Dell Technologies World 2026: agents, hardware, and tokenomics
Jane, live from Las Vegas, takes us through her week at Dell’s AI agent extravaganza
It’s been a busy week for the enterprise tech world in Las Vegas as Dell Technologies customers, partners, and channel partners poured into the Venetian Conference Center to hear about the company’s latest strategies, products, and predictions for the future of IT.
In this episode, Bobby speaks to Jane about what she’s learnt during her week at the conference, what some of the big announcements were, and whether her pre-conference predictions were correct.
Highlights
“The move towards agents has changed the conversation around what's important in terms of hardware, so for parallel computing and for LLM training and whatnot, it's all about the GPUs, but as we move to inference and we’ve moved to to AI agents, the CPU starts to become more important again, just because of how compute intensive these things are.”
“Agents are token hungry, you know. They can use up in days or months what otherwise would take in months to a year. You may have seen the story, or listeners may have seen the story, that Uber has used up its entire AI budget for 2026 in April or early May … and it‘s prompting a bit of a rethink about how this is used now.”
“It seems like there's a reckoning with the economics of this since the invention of agents and their increasingly widespread use thanks to OpenClaw. There's a big change coming and fortuitously for Dell, from my perspective, and from the perspective of experts who I spoke to for my feature on this, it does probably work out quite well for Dell and other hardware vendors.”
Related content
- Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
- “Now we have, for the very first time, useful AI” – Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk up the power of agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
- Dell unveils Deskside Agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
- Three things I expect to see at Dell Technologies World 2026, and one I don’t
- Google Cloud Next 2026: Scaling AI agents
- The agentic identity crisis
- CES 2026: The year of AI PCs?
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Jane McCallion is Managing Editor of ITPro and ChannelPro, specializing in data centers, enterprise IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.
Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.
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