Rahul Tikoo, AMD
In this interview from AMD Advancing AI (San Francisco) 2026, Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of the Client Business Unit at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante and John Furrier to discuss how agentic AI is transforming the PC from a cost item into a value-generating node in enterprise infrastructure. Tikoo explains why the "killer app" for AI turned out to be agentic workflows rather than chatbots, describing how reasoning agents multiply productivity far beyond simple assistants. He details the Ryzen AI Halo platform, built on the Ryzen AI Max+ processor with 128 gigs of unified memory, which lets large language models run locally rather than burning cloud tokens. The conversation also explores AMD's push to simplify the software stitching this all together, including a semantic router that decides in real time whether workloads run locally or in the cloud. Tikoo highlights new tools such as Access for sandboxing agents and Skills for automating agent setup, both aimed at giving CIOs governance, observability and security over agentic deployments. He notes that agentic PCs are driving faster refresh cycles across the 2 billion-device PC market as machines become always-on desk-side servers running dozens of agents. From Microsoft partnerships around the Agentic OS to AMD's end-to-end reach across CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and the open ROCm ecosystem, Tikoo makes the case for why AMD's full-stack, open approach gives enterprises a genuine alternative for scaling AI from cloud to endpoint.