Dell's John Roese: company knowledge, not AI models, is the moat

Dell's message comes from its own experience rather than a customer pitch. The company has spent close to two years running fully autonomous agents inside its business, and that period convinced global CTO and chief AI officer John Roese that the hard part is organizational, not technological. In his framing, applying agents to an unchanged company simply redistributes work between people and machines, and the result is a bad experience.

The mechanism Dell describes is knowledge capture. Subject matter experts encode Dell's practices into machine-readable skill files that steer how agents behave, so an agent pricing a deal or servicing a customer follows Dell's own biases, parameters and rules instead of generic defaults. Those agents also build relationships in knowledge graphs and develop new digital skills as they work, which is why Roese warns against handing proprietary knowledge to third parties.

The commercial angle sits alongside that advice: Dell has pitched its AI Factory as a way to close the gap between AI ambition and outcomes. Roese's conclusion is that the tools and even the models are not the differentiator — the special knowledge a company captures in these new forms is.