AI Pilots Are Dead. Now What? Dell Explains.

GPUs don’t create value. Enterprise AI does—when it’s built the right way.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Allen Clingerman of Dell Technologies and Matt Halcomb of World Wide Technology break down why the next phase of enterprise AI won’t be won by chasing GPUs or spinning up one-off pilots—but by building real AI factories grounded in data, strategy, and execution.

They introduce Dell’s AI Data Platform as an operating model for production-grade artificial intelligence—one that starts with use-case clarity, not silicon. The conversation reframes the AI factory as a system that aligns people, process, data, security, and infrastructure to deliver repeatable outcomes at scale.

A major theme: bring artificial intelligence to the data, not the other way around. With most enterprise data still on-prem and regulations tightening around sovereignty and locality, flexible architectures that span data center, cloud, and edge—and remain silicon-diverse—are becoming non-negotiable.

The message to leaders is blunt: slow down long enough to design with intent, then move fast with purpose—or risk building rigid AI monuments that never deliver ROI.

More about this week's guests:

Matt Halcomb is a Principal Solutions Architect for Data Center Technologies at World Wide Technology, with over 25 years of experience in enterprise IT, including 17+ years at WWT. He works within WWT’s Global Solutions Development team, designing and deploying next-generation infrastructure in the Advanced Technology Center. His expertise spans compute, storage, software-defined, and composable architectures, with a focus on scalable, sustainable, production-ready platforms.

Matt's top pick: The AI Proving Ground: Empowering IT Teams to Drive Their Organization's AI Success

Allen Clingerman is Chief Technology Strategist & Partner AI Officer for Global Channel at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. With more than 25 years of award-winning experience, he is an achievement-driven IT and technical sales leader known for translating enterprise architecture strategy into measurable business outcomes. Allen partners with customers to design scalable AI and infrastructure solutions that move organizations from vision to real-world results.

Allen's top pick: AI-Powered Customer Success: The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.