Becoming AI-native is no longer a path to success — it’s an operational prerequisite
The AI-native enterprise isn’t an ideal anymore. Instead, it has become the new competitive baseline.
Dell Technologies Inc. has spent nearly three years interrogating that reality from the inside, using its own operations as a live proving ground, according to Jeff Clarke (pictured), vice chairman and chief operating officer of Dell. That time spent on internal iteration has also made the current moment easy to recognize, with frontier model advances of the past year having created a genuine inflection point in the AI-native enterprise journey.
“We spent the last two years asking the AI to answer a question, asking the AI to go do a little research and then we advance and we ask it to do a little thinking, some reasoning,” Clarke said. “Now it’s doing work, and meaningful work — work that for the last 20 years we told software developers, ‘You have nothing to worry about. Your craft is safe.’ Here we are [and] in six months, the entire landscape of software development has changed.”
Clarke spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Dell is applying the AI-native enterprise operating model, the economics of token routing and what it means to build a super-user workforce. (* Disclosure below.)
