand for data centres as companies turn to the power-hungry technology. Dell is in a unique position to take advantage of the coming AI revolution, Ward says.
“I think the market is early stages. In Ireland, small business, the Government or banks, they’re testing the border with Gen AI at the moment,” says Ward. “That wave of enterprise AI spend, we see a huge amount of spend in that space, and that’s where somebody like Dell, with the full portfolio we have, can help customers accelerate the benefits they get from AI.”
While Dell is capitalising on the technology for its clients, AI is also helping Dell’s own business. The company has built virtual assistants for support teams, trained on the years of expertise that Dell has built up. Ward says developers and coders are saving up to 40 per cent of their time, using AI tools to automate certain tasks. That frees them up to work on more high-value work.
“It’s very hard to get really high-trained quality software engineers so, for us, freeing up their time from doing mundane quality checking, recoding into areas of building new innovation into our products, we’re actually bringing products to market quicker,” says Ward. “We’re repurposing the engineers to drive more value out of our products and actually build new products.”
In Limerick, Dell is using its facilities to showcase how AI can benefit its customers, from automotive customers looking to develop and test new engines and vehicles to healthcare companies that want to analyse MRIs or develop new drugs through the use of digital twin technology. “You can develop it in a matter of days and weeks as opposed to months and years,” he says.
AI is facing some challenges, however. In the EU, there has been a push in recent years to regulate the new technology, with the AI Act coming into effect in August. But that approach has its opponents.
The accusations that the EU is hampering innovation have been coming from different quarters. “America innovates, Europe regulates” is often used as an indictment of Europe’s failure to keep pace and come up with innovations of its own. Ward doesn’t see it that way, however.
“I think this is probably the most important time that the EU regulates,” says Ward. “The computational power of these large language models today is probably the weakest and dumbest that they’re ever going to be [today]. They’re going to get better and better over the next couple of years. The compute power pointed at these large language models is increasing at a scale we’ve never seen before.”
That means what is coming down the line will be significantly more powerful than the current crop of AI models, and while that brings more potential, it also brings further risk.
A recent study into the capabilities of AI showed some flaws in the guardrails that had been put in place by companies themselves. While asking for instructions on the development of napalm triggered the safeguards of the systems and was blocked, asking the AI to role-play as their grandma, to tell a story used to help them fall asleep – in this case, the steps for making napalm – was not.
An outside perspective in developing the right guardrails could help prevent this situation in future.
“The great thing about the EU in my mind is they’re pushing to ensure there’s guardrails around Gen AI and AGI. Because if you’re the most powerful nation state, or if you’re the largest IT company with the biggest balance sheet, you’re going to determine where the investment goes around these large language models,” says Ward. “Then we get into the whole recursive training of AI models, where they can independently train themselves, become more powerful. Regulation will be far more beneficial than leaving it all unregulated.”
Ward points to some of the earliest proponents of AI, including DeepMind co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis, who believe that guardrails and regulation are critical, and that the owners of the large language models are open around how they develop the models and the power they have.
He compares the current push to regulation to the role played by global, independent agencies that were created in the aftermath of the Cold War to regulate nuclear arms.
“I think the EU has got it right; regulation is going to be really important, and the right guardrails are going to be critical to how this whole technology evolves into the future,” he says.
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