Dell Technologies World 2025 Keynote: Lowe’s, JPMorgan IT Execs Share AI Strategies

Senior editor and veteran reporter O’Ryan Johnson at MES Computing’s sister site CRN, is boots on the ground this week at the Dell Technologies World 2025 event. This article is based on Johnson’s coverage of the keynote address where IT executives from JPMorgan Chase and Lowe’s discussed their partnerships with Dell and how the companies are incorporating AI into their operations.

(Dell Technologies founder, chairman and CEO, Michael Dell on stage at Dell Technologies World with Seemantini Godbole, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer at Lowe’s. Courtesy: Dell Technologies)

Two IT executives took to the stage alongside Dell Technologies founder, chairman and CEO Michael Dell at the Dell Technologies World event on Tuesday.

Larry Feinsmith, head of global technology strategy, innovation and partnerships at JPMorgan Chase, and Seemantini Godbole, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer at Lowe’s, discussed their partnerships with Dell and dove into how AI is transforming their business operations.

‘Largest Enterprise Rollout Of Any Generative AI Application:’ Feinsmith

Feinsmith noted JPMorgan’s massive operations and how critical a role technology plays in its digital transformation.

“Our commercial and investment bank moves 10 trillion payments on any given day, which talks to our global systemic importance and our asset wealth management business that has $4 trillion under management. We operate in 100 markets globally with over 300,000 employees. That requires us to build and deliver technology at scale as well: 60,000 technologies, 44,000 software engineers, and exit by the data, 6,000 applications,” he said.

JPMorgan Chase has an $18 billion technology budget, Feinsmith said. That money is spent on forwarding the banking behemoth’s tech priorities, which are cybersecurity, modern infrastructure and leveraging AI across various applications.

(Michael Dell on stage with Larry Feinsmith. Courtesy: Dell Technologies)

Feinsmith focused on the company’s AI strategy and how partnering with Dell has helped JPMorgan Chase bring that strategy to fruition.

“Our LLM strategy ... is to use constellation models, both foundational and open, which requires a tremendous amount of compute in our data centers, in the public cloud and, of course, at the edge. And the one thing that’s constant, whether you’re training models, fine-tuning models, finding a great use case that has large-scale inferencing, or using these next-gen reasoning models, they all will drive compute. And we think Dell is incredibly well positioned to help JPMorgan Chase and other companies in their AI journey,” Feinsmith told the audience.

JPMorgan, Feinsmith said, has been using AI “for more than a decade” for use cases that include machine learning models for fraud, personalization, marketing and operations.

However, the company is using AI in new capacities.

“I want to go ahead and tell you some use cases we’re doing. The first one is what we call our large language model suite, LLM suite. We’ve rolled that out to 200,000 people at JPMorgan Chase, which we believe is the largest enterprise rollout of any generative AI application, and that’s used for QA summarization, content generation with our own data,” he said.

Data, he said, ultimately, is the “long pole in the tent and the cornerstone to achieve value from AI.”

AI has also aided JPMorgan Chase in streamlining internal IT operations.

“We’ve rolled out co-generation AI capabilities to 40,000-plus engineers, where we’ve seen as much as 20 percent productivity in the co-gen space, and we expect that to grow into all aspects of the software development life cycle,” Feinsmith said.

As to what’s on JPMorgan Chase’s AI road map: “The next exciting horizon is going to be using agents and reasoning models and how you orchestrate all of these agents working together. And we think, as we talked about before we came on, that if you’re using a reasoning model that’s thinking and planning and rethinking and then executing complex business processes end to end, there’s going to be a very big compute burden on that and an unbelievable opportunity for them,” he said.

“I’d like to quote our chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, who believes that this AI transformation, including GenAI, is as transformational as any technological invention we’ve seen over the last couple of 100 years: printed press, steam engine, electricity, computing and the internet, the opportunity here is unbelievable,” Feinsmith said

‘We are not in the business of building LLMs’ but ‘we are going to put AI in the hands of 300,000 associates’: Godbole

Godbole kicked off her remarks on stage by speaking about home improvement company Lowe’s’ digital transformation over the past seven years.

“When I came in about seven years ago, my boss, our CEO, chairman, Marvin Ellison, had come in, and then I came a couple of short months later,” she said. “Three weeks after I got into my job, our website crashed in 2018 on a Black Friday.”

Godbole went on to speak about how she helped lead the company’s tech journey from that literal black Friday of a website crash, to “putting AI in every associates’ hands across 300,000 associates and more than 1,700 stores.”

Lowe’s is banking big on AI, she said.

“For AI ... we have invested a lot ... where I don’t want the engineers to think about which LLM to use, how should I use it? It should simply be using an agent, API calls, and you should be able to call the foundry, and we’ll get you the right model deployed and answer your questions,” she said.

In partnership with Dell, Lowe’s has placed micro data centers in its retail stores.

“AI is following the data. And you know, more than our 1,700 stores ... that’s where the data is being generated. Our e-commerce business, of course, but these are the places where data is being generated. So, what we always thought is we’ll do a micro data center in the back of every store. We have four coverage Dell servers with Nvidia GPUs. ... Then we have two powered servers which are doing, from a perspective of SD-WAN, and then we have another dev server which is doing video analysis,” Godbole said.

Lowe’s has been using AI for quite some time already, she explained, but GenAI is a game-changer for the home improvement titan.

“Now that we have generative AI ... we are not in the business of building LLMs, so our first thought process was, how do we use this technology for the benefit of our associates, our store associates, our customers?” she said.

“We always thought that our store associates should look like super associates. When you guys go to the stores and ask them a question, they have to be able to help you, and you should feel like you got just a tremendous treatment. And that dream is so close, it’s in our hands now, at our fingertips with the generative AI technology and some of the things ... we have done in our stores. For example, we said that every store associate now has on his or her Zebra device, they have almost like a ChatGPT for home improvement. It’s really important that even if you’re an electrician and that morning you’re working in the garden center, you should be able to answer the questions of the customers, and that’s why the companion app that we have comes into picture.”

Godbole also spoke about Lowe’s road map with AI.

“We are deploying computer vision algorithms at the edge, and we are going to figure it out,” she said. “Let’s say you are in one of our aisles, and you’re looking at the product. Our stores are quite large ... so sometimes it’s difficult to just look around the corner and know there is an associate who can help you. So, let's say you're in an aisle. You’re kind of spending a couple of minutes and wondering, ‘Hey, I wish I had help.’ What’s going to happen ... is we are going to pick up those signals through computer vision, and we are going to know that there is a customer in a particular aisle waiting for help, and then Uber-style, we are going to send notifications to the associates in that department. They are going to get a notification on their Zebra device that there is a customer who needs help. They are going to press the button, like, ‘I am on my way,’ and they are going to come and help you,” she added.

“We are going to put AI in the hands of 300,000 associates,” she said.