How Dell Is Building the Secure Agentic Enterprise

Agentic AI
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Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

Dell’s AI Blueprint for Identity, Agents and Agentic Infrastructure

Jennifer Lawinski •
March 17, 2026    

See Also: How Unstructured Data Chaos Undermines AI Success

Dell’s strategy begins with drinking its own Kool Aid and becoming an early consumer of the very technology it builds infrastructure to support.

“You cannot do AI with the infrastructure of the past,” said Dell CTO and Chief AI Officer John Roese in a conversation with Okta CEO Todd McKinnon in Manhattan on Monday.

“A couple of years ago, we made the decision to be customer zero, that we would be the early, aggressive adopter of this technology,” he said. “If we’re going to build for this new space, we sure as heck better understand what this space is as a firsthand participant in it.”

That mindset partners with a strategic organizational decision – giving Roese the chief AI officer role in addition to his CTO responsibilities. His mandate was to lead from the top after a previous effort to drive AI adoption through consensus-building failed.

“Doing that was not trivial. It required us to lean in, to be bleeding edge in terms of thinking as possible, but also very pragmatic about making sure that we didn’t break the business, that we did things that matter,” Roese said.

The combined efforts drove two years of double-digit growth after a slump in 2024 that resulted in revenues down nearly 15%, and aggressive technology adoption also drove down costs, Roese said.

“Our revenue grew dramatically. The first year about $10 billion and the second year about $20 billion, and at the same time our costs went down. We’ve never seen that happen,” he said. “Every time revenue went up, costs went up with it. But when you redesign for the AI era, people process technology, funny enough, you decouple those two.”

A lynchpin of Dell’s strategy is what Roese called the two-year rule. “We treat all AI decisions as having no more than a two-year lifespan,” he said. “We can’t predict that future.”

Another key aspect of Dell’s strategy is its architectural decision to assign a digital identity that the company manages to every single AI agent that works on behalf of Dell, regardless of whether it runs on Dell’s internal infrastructure or on a third-party platform.

“I don’t care if the agent’s in a third party, I don’t care if it’s a SaaS provider. I want control,” Roese said. That also gives the company a built-in kill switch if any agent goes rogue. “If I control identity, I can make an agent go away if it behaves badly, even if it isn’t running on my infrastructure,” he said.

The system functions in what Roese describes as a two-ring model: an inner ring that Dell fully owns and controls, and an outer ring of third-party and SaaS platforms that Dell doesn’t control, but does control the agents running on it. Identity and access management systems link the two.

To qualify as an agent, Dell needs insight into how a system functions. “We believe agents are software systems that can do autonomous work,” he said. But for a vendor’s agents hidden behind APIs, “they are not agents to us. They are just tools, and the intelligence and the reasoning will happen on our side until they expose that underlying capability.”

For CIO’s, Roese’s big picture strategy offers a fresh way of approaching integrating AI agents into an ecosystem, and IT teams will need to rethink their operations as their road maps, architecture and vendor relationships were likely chosen before the explosive launch of the agentic world.

“The majority of the world’s infrastructure was built before generative AI even existed,” Roese said. “If you have an existing infrastructure and IT strategy, this is a very good time to pause. It’s a great time to stop, to get educated, to rethink everything from identity to access control to telemetry to infrastructure choices, to where the AI runs and where the data lives, and what those data layers look like. That is probably a terrifying prediction, because it means we have a lot of work to do. But it’s also incredibly exciting.”