Heather Lockhart • CMO

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. 

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Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Compucom and Intel: A combined Focus on the Modern Digital Workplace 

Our Long-Term Partnership With Intel and the Evolving Workplace 

For over 25 years, Intel and Compucom have partnered to deliver IT solutions for enterprise organizations while focusing on the needs of the evolving workforce; these days, the unique needs of hybrid workers are top-of-mind.

Of course, more remote work means less oversight, so employee success is now more heavily defined by outputs — performance far outweighs presenteeism. And this greater autonomy allows workers to organize their days in ways that improve their work-life balance.

Eager to retain this flexibility, employees understand that it is on them to effectively manage their time and produce results. To this end, workers expect to be well-equipped for productivity and collaboration, enabling them to meet or exceed expectations as they work in the office, in the field, from home, or move between sites. 

Compucom, Intel, and vPro 

In 2007, well before the push to hybrid work, Intel created the vPro brand to provide IT departments with an efficient way to remotely manage and support multiple PCs. PCs on the vPro platform have a vPro-enabled processor, chipset, and BIOS, with several supporting features.

During the same year, Compucom and Intel built a highly successful tool together called End-user Orchestrator, a Windows Desktop remote administration tool to be used by our service desk agents and field techs for providing remote support. Now, nearly 16 years later, the latest vPro platform is poised to deliver even more benefits to our customers.

A Partnership for Today and Into the Future 

For many in today’s workforce, the first impression of their company won’t be arriving at a shiny office tower and stepping into a well-appointed office. Instead, it will be opening a shipping box, setting up their laptop, and connecting remotely from their spare room/home office.

From providing concierge-style device-as-a-service for provisioning and device management to operational support, our partnership with Intel has continued to grow and deliver results for our customers.

For today and the coming years, Intel technologies will continue to be a great fit for the solutions and services that Compucom provides to enterprise organizations. By working together, we will continue to drive improved user experiences and provide high-performing, well-managed, and well-supported technology so our customers will have a leg up over the competition.  

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For companies across industries, worker expectations have grown exponentially. Many who enjoy the flexibility of remote and hybrid work expect seamless technology and tools. Meanwhile, their peers in-office also expect efficient technology, processes, and support.  

“Productivity, minimizing downtime, and enabling employees to be able to access things when they need it and how they need is really paramount.”

Says Troy Baldwin, product management director at CompuCom. “It’s always been important, but Covid accelerated the need.” 

In this new norm of an increasingly distributed workforce, it’s critical for enterprises to get the employee experience right. Yet many companies struggle with employee engagement, satisfaction, and turnover due in part to outdated technology or persistent roadblocks to change.  

With the right solutions and technology, however, enterprises can ensure their workers are engaged and happy, and have experiences that are productive, connected, secure, and seamless. Ultimately, happy workers lead to better outcomes for companies.  

The Challenges

Workers across sectors continue to have abundant choices in the job market as the Great Resignation continues, while employee expectations have drastically shifted. 

Some 50% of respondents to a Gartner survey said the pandemic changed their expectations for their employer. When employees talk about their on-the-job frustrations, outdated and hard-to-use technology almost always tops the list.  

Employees want their work devices and tools to be modern, up-to-date, compliant, secure, and hassle-free.And workers want this seamless experience from day one. They expect a smooth and hassle-free onboarding process that gets them up to speed and working right away. When their equipment breaks or malfunctions, they need an immediate fix, and for outdated equipment to be replaced without effort on their end or long wait times. 

“From day one, people have to have the tools to at least start to function—a computer, email,” Baldwin says. “Folks are leaving because they didn’t have the tools they needed or the tools they wanted.” 

For companies that fail to address a poor employee experience, there are often significant consequences. Enterprises may suffer from the high cost of continuously having to recruit and onboard new staff. 

Replacing staff members also isn’t a quick or easy task. By some estimates, the average time to hire last about 43 days, and for some, it’s much longer. That’s time that could be better spent creating new, engaging experiences for current employees. 

On the flip side, there’s a significant upside and bottom-line impact to having engaged, productive, and happy employees. Employees that are satisfied with their work help maintain customer relationships, improve business outcomes, and offer better customer experiences.  

Despite how critical seamless technology and processes are for employees, however, IT talent comes at a premium these days. It’s difficult for IT departments to keep up with their day-to-day requirements, let alone deliver a seamless employee experience.  

The Solution

The good news is that managed services can simplify hardware refreshes and remote monitoring, taking some of the burden off IT. 

Compucom’s Modern Endpoint Management for the Modern Age helps companies shift from an office-centric approach to a work-from-anywhere model. It’s a concierge-style single source for provisioning, device management, and operational support.  Baldwin went on to say:

“When you package services together, companies have a much better experience. It enables the full breadth and understanding of the environment that’s very difficult for customers to do independently.” 

Using the service, companies can seamlessly manage devices’ complete life cycle, from procurement to end-of-life when devices are retired, resold, or replaced. The service makes remote monitoring, fixing, and managing all employee devices easy, including Windows, macOS, mobile, and BYO devices.  

Employees can access files and apps from anywhere, while security is ensured regardless of the multiple work locations. Onboarding becomes seamless, too, with distribution to new employees of pre-equipped devices containing applications and tools.  

As part of the holistic solution, Compucom has a long-standing partnership with Intel on the vPro platform, which allows for remote access of machines so repairs can be performed at any time.  

By tapping into the vPRO platform, enterprises lower maintenance costs when technicians don’t have to repair on-site or equipment doesn’t need to be sent in for repair. Still, dispatch support can be sent to a worker’s residence when necessary and a replacement device readily provided during repair to minimize downtime. 

Analytics tools and automation are a key part of the solution. If an event or an issue occurs on an employee’s device, an automation can be proactively kicked off to resolve the problem before the user experiences an impact. 

“We’re also constantly learning and constantly collecting all this telemetry data to understand where there’s opportunities for automation,” Baldwin says. 

Sustainability Savings

The journey to net zero is also furthered when rolling out gas-powered, CO2-emitting service vehicles for service becomes less necessary. What’s more, companies can also save energy with optimized power state management, turning devices on and off remotely to match usage patterns, reducing unneeded energy consumption and lowering utility costs.  

Compucom’s Device as-a-Service component includes flexible equipment leasing, “zero touch” remote device configuration, and convenient repair, refurbishment, and IT Asset Disposition services.Companies that have embraced the solution have: 

• Reduced support needs by up to 40%
• Lowered maintenance costs
• Improved staff productivity  
• Streamlined employee onboarding by reducing device setup time by up to 90%
• Created a better overall user experience  

One large financial company that ultimately approached Compucom for help heard from employees that log-in start-up times were taking 20-30 minutes each morning. 

“That’s a huge productivity loss for employees and the organization,” Baldwin says. “We’re at a place now where folks are not going to put up with that.”  

Compucom put analytics tools in place for the financial company to collect data to evaluate start-up times. They found the delayed start-up claims were true. Highly skilled employees were experiencing some of the largest productivity losses. 

Because of the analysis, the company implemented a holistic solution that included adjusting scripts and replacing aged-out equipment. The solution ultimately drastically improved start-up times and resulted in enhanced employee productivity.  

The Bottom Line

In today’s distributed workplace, where employees have more choice than ever when it comes to employers, it’s clear that a seamless experience with technology is no longer a nice to have—it’s mission critical. 

Companies that want to retain staff and ultimately provide the best possible service to customers will benefit from a managed service like Compucom’s Modern Endpoint Management for the Modern Age.

Learn more about Intel vPRO here.

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