COMMISSIONED As the AI era unfolds, I have been reflecting on my journey in the tech industry. What’s happening with AI at the edge right now reminds me of the early days of the internet, when the potential seemed limitless, but the path was unclear. Similarly, edge computing and AI are at a pivotal moment — with vast potential waiting to be unlocked on the other side.
Right now, AI at the edge is revolutionizing business operations across all industries. While compute-intensive AI training typically takes place on large, powerful infrastructure stacks in a cloud, colocation or data center environment, AI inferencing needs to happen close to where data is generated and decisions get made — at the edge. AI inferencing is the stage where the trained model applies what it has learned to real-world scenarios to make predictions or decisions. Generative AI relies on AI inferencing to generate new content, making it a crucial component for GenAI to function and produce meaningful outputs.
While GenAI is capturing all the headlines, right now it’s AI inferencing that is driving the majority of the growth at the edge. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that IDC is predicting a surge of hardware spending at the edge that will be double the pace of data center and cloud investments, with a quarter of new infrastructure deployed to edge locations. 451 Research concurs, predicting that 62 percent of data compute will reside in edge environments within the next few years.
Running AI inferencing at the edge provides the low latency required for real-time decisions. For example, if you’re riding in an autonomous vehicle, your life may depend on a split-second decision. You can’t wait for data to go to the cloud and back. AI inferencing at the edge also optimizes costs by avoiding the need to transfer gigabytes of data over the web to the cloud or a core data center and back. And it can enhance operational efficiency for geographically distributed locations with different needs than the home office.
Many organizations with extensive edge environments – such as manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers and utilities – are in the beginning phases of thinking about and planning for AI. It’s important to identify the challenges that you would like to solve at the edge and then start to work toward an efficient way to deploy, secure and manage your edge AI over time.
You will also need to consider the unique demands of edge computing. Unlike the controlled environments of data centers, colocation facilities or clouds, the edge presents a diverse set of challenges that need to be addressed for edge AI deployments to be successful. For example, edge IT tends to have a distributed footprint, different environmental conditions, different data sources, much less IT support and a wide attack surface that can be difficult to protect.
This is where Dell NativeEdge comes into the picture. It’s an innovative edge operations software platform designed to streamline and secure edge operations. The platform enables you to bring AI to the edge, faster and simpler, so you can rapidly deploy and manage edge solutions without compromising security or efficiency.
In an edge environment with diverse infrastructure, NativeEdge helps you securely onboard and provision devices with zero touch and Zero Trust. You can then orchestrate AI applications and workloads with other infrastructure as well as other virtual and container environments. In addition to NativeEdge, Dell offers an extensive portfolio of technologies and solutions designed with the edge in mind so that you can easily deploy your AI, at scale, at the edge.
Running AI inferencing at the point of data creation enables real-time, intelligent insights at the point of decision. This is a winning combination that is driving an explosion of AI inferencing at the edge.
To learn more, check out Dell.com/NativeEdge and watch the Capitalize on Your Edge with AI webinar where Alison Biers and I walk you through the business cases, uses cases and technical requirements for edge AI along with step-by-step demos of Dell NativeEdge in action. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast or a business leader, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
Chhandomay Mandal is director of edge marketing solutions at Dell Technologies.
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