Modern Endpoint Manageability: From Virtual Remediation to AI PCs

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here at the Intel corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. Dan, I’m happy to be here. I know, based on that big smile, you’re happy to be here. And we are talking about our favorite topic and that is AI. And it’s just been incredible the past 18 months, the conversation. AI in the data center, AI at the edge, and everything in between. Iaas, PaaS and SaaS. It’s pretty exciting.

Daniel Newman: It started with this big sort of transformation going on. I think everybody, that at least we know, by now has played with a ChatGPT or some version of it. We’re seeing search being reborn, but we’re seeing that expand. It’s proliferating into the data center, it’s proliferating onto the devices, Pat, and it’s just such an exciting time. And I know it sometimes feels a little cliche, like we’re talking about AI. But I think what we’re really talking about is this transition from AI is a headline to AI is changing our lives in a really meaningful way that all of us can experience.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, that’s right. And the latest crop of devices with even AI smartphones and AI PCs has a lot of people talking, and here I’m going to do a plug for myself here. I like to do that.

Daniel Newman: Of course. Never.

Patrick Moorhead: I was on stage with Intel at CES in their big announcement with all the big PC OEMs that they had. And true in PCs, there’s multiple market to the PC market. There’s the consumer market, SMB and enterprise. And one thing that’s, by the way, had been in the headlines recently is the importance of PC manageability and how you manage a fleet of 50,000 PCs plus without having a tremendous amount of resources to do that. And I can’t think of two of the best people to talk about this is Novin and Dave from GoTo and Intel. Welcome to Six Five, first time guests. Great to have you.

Novin Kaihani: Great to be here.

Dave Campbell: Thanks so much.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, appreciate you both tuning in. You heard our little entree here, we set you up. And I think Pat’s point, I mean, whether it’s been challenges of keeping systems up and running and of course, optimizing systems, I think everybody’s got a little more tension on this endpoint management situation that’s going on. AI is of course going to play a role and be an enabler, but Dave, I’d love for you to share a little bit about how are you seeing the evolution of this endpoint management trend line that we’re talking about?

Dave Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. And when we think about where we are, especially for the enterprise, there’s been extreme transformation in terms of where we were 5, 10 years ago around basic device management and everything was about break-fix remote support, to where we see the world going. And at GoTo and with our customers, we’re really looking towards that endpoint management and unification as a key part of enabling our customers and companies to support their employees and their devices. And as you mentioned, just having to do that at scale across 50,000 or more devices is arguably a tremendous challenge and an opportunity, especially with the advancements in AI.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it really is. And it’s funny, I started in the PC industry a long, long time ago, 30 plus years ago, and endpoint management was exchanging floppy disks and then we evolved to CD-ROMs and literally you would go from PC to PC IT to manage everything. And what we can do today is incredible. Where a little bit in the run-up, I said this, but you can manage 50,000 PCs, you can see what’s happening. You can do predictive and proactive type of support. You can change files in and out. You can actually do updates as well. So it certainly has evolved, but with AI, of course, AI changes everything. And this is a great question for Novin. Where does AI and endpoint management intersect? What are some of the innovations that you see either here now or on the horizon?

Novin Kaihani: With AI coming into the enterprise, so much of what we’ve seen has actually been focused on content creation and productivity, but applying that same AI technology to IT, automating their workflows, delivering a better employee experience, a lot of what we see on the horizon is how you take the data off the device, the telemetry, and deliver insights back into IT so that you’re no longer in these manual workflows of trying to fix a device that the device is signaling its health and remediation begins to become automated on that device so that you’re constantly in this healthy device cycle rather than in this reactive state where you’re trying to sort through what the issues are, root cause them, get the data in order to remediate what you see on that device.

Patrick Moorhead: So it’s a real data game then. That’s where everything is going. So of course it would apply to endpoint management too.

Novin Kaihani: That’s right.

Daniel Newman: And Novin, Intel’s been very focused on this for some time, some of the innovations, vPro and helping commercial enterprises being able to do more. I know when there was a certain issue with a security vulnerability and the whole fix was running machine to machine. And Pat and I talked on one of our Six Five shows and we said there’s been technology for a long time that could have helped the situation. And so we won’t get into details, that’s not important right now, of that particular case. But companies like Intel have been trying to solve this problem for some time. I mean, Dave, when it comes to AI PCs though, because, heard me just say it, this isn’t totally new. How is AI going to contribute to evolving this and making this more available to everyone, democratizing this, and of course making sure companies take advantage of the technologies that both of your enterprises are building?

