The thoughts of Chairman Dell - the vision of an enterprise tech survivor as he navigates another industry transition into an agentic era

Michael Dell founded Dell Technologies with $1,000 in 1984 at the age of 19, going on to become the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on Fortune 500. Since then he’s been one of the most enduring thought-leaders in enterprise tech, someone whose view is well-regarded by his peers and industry onlookers alike. 

So when he declares: 

You have to step back and understand that we're shifting from calculating and computing to thinking and intelligence, which is just a fundamental change.

...that’s a statement that requires you to sit up and pay attention. He’s talking about AI, of course - it’s 2026, people, this is a standard requirement for any CEOs deserving their spurs! - but as noted above, these are words coming from the survivor of more than a few tech transitions over the past 40+ years. He goes on:

If you think about this ‘thinking intelligence platform’, you've got a $114 trillion economy. If you get a little bit of productivity improvement with AI tools, it's worth an enormous amount. And so while there's a ton of investing going on here, it's at least possible that the world is under-investing in this given its potential.

While the tech trends may move on, the heart of this vision remains constant - it alls need infrastructure to under-pin it, and that’s where Dell, the company, comes in. As Dell, the man, pitches it:

It turns out that you need a lot of what Dell Technologies has built over 42 years in terms of infrastructure capability, server, storage, networking, and the support and services, and supply chain, et cetera, to be able to deliver that. I think maybe 10% of customers maybe 15%, understand what this can do and the rest of them are still figuring it out. It takes time for all this to kind of happen in the real world.

Of course, as has been well-documented to Wall Street’s pearl-clutching horror, building out AI infrastructure costs money. There’s also a supply chain problem with demand far outstripping infrastructure availability, as the hyperscalers in particular have been quick to point out. We’ve been here before, points out Dell, citing the semiconductor space as an exemplar:

I we dial back the clock to 2023, you might recall, it was a horrible year for semiconductors, particularly memory. Micron, in particular, had negative gross margin percentage, their sales went in half from 2022 to 2023, and the industry collectively lost $40 billion. A lot of them still have PTSD from that. And they're like scared little puppies. Some of them almost went bankrupt, so they’re very careful about investing. 

Dell is not among the suppliers with supply chain panic, he reassures the world:

We kind of love it when there's a supply chain challenge because it's kind of like the Super Bowl for us. We're ready for that...If you look at our scale, our server and storage business is 4x larger than any single competitor generally, and we're larger than  number two, number three, number four, all combined together. And we've also gotten really good in terms of our reaction time in dealing with the changes in cost. And customers also know that we have a supply chain that works. 

Adoption trends

As for those customers, they’re all at varying stages of AI adoption and as such have varying needs when it comes to supply, he observes:

There's companies that have said, ‘Wow, this stuff is total game changer, and we better do this or we're going to have a big problem if our competitors do it and we don’t!’. And then there's other organizations that say, “Well, okay, this is our budget, and it doesn't really matter what's happening in the outside world, we’re sticking with our budget, okay?’. That will kind of work until it doesn't work, but I think over time, there's going to be fewer of those.

The differences between those two approaches will become increasingly apparent, he predicts:

There's just a whole re-thinking and re-imagining going on inside companies, but that will happen at very different speeds. Not every organization is going to be AI-pilled and just throw everything [at AI] and re-do their company immediately, kind of like we are. But I think you'll see more and more of that over time. And you'll see a stark contrast in the performance of companies based on the rate and pace that they do this. We're already seeing that.

The coming of agentic AI into the mainstream will make the contrast even sharper, Dell suggests:

In the past, each of us processed data and tasks, and we had projects and tasks and e-mails and things, and we do those at human speed and we pass them off to the next person and organizations and technology that are in organizations are a function of what was available at the time they were established, and they get updated from time to time.

So now fast forward to, let's say, 2027, we have these agents that are able to process all these tasks and they work way faster than humans. They're way more accurate. They never sleep. And so you can supervise tens or hundreds of those agents and fundamentally change the way work is done.

What agentic tech is capable of is moving fast, he adds:

We've gone from LLMs (Large Language Models) to reasoning to agents, and now we have this recursive self-Improvement. And if you think it's going to end there, you would be sadly mistaken. It's going to keep going. A way to think about it is we have this platform for thinking and intelligence and you're going to see a significant number of innovations on top of that. Can somebody predict exactly what those are going to be? Not a chance! 

My take

I’ve been writing about and discussing the thoughts of Michael Dell for my entire career. He’s up there with Oracle’s Larry Ellison as someone who was there on Day 1 and continues to be a highly-relevant thought-leader in the enterprise tech space. I’m not expecting that to change any time soon - for either of them!