For Richard McLaughlin, President, APJC for Dell Technologies, what makes this AI movement so compelling isn’t only the technology, but it’s how Dell is future-proofing customers across Asia.

While it’s been just about 100 days since Richard McLaughlin took over as President for the APJC region at Dell Technologies, he has been continuously speaking to partners and customers to work on the opportunities and the challenges in the region.

Speaking to journalists at Dell Technologies World 2026 in Las Vegas, McLaughlin shared that customers in the region are seeing vast opportunities to AI, with Dell playing a huge role in making them realize the opportunity.

“We are supporting them end to end, as a partner, a guide and a facilitator. The AI ecosystem is changing, as agentic is being embraced and created by our customers in the AI economy. New business models, products and services are emerging in the region, as agentic frameworks become more commonplace. Underpinned by new ways of thinking about AI economics, impacts such as thorough tokenomics is occurring in the marketplace. The scale and market opportunity ahead is significant, and Dell and our customers are already positioned to lead this economy,” he said.

McLaughlin added that Dell is witnessing the region’s enterprises accelerate innovation and entering the agentic lifecycle development at pace, with Dell helping customers shape the future today with agentic readiness across the full enterprise, from the data center to the endpoints.

“For some time, we’ve talked about the strategic importance of sovereign AI. This remains a priority for our customers in the region, and a key area where we continue to build sovereign, ready environments their business can thrive in. At the edge, where data lives and adapts alongside of AI advancement, we’re seeing real, active customer deployments across AI PCs and workstations, reflecting how enterprises are embracing the hybrid AI future now,” McLaughlin said.

For McLaughlin, what makes this movement so compelling isn’t only the technology, but it’s how Dell is future-proofing customers across Asia. Dell is ensuring modern enterprises don’t have to choose between running today’s businesses and building tomorrow’s.

“From individual PCs to most demanding AI workloads in the data center, Dell is supporting customers end-to-end. In conversations with our customers, we hear about more than just technology challenges. Businesses are also redesigning for a cultural shift,” he added.

Delivering AI in diverse and complex market

In Michael Dell’s keynote address, he shared about the importance of embracing AI and how businesses are not going to get the best outcomes if they have not made the shift. While this is a common goal, McLaughlin believes that any disconnect in the overall vision and approach towards that goal brings around gaps and ambitions and executions that Dell is helping customers address.

“We know that APJ is diverse and complex market. There are multiple varying levels of maturity that add uniqueness to each business journey towards achieving ROI on an AI deployment. There’s a matrix of factors and considerations that shape the journey to an AI ROI and an unlocking AI value. It’s not just tangible gains, automation, or new products, but it also builds resilience, market advantage, and future relevance. On that journey, some of our customers in the region are looking at whether they need to adopt ready use POCs or whether they need to prioritize sovereign AI or focus on data governance,” McLaughlin said.

At the same time, while more mature enterprises are focused on operationalizing from tokenomics perspective, McLaughlin explained that Dell is advising customers that the value of the AI isn’t just what they gain, but also about protecting what they already have, which is data.

“Wherever our customers are on this journey, we’re helping them move forward. Dell is helping them get there, providing the foundation to innovate, grow, and advance. With over 5,000 AI factories globally, we’re talking to our customers about a holistic solution that incorporates integrated foundation expertise and operational simplicity,” he said.

Customers understanding the value of data and AI

For Chris Kelly, Senior VP, ISG Specialty Sales, APJC, Dell Technologies, what’s impressive about AI is the evolution its going through. Two years ago, conversations were about proof-of-concepts, while last year Dell had 3000 customers in its AI Factory and this year, it has grown to more than 5,000 customers.

“When you look across the customer logos, there are very large corporations to some smaller sort of AI native corporations that are doing some really innovative things in their businesses,” Kelly said.

Among the customers in Asia that are seeing continuous innovation in AI is Worley. The leading engineering firm from Australia provides engineering, procurement, and construction services to the energy, chemicals, and resources sector. With a global operation of over 40 countries. Worley is also heavily focused on sustainability.

Worley partnered with Dell, NVIDIA, and World Wide Technology (WWT) to build its own AI factory, enabling its engineers to leverage Gen AI to meet sustainability goals, improve workforce productivity, and protect intellectual property by using on-premise infrastructure.

“And so with Worley, what they’ve actually been able to do, is to have a secure on-prem computing environment because obviously their data and intellectual property is incredibly important to them. So that security was something that was critical in the decision-making on how they set this up from the start. They’ve got a scalable AI platform that acts as what they call in their terms a critical force multiplier, which is supercharging the workforce to effectively double the amount of engineering capability they’ve got in the business,” Kelly said.

By drastically reducing the design times and optimizing energy transition flows, Worley is now empowering engineers to accelerate the delivery of large scale sustainable energy solutions across chemical and resources sector.

Another customer is Zoho Corporation from India. The tech company provides businesses with over 55 different applications to manage their operations, including sales, marketing, finance, and HR.

Zoho recognized the need for high-performance AI infrastructure to deliver contextual, privacy-first and multimodal enterprise AI solutions while supporting data sovereignty. Zoho is leveraging Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA to make enterprise AI and agentic AI adoption practical and accessible for businesses.

“They’ve built their own AI platform called Zia AI. It powers the AI capabilities across all of their applications. They’ve developed an in-house large language model called Zia LLM. And they’ve done that deliberately to reduce the dependency on external AI providers. They’ve also been able to create AI agents and an agent studio, which automates workflows, customer interactions, reporting and enterprise operations. They are very focused on privacy-first AI,” Kelly said.

He added that is another example of where an organization has realised that the data and intellectual property is an incredibly important asset to the business and something that needs to be protected, hence the on-prem solution.

Japan’s Mazda Corporation is another customer with a very strong heritage of both innovation and driving operational excellence. Kelly mentioned that Mazda has been able to deploy AI in multiple different parts of their business.

Mazda is building a data foundation to accelerate AI-driven automotive development, deploying Dell PowerScale, part of the Dell AI Data Platform, to unify its model-based development and CAD storage environments into a scalable infrastructure designed to evolve into a data lake supporting AI and generative AI workloads.

“But it’s really building that data foundation that they’ve been able to accelerate the automotive development cycle. They’ve deployed the Dell PowerScale solution as part of the Dell AI data platform. And the ability there to unify this model-based development, CAD storage environments into a scalable infrastructure that is designed to really evolve into a data lake that will be ultimately supporting AI and generative AI workloads across all facets of their business. So again, a very impressive use case that they’ve been able to deploy,” Kelly said.