Dell CTO John Roese: The key to the AI operating model is not the model, but the enterprise's proprietary knowledge

UPDATED 15:12 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026

Dell sees company knowledge, not AI models, as its competitive edge

by Sloane Kali Faye

As AI agents take on more work that people used to do, enterprises need an AI operating model to match. That means changing how people, processes and work are organized, not just which tools get deployed.

Dell Technologies Inc. has spent close to two years running fully autonomous agents inside its own business, and those lessons now shape its advice to customers. Companies that adopt agents without changing how they are organized accomplish very little, according to John Roese (pictured), global chief technology officer and chief AI officer of Dell.

“If you adopt AI technology but are unwilling or unable to change your operating model, you’re going to run your business just like you did before AI, but you’re going to do AI to it,” Roese said. “You’re going to have a bad experience because … if you apply agents to your company, what you are doing is redistributing work between people and machines.”

Roese spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante at the Dell Technologies New York Symposium, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why AI agents force companies to rethink their operating models and how enterprises can protect the knowledge that sets them apart. (* Disclosure below.)

Why the AI operating model starts with knowledge

Dell began its own transformation with people and processes rather than technology. The company has pitched its AI Factory as a way to close the gap between AI ambition and outcomes, and internally much of that work starts with knowledge capture. Subject matter experts help encode Dell’s practices into machine-readable skill files that guide how agents behave, Roese explained.

“It manifests as a Markdown file, just this piece of text. But that’s a very special piece of text because it’s a piece of text that other people don’t know about,” he said. “When you add that to the work that an agent is doing, instead of it operating generically, it suddenly operates based on the biases and parameters and rules that we use to differentiate ourselves, whether it’s in writing code or pricing a deal or servicing a customer.”

Those agents also improve as they work, building relationships in knowledge graphs and developing new digital skills. That continuous improvement is why Roese warns against handing proprietary knowledge to third parties. Keeping it in-house is a core part of building an AI operating model that protects what makes a company unique.

“It doesn’t mean you can’t use frontier models and open models,” he said. “It just means that when you design your AI system, you need to realize that the thing that is your moat is not the actual tools. It’s not even the models. It’s the special knowledge that’s now manifesting in these new forms that really captured what you know and do differently than your competitors.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies New York Symposium:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell Technologies New York Symposium. Neither Dell, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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Dell CTO John Roese: The key to the AI operating model is not the model, but the enterprise's proprietary knowledge

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