Dave Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. And when we think about what Novin hit on in terms of the power of data, it is the volume as well. And when we think about what AI brings to the table, it really allows things to get much more proactive and real time. And I think that’s one of the most interesting things that is on the table as we look at where we’re going to go moving forward because IT is going to be on a new precipice in terms of having to manage not just that end user experience, but they’re going to have to deal with a lot of the security issues and threats that are out there and probably at an increasing rate. And as AI comes into the picture, it’s going to create and unlock tremendous opportunities to be able to do things real time, highly secure, and maintain that entire user experience to keep business up and running.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it is funny how occurrences that pop up give us the reminder of just how important some things are. We kind of forget about some of these technologies if we’re in a bind or something like that. And this is just a great reminder of why endpoint management is critical and then finding the right technologies, the right PC platforms and the right semiconductors that go along with that. So it’s funny, with AI, we’re talking a lot in terms of sometimes we talk theoretically, like what could happen, right? What’s here right now that you can benefit from right now?

So I have to, Novin, you’re right in the middle of products and platforms, I know you both are talking to enterprises, but when is the right time? Enterprise purchase behavior is we put a checklist of what we want for our next purchase cycle. It literally is a checklist. And why should AI PCs be in there? Is it because they’re deriving value now or is this more like, “Hey, in four to five years, if you believe this is going to be real thing because this is how long you keep your PCs, you need to be doing those today”?

Novin Kaihani: It’s both, right? Because you want to make sure that your PC fleet in that four, five year timeframe can take advantage of a lot of the new software capabilities that are getting landed on that device. But even just now, we’re seeing a lot more of these AI models being run locally on that device taking advantage of the MPU that’s now part of the core platform. So it’s the hardware component, the models that get landed that deliver those use cases for IT, as we talked about, sort of the digital employee experience type use cases, automating the workflows, but then they have the software component to it as well. So it’s how we work together as a hardware vendor and a software platform with ISVs in the market to deliver that capability as a full solution. So that happens today and is going to get better throughout the life cycle of that device.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I like that you said that though too, because I think these partnerships and killer applications, and by the way, depending if it’s consumer, commercial, enterprise, there are different applications that are really going to drive this. But keeping your teams up and running, keeping them connected, obviously some of the great advantages of being able to have data local and secure and then having things go to the cloud as needed, there’s a lot of power considerations. There’s all kinds of reasons right now to do it.

So Novin, I want you to double-click on that. You started to insinuate like the roles. You’ve got IT managers, you’ve got leaders, directors, VPs, you’ve got CSOs, so you got security angles, you got CIOs, they’re all in this consideration phase around AI PCs. They’re kind of trying to demarcate between what is real, what is kind of future, because I won’t call it hype. I think everything’s going to happen, but do I buy now? Do I wait for the next generation? What are the things that you are suggesting and your partners are suggesting in that consideration phase to say, “Hey, it’s time to go to the AI PC platform?”

Novin Kaihani: Right. And as part of that, I think the time really is now. You’re seeing some of those use cases land on that device. When we think about unified endpoint management, you’re seeing a lot more automation with unified endpoint management that takes advantage of that MPU on that device. And so the way we see it is drive efficiency into the enterprise into IT. And so you want to begin doing that now. As we talked about some of the events that we’ve seen over the last few weeks, you want to be prepared for events like that. And that means enrolling those devices in your environment, taking advantage of those use cases versus waiting until they’re out more broadly to drive that efficiency into the enterprise.

Daniel Newman: Makes sense. And Dave, as we wrap up, I’m interested to have you expand a little bit upon what Novin just said. You lead enterprise. What is the sell on, sell in, the point of excitement that you’re creating to drive them to want to move to this AI PC?

Dave Campbell: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So today, a lot of our customers, we’re working with them to do exactly what you said, support their machines, keep them up and running, and avoid some of the outages and disruptions or cyber events that companies are dealing with every day. As we look to bring AI PCs into the environment, IT has to be prepared for that and they have to transform along with that shift. So it’s going to be essential for partnerships like GoTo and Intel to work together to make sure that the devices and the software are interoperable and it allows us to do great things with technology that’s out there in the realm today.

And I think IT really needs to think about being ready for how this is going to change their world over the coming years, because I think that’s going to be one of the biggest factors that’s going to unlock opportunities for IT to do more. Because you’re going to have AI in place doing real-time analysis and automation to do some self-healing and take care of the machines. It’s going to transform what IT is focused on to allow them to focus on managing large fleets of machines and staying on top of it to run business. And then it brings it right back to keeping the users up and running and allowing business to continue moving on.

Daniel Newman: Well, Dave, Novin, I want to thank you both. Very interesting topic. Love to chat more. Pat and I will be watching very closely as this AI PC trend enters the market. We’re going to be watching the units, we’re going to be listening and hearing from, of course, the partners, the ecosystem, the customers, and I’m sure we’ll be talking to you and or your companies very soon.

Novin Kaihani: Great. Thanks for having us.

Dave Campbell: Thank you.

Daniel Newman: And thanks, everyone, for tuning into this episode of The Six Five On the Road. We’re here at Intel headquarters. We’re talking AI, in this case, endpoint management and more about PCs entering the enterprise during the AI era. Stick with us for more. Subscribe. We appreciate you being part of our community. Bye-bye.