Alum eyes the future of service operations

As a senior advisor at Dell Technologies, Muhammad Shafiul Munir (MBA ’25) is advancing the future of global service operations. 

Working in program management, Munir ensures that Dell’s massive customer base — millions of commercial and consumer clients — can obtain troubleshooting assistance for a range of products, from digital equipment like laptops, docking stations and mouses to digital infrastructure tools like servers and data storage products. 

“All our products are connected,” Munir says. “When a customer is buying physical equipment, they are also buying services like pro support or hardware assistance, so we help them with all of these items.”

Originally from Bangladesh, Munir completed an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering before joining British American Tobacco, where he worked for 8 years in manufacturing supply chain. His work took him throughout Southeast Asia to countries including Indonesia, Singapore and Papua New Guinea and allowed him to develop the global business mindset important for his role at Dell.

“I’ve worked with people of probably 15-20 nationalities,” he says. “That made me really respectful of other people’s cultures. I can appreciate everyone’s differences and the strength that comes through diversity.” 

Munir’s love of other cultures came in handy when he decided to leave behind a successful career in Bangladesh and travel to North America to pursue a graduate degree in business. Though leaving his job back home was risky, Munir decided that the chance to attend Tulane was worth it.

“My wife and I both had stable careers,” he says. “But I was seeing how the business world was changing, and I thought I definitely needed to improve my business understanding as well as my understanding of data analytics. From that point, I started looking for MBA programs in the United States where I could find a specific focus on business analytics and where I could hone my commercial equipment and business skills in general.” 

In moving to New Orleans, Munir and his wife were venturing into the unknown. 

“I had travelled internationally, but I had never been to New Orleans,” Munir says. “It was definitely a challenge at first, but everyone at Tulane was super nice and helped us get settled.

“We ended up really enjoying our time in the United States, and we’ve done a lot of traveling,” he says. “In the last two years, I covered 26 states and 20 National Parks.” 

Today, Munir is using the data analytics insights he learned at Freeman to help position Dell as a leader in modern service operations.

“In this age of AI and data, we are trying to get ahead of the game,” Munir says. “My team is modernizing service operations with the help of AI. We’re figuring out how we can involve AI in our work and make data-driven decisions. We’re thinking about automating processes, and we’re trying to help our customers get their services more efficiently.”

Key to this automation process are Dell’s innovative solutions and adoption of upcoming technologies which are being disruptive in many ways.

“We are working on automated service gateways driven by AI and agentic, that are intelligent, multilingual and user-friendly,” Munir says. “These tools are catering to different customer troubleshooting applications with high efficiency.”

“In working with customers, we keep track of how and why a product is failing,” he adds. “We work closely with engineering and product management team so they can think through how to make the products better. We want customers to get the best possible version of our products.” 

While Munir enjoys helping individual customers solve their problems, he keeps a wide perspective and an eye toward the future. 

“One of my favorite parts of my job is strategic business analysis,” he says. “In working with teams and team leads, I synthesize their feedback and provide reports to leadership. In this way, I’m helping leaders make important decisions that will have global impact. We’re looking into the future and thinking about what’s going to happen years from now—in 2030, for example.” 

He’s also been thinking about what the future might look like for today’s students.       

“Students need to understand AI,” he says. “Already, they can use AI in many different ways. They might use it for skill improvement, management tasks like organizing a calendar, coding, or sending emails. But it’s also important for students to understand the concepts behind AI. They need to understand prompt engineering. They need to have a grasp of how AI works, how large language models work and how agentic AI operates behind the scenes.”

“The world of AI is changing so quickly,” he says. “I’m still learning a lot every day.”