Nutanix .NEXT 2026 | Dan Regalado, Wynn Resorts

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Dan Regalado

Chief Information Officer

Wynn Resorts

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Dan Regalado, Wynn Resorts

Dan Regalado

Chief Information Officer Wynn Resorts

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Dan Regalado, chief information officer of Wynn Resorts, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss how a luxury resort operator is modernizing its hybrid infrastructure and applying AI to deliver seamless, personalized guest experiences at scale. Regalado explains Wynn's infrastructure philosophy — running cloud workloads where velocity and scalability matter and on-premise systems where security and stability are paramount. He details the company's migration from VMware to Nutanix at its Bosto... Read more

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How is Win Resorts building an IT foundation that is seamless, secure, and feels effortless for guests? add

What is the scope of your Nutanix deployment — which properties and Nutanix products are you using, how many virtual machines are running, and what workloads (including AI and gaming platforms) are you running on it? add

What workloads and applications are being run on Nutanix, and how are you approaching AI workloads (on‑prem vs. cloud) and latency‑sensitive services like guest automation and sports betting? add

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Dan Regalado, Wynn Resorts

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Alison Kosik

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're in Chicago streaming live at Nutanix .NEXT. I'm Alison Kosik. I'm hosting today alongside my great co-pilot here, John Furrier. He's the co-founder and CEO of SiliconANGLE theCUBE. And we talk about technology that we can see, but then there's the invisible technology that also really makes a difference, right?

John Furrier

>> The Nutanix said here in theCUBE, it's hard to make infrastructure invisible, but at the end of the day, their customers are scaling and putting production workloads with AI at scale. And this next guest is going to be great because he's the CIO of a resort I stay a lot in Vegas, the Wynn. So I'm super excited for this interview.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah. Let's bring in Dan Regalado, he's the CIO of Win Resorts. Welcome to theCUBE.

Dan Regalado

>> Thank you for having me.

Alison Kosik

>> Oh, pleasure to have you here. So how are you building an IT foundation at Win Resorts that's kind of seamless and secure and still kind of feeling effortless for your guests?

Dan Regalado

>> Absolutely. Very good question. So we're a hybrid infrastructure. So we have workloads on the cloud and we have workloads on our own data center. And absolutely, you hit the nail on the head that I want technology to be invisible to our guests. If technology is visible to our guests, sometimes that means that we failed because there's some friction. So yeah, so it's a hybrid infrastructure. We're intelligent in a way that we're not purist in thinking that everything should be in the cloud, everything should be on-prem. What needs the scalability and the velocity of provisioning will be on the cloud. What needs to be secure and stable can be on premise.

John Furrier

>> You guys are very fluent in digital. You have tons of technology. The customer experience to Wynn is impeccable. You guys are high standards. Get a lot going on to run operations. Then you got the guest experience.

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So it's kind of like a sports team. You got to manage the team, manage the operations, and then manage the fan experience. Here, your fan experience is people are guests.

Dan Regalado

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> But you're running a lot of stuff. Security, data. Talk about that dynamic and how you manage that and how Nutanix helps you.

Dan Regalado

>> For sure. Yeah. So we welcome about 6,000 guests every day on average. And to your point, keeping all of our systems up and running, and if there's any disruption, how do we quickly resolve it? It's definitely a full-time job. And I have an amazing team that does it for me from an IT operation, cybersecurity perspective. Nutanix played a role about three years ago. We were about to renew our contract with our incumbent provider in virtualization VMware. And so at that time, it was a good timing to look into other options, and we went with Nutanix. And by the way, Nutanix is live on our Boston property, so I don't know if everyone is aware that we actually have several properties in the world. One of them is in Boston and Boston was due for a refresh and we went with Nutanix and Nutanix move was seamless. Obviously, we had some hiccups along the way in the early days, but we've quickly worked with Nutanix and the rest of the migration were amazingly seamless.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Give us the taste of your footprint, your estate, products you're using with Nutanix, and also the workloads you're running, the AI workloads. What are some of those?

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Give us a feel for the scope.

Dan Regalado

>> So in Nutanix in Boston, we have about almost 500 virtual machines running on Nutanix now. And we basically run all of our gaming platforms. So if it doesn't work, our guest will feel it, so we need to make sure that it's up and running all the time.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, you can't screw that up. That's got to be rock solid.

