ON DEMAND
Arthur Lewis, Dell Technologies
In this interview from Dell Technologies World 2026, Arthur Lewis, president of the infrastructure solutions group of Dell Technologies, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante to discuss how enterprises are shifting from AI experimentation to full-scale production — and how Dell is positioning itself as the infrastructure backbone of the agentic era. Lewis draws a sharp distinction between "AI-first" and "AI-native" enterprises — the former layer AI onto existing workflows for modest productivity gains of 10% to 20%, while the latter remap entire processes around agentic systems to achieve 10X to 30X improvements. He points to spec-driven software development as a prime example and explains how Dell has spent three years consolidating data across sales, customer service and product development to drive that transformation. Lewis underscores that every byte of organizational data is fuel for AI, making a unified ingest, transformation and query engine — built into the Dell AI Data Platform — the critical foundation any enterprise must establish before its AI strategy can succeed.
The conversation also explores the Dell AI Factory, which has grown to 5,000 customers — a sharp jump from 4,000 at the close of Q3 — driven by the agentic inflection point. Lewis argues that token economics are becoming a P&L line item, and that Dell's full-stack approach achieves 100% GPU utilization by eliminating bottlenecks across compute, networking and storage. He details a sweeping portfolio refresh spanning the 18th-generation PowerEdge platform, PowerStore Elite, PowerProtect One and the Exascale architecture, which supports file, block, object and disaggregated inference storage under a single flexible framework. The Lightning file system, he notes, extends context windows for disaggregated inference by splitting pre-fill and decode operations to make token generation significantly more efficient. From the "rack as product" philosophy — shipping fully optimized, customer-configured racks in hours — to future investments in SONiC networking and the Dell private cloud, Lewis provides a roadmap for how enterprises can turn AI infrastructure into a durable competitive advantage.