Dell execs sound alarm with consumer comments originally appeared on TheStreet.

Jeff Clarke was feeling the love.

Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Dell Technologies  (DELL) , was giving analysts the rundown on the tech company's first-quarter report.

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The report included a backlog of orders for confirmed artificial intelligence systems valued at $14.4 billion.

"We love where the backlog is," Clarke said during the Round Rock, Texas, computer maker's earnings call. "It's healthy."

He said Dell was off to a good start "but we have much in front of us."

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"The customer deployments that we have in front of us are large, they’re complex, they have very detailed scheduled deliveries," Clarke said. "There’s lots of dependencies on this. We’ve talked about this business being lumpy and nonlinear."

While AI momentum remained strong, he said, "given the scale of these opportunities, variability and timing and choices around technology, the inherent nonlinear nature of demand and associated shipments is likely to persist."

Dell's fiscal-first-quarter earnings missed Wall Street expectations, but the revenue number beat estimates and the forecast for the current quarter was stronger than Wall Street expected.

Clarke told analysts that Dell executed very well in the quarter, "achieving growth across our core markets." Demand for AI-optimized servers was "exceptionally strong," he said.

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Dell built "on the momentum discussed in February and further [demonstrated] that our differentiation is winning in the marketplace," he said, referring to the company's previous quarterly report.

"We had over $12 billion in AI orders this quarter alone, which will drive significant revenue growth and EPS," he said.

Still, Clarke said "the consumer market remains challenged."

"Consumer revenue declined 19% and the industry pricing remained competitive," he said.

Yvonne McGill, Dell's chief financial officer, said the company was expecting "subseasonal performance in traditional server and storage, our larger profit pools that provide scale, as customers evaluate their IT [spending] for the year given the dynamic [macroeconomic] environment."

"We saw strong performance across small and medium business and large enterprise," she said. "In consumer, the demand environment remains soft and profitability remains challenged."