Dan Regalado

>> Correct. All of smart room technology. So you've stayed at the Wynn, you can guest command.

John Furrier

>> All the guest automation.

Dan Regalado

>> You can push the button to open your drapes, TVs, et cetera, those are all on Nutanix. We're still in the early days of exploring about Nutanix AI offering on-prem or hybrid, because right now, all of our AI workloads are being provisioned in the cloud. We're very interested in learning where an on-premise or hybrid infrastructure would play a role from a data security, data sovereignty, and also cost efficiency is involved.

John Furrier

>> Is sports betting involved in some of these?

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And because that's also online too?

Dan Regalado

>> Correct. So our sports betting app runs on Nutanix also, so that's also very critical for us. I'm sure you probably know that we got out of online betting. We used to have a division called WynnBET, the one that competes with BetMGM. We're no longer in that business. We are heavily focused on brick and mortar and providing the best experience for our customers who walks in the door. But yes, we do have sports betting when you are on property.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Got to be low latency.

Dan Regalado

>> Zero latency, if possible, for sure. I'm telling you, we have the caliber of guests who has the shortest amount of patience.

John Furrier

>> Yes.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah.

Dan Regalado

>> And they deserve so, so we try to make sure that our platforms are up to snuff, especially when we have big events going on.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And the guest experience is awesome too. I mean, just everything ... By the way, the room automation is very strong, so congratulations on that.

Alison Kosik

>> Is there a challenge between innovation without disruption, meaning upgrading without disruption, knowing that your clientele is so upscale?

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah. I think the best demonstration of that is when we were moving from VMware to Nutanix, we start impeccable timing. Obviously, you need to time it so that there's not a big event happening when you're moving the critical stuff, but really careful and methodical planning at the start. And then starting with the low complexity workloads, like our test and development environment, just to get our toe swept. And then after that, you move on to more complex stuff, and then you save the best for last, which are highly impacting critical workloads would be the last.

John Furrier

>> Dan, I have to ask you, because you have, one, you're in a really pressure cooker job, CIO, not for the faint of heart, as you know. CISOs, you've got all those roles kind of in there. What's changed over the past few years? As we've seen cloud scale, we saw that in the past decade and a half, pure, good reliability. But now you got the AI wave coming. Infrastructure is disaggregated.

Dan Regalado

>> You

John Furrier

>> You got to get to zero latency on many applications, very, very low on others, real time. What's been the biggest change in your role? Is it technology? Where's the impact to AI to your world and the outcomes you're going after?

Dan Regalado

>> When it comes to AI, we see it in three lenses. One is operational efficiency. How might we be able to do more for the same amount of staff that we have? Because the less mundane task we do, and the more we can dedicate the time to serving our guests, the happier our guests will be, including anticipating what you need as a guest instead of waiting for you. So that's one thing that we're focused on is how would AI help our teams to be more efficient. The second is automation, which is also touching that. And then how does customer experience get impacted? So to your point, how do we know you when you check in? So that's combination of AI. We are basically very focused on customer sentiment, right? So how could we use AI to understand more of our customer sentiments and not to tap ourselves in the shoulder for all the good sentiments, but to actually understand, what have we done wrong or what can we do better? And AI plays a role in that, in informing our teams at our fingertips. And then lastly, personalization, right? So how can we treat you as John instead of treating you as every single type of our guest? We service you the way you want to be serviced, we reward you the way you need to be rewarded. So personalization is the third lens for-

John Furrier

>> How about skills, the staffing?

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> How do you see that evolving? Obviously roles change because with automation, IT, we're seeing a lot of great cloud, on-prem, agentic.

Dan Regalado

>> For sure.

John Furrier

>> Things coming.

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> What's the role of the staff? You're going to have more workers under your third role, agent. It's director of agent technology as an agent.

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah. So we're going to have AI employees or AI workers, which are teammates of human workers, right? And it's really to empower our human workers to be able to do more, because obviously, we can hire an army of people as our business grows, or we can be smart and take advantage of this technology and have teammates for our human workers.

Alison Kosik

>> Walk me through what that exactly looks like.

Dan