Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was fired up during his April 9 keynote address at Intel Vision 2024. In a room full of AI visionaries in the “silicon desert” of Phoenix, Arizona, his energy was akin to a car enthusiast extolling the virtues of hot rod mods rather than a tech CEO discussing new edge processors, AI PCs, and data center equipment.

Calling this “maybe the most intense period of innovation that the technology industry has ever been part of” and claiming that now is when every company becomes an AI company, he offered sage advice on how enterprise companies can best harness AI to get to real value realization.

Intel is positioning itself as an AI leader by responding to the demands of the rapidly growing momentum in customer adoption of AI with an acceleration of high-performance computing. The name of the conference was “AI Everywhere”. It centered on some impressive new Intel products that will enable customers to take advantage of generative AI in their data centers, at the edge, and on PCs.

Bringing AI Processing Power to Data Center Environments 

Data centers are the central hub for IT operations and equipment, where data is stored, managed, and accessed. They house a company’s most critical and proprietary assets, including servers, storage systems, and networking hardware.

At the conference, Intel unveiled the Intel® Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator. Primarily meant for data center use, it is specially designed to provide high-performance, efficient, and scalable AI processing power to deep learning and generative AI models. A key component in Intel’s strategy to help businesses get ready for AI, it helps companies prepare their infrastructure for the high needs of AI workloads.

Untapped Knowledge: AI at the Edge

Bandwidth and cloud computing are expensive resources. And with the heightened regulations for privacy and security, the edge is set to become the dominant AI workload resource. Not only does it cut costs and increase security, but by bringing processing closer to where the data is generated, it also allows for more responsive applications (as Gelsinger noted, “You can’t change the speed of light”).

Powering AI-enabled Edge Devices

Among other developments in AI for edge computing, Intel announced the new Intel Core Ultra Processors for Edge. Designed to power AI-enabled edge devices across various verticals, some examples where they could be of benefit include:

• Retail: Powering smart point-of-sale systems of kiosks with enhanced inventory management and customer service applications.

• Manufacturing: Allowing predictive maintenance through integration into monitoring equipment.

• Healthcare: Boosting diagnostic capabilities with complex medical image processing in real-time.

RAG: Getting to the Real Value with Generative AI + Proprietary Data

AI at the edge also enables companies to take advantage of a largely untapped but highly valuable resource: the massive proprietary data sets generated today. As shown in a live demo, imagine the possibilities when you can ask your large language model (LLM) open-source application questions and have it respond with the knowledge of the internet combined with proprietary company knowledge.

This is enabled with a retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) architecture, which packages your proprietary data for complex queries in open standard LLM environments. Gelsinger called RAG one of the most important workflows for corporations to take advantage of the combined power of their data with generative AI.

A Productivity Boost Approaching 50%: Don’t Underestimate AI PCs

As we’ve been saying for a while, don’t wait to upgrade your PC fleet. AI PCs are the way to go. Not only is Windows 10 end of life coming, but some impressive AI use cases can help your workforce see significant gains in productivity (up to 47% improvement). AI PCs offer better security, battery life, and new AI use cases like Microsoft Copilot. It seems like every application is going through an AI makeover, incorporating new contextualization, summarization, and translation capabilities, to name a few. Intel Core Ultra helps you reap the benefits.

I echo Gelsinger’s sentiments during the speech — if your head of IT doesn’t have an AI PC refresh plan in place, what are they waiting for? (We can help.)

How Compucom Helps Customers Get AI-ready

With new and innovative products becoming available from our OEM partners, we look forward to helping our customers benefit from next-gen data center, edge computing, and AI PC offerings for the enterprise.

Compucom can make product recommendations and map out a best-fit technology solution to get your infrastructure and workplace devices ready for AI. Our focus is delivering complete technology solutions — the right products that will work best in your environment, backed by the right services, to provide the best user experience and keep your workforce future-ready.