Enterprise platform rebuilt as Dell AI Factory grows usage

Dell Technologies Inc. opened its annual gathering in Las Vegas this month with the news that it had added 1,000 AI Factory customers globally in a single quarter, bringing its total base to over 5,000 users. The announcement revealed a basic truth: AI adoption is moving rapidly, and the enterprise platform must be swiftly rebuilt to keep up.

This message was reinforced by Dell founder and chief executive Michael Dell (pictured) in his keynote remarks and subsequent interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. Data querying and orchestration are priorities now in the world of agentic AI, and future business success will depend on developing and managing the infrastructure to support them.

“We’ve been talking about data at Dell, at Dell EMC and Dell Technologies for decades,” Dell told theCUBE. “Now all the data’s coming to life, and we’ve got the infrastructure solutions as a leading company in the space to make it all happen. You see the incredible breadth of solutions bringing it all together at the rack level — all the models, the frontier models, the open models, the specialized models. It’s happening in the client device. It’s happening in factories, in retail stores, in hospitals, in laboratories.”

Reporting from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, theCUBE explored how Dell and its ecosystem partners are generating rack-scale AI factories and high-performance storage to power real-world enterprise workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Michael Dell:

Here are three key insights you may have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

Insight #1: An effective hybrid enterprise platform will be more important than ever in driving successful AI.

A number of Dell’s announcements this month notably targeted support for hybrid architecture. Dell’s alliances with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Nvidia Corp. have been geared toward not just delivering processing power on-premises, but in edge environments as well, where AI use cases are expected to grow.

“We believe we have to build out a hybrid platform for our customers — whether it runs at the edge, the core or in a hyperscaler,” said Melissa Crichton, vice president of server and AI solutions at Dell, during an interview with theCUBE. “That’s how we think about the AI factory; creating that enterprise scalable model for our customers to start small, scale to the largest models … and creating that orchestration and abstraction layer to move workloads where it’s best suited.”

Dell enhanced its AI Factory offering with Nvidia through a new solution that meshes Dell workstations and Nvidia’s NemoClaw to run AI agents locally, outside of cloud infrastructure. Enterprise adoption of agents requires smarter use of hybrid architectures, according to John Roese, global chief technology officer and chief AI officer at Dell.

“I was introducing people to the word ‘agentic’ about a year ago,” he told theCUBE. “Now we’ve realized that this idea of fully autonomous AI systems — of really shifting work into the machine layer — is now very real. At the same time … the word ‘tokennomics’ is now in our vernacular because we’ve realized that when you put these things into production at scale, the cost of different patterns of what you deploy are incredibly variable. Having a smart, intelligent way to use your hybrid infrastructure, to put the right workload in the right place to use the right model, is actually not just a nice-to-have — it’s required.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with John Roese:

Insight #2: An AI-native mindset is transforming operating models across the enterprise.

One of the key themes to emerge from Dell Technologies World is that enterprises will have to become AI-native. This will mean building an operating model where intelligence flows through every workflow and decision in the business, according to Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell.

“Everybody has to become an AI-native company — not in the context of ‘I was born in the AI era.’ You need to be able to implement that operating model,” he said in a conversation with theCUBE. “You need to be able to take that utility of intelligence and apply it everywhere. Those who figure that out are advantaged and will win in their respective marketplaces.”

This transition to AI-native is accompanied by changes in software development. What used to be an agile-driven methodology, project management that divides work into phases, is now being replaced with a spec-driven approach where specifications are treated as executable contracts which AI agents draw from for generating code.

“We see customers that are not thinking about remapping their processes and they’re simply dropping AI on top of current processes,” emphasized Arthur Lewis, president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell, during an appearance on theCUBE. “This is what gets them 10%, 15%, 20% productivity. But the customers that are remapping everything and then using AI — those are the AI-native customers. We’ve moved away from agile to something called spec-driven development. Spec-driven development is an entirely remapped workflow for the software development lifecycle, all built on agentic harness. Now you get into 10X, 20X, 30X productivity gain — this is what it means to be AI-native.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Jeff Clarke:

Insight #3: The AI era is moving into the age of agent management.

The market research firm Gartner has predicted that in the next two years, the average Fortune 500 firm will run over 150,000 AI agents. Even if that estimate turns out to be only half of what is forecast, it will still require significant work to manage autonomous production within an enterprise.

Dell’s role in providing IT infrastructure gives it visibility into this coming wave. “Clearly, it’s the year of agent management — helping both our customers and delivering [agents] internally as well,” noted Doug Schmitt, chief information officer of Dell and president of Dell Technologies Services, in an interview with theCUBE. “We’re seeing it live. We’re seeing it with our supply chain. We’re also seeing it with our development. Then, externally, what it’s going to do for healthcare, for education, all of these great opportunities.”

This will require Dell and other key IT vendors to supply the technology customers need to manage converging databases and hybrid capabilities within a stack that can channel data into agentic infrastructure. Dell’s partnership with Microsoft and a joint release of SQL Server to support the Dell Automation Platform are evidence of how leading industry players are responding, according to Bob Ward, principal architect at Microsoft.

“The key architecture for AI capabilities is integrating with things like embedding models for vector searching or chat completion models for AI agents. But we do it all inside the engine — the SQL Server Engine,” he told theCUBE. “We [formed a] partnership with Dell so that we can connect to anything on premises. I can connect to Azure Local, Dell, Nvidia factory. We just got a framework built in so it doesn’t matter where you’re running these AI models, we can easily integrate with it.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Doug Schmitt:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World, here’s our complete video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World 2026. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE