“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

AI agents were the name of the game on the first day of Dell Technologies World 2026, with multiple speakers indicating that they make a step-change in business interest in AI.

During CEO Michael Dell’s opening keynote, guest speaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reflected on the level of technology available when the two companies launched Dell AI Factory with Nvidia.

“Two years ago, when I was here, we had just started with … generative AI as the product. Generative AI can, of course, generate content, but remember it can also generate content to think with – generate thoughts,” said Huang, “which led us to reasoning, which led us to planning, which led us to agentic systems. So now we have, we now have – for the very first time – useful AI.”

Huang claimed that agentic AI is significantly shortening the timeframes for tasks such as software programming, which can be reduced from a month to a week.

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“Because it’s so useful, the number of people using agents is now all over the place,” he said. “Every enterprise – my company, [Dell Technologies] – everybody’s using agents all over the place to do software development, DevOps, SRE, all of our CI/CD work, QA, testing.

“The amount of software work that we do in the company now supported by agents is incredible.”

Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research, told ITPro that he agrees, but with some caveats.

“Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “I think that the generative AI phase where we got AI to write for us was useful for some professions (content marketing would be a good example) but it largely was limited to tasks that require summarization and writing. The agentic AI value is a lot higher because AI is now not merely writing it is doing.”

“We are still very early into this phase of adoption. The usefulness of agents is still relatively nascent and is still in the early adopters phase,” he added. “As tools like Amazon Quick, Perplexity Computer and Claude CoWork become more widely adopted then the perception of usefulness will radically change. This will also be the same beyond personal productivity in areas like AIOps for instance.”

One key challenge for the widespread adoption of agents, however, is how resource-hungry they are. For Dell Technologies, the answer lies in bringing agents out of the public cloud and returning them on premises.

This potentially solves the issue of high costs associated with high token use – a single Dell Technologies developer reportedly ran up a $3,400 token bill in 24 hours – but companies will still have to reckon with the cost of buying hardware outright.

Michael Dell believes, nevertheless, that this is the way the wind is blowing.

“The real agent takeoff hasn’t really even happened in broad scale across millions of companies,” he told delegates at the company’s Partner Conference, which is also happening at Dell Technologies World.

“I think it’s still pretty early in all this and … the models, they’re great! But they’re the worst they will ever be, and they’re going to keep improving. There doesn’t seem to be an asymptote in the capabilities.”

ITPro's managing editor Jane McCallion is at Dell Technologies World all week. Click for all our coverage of the event, including news and analysis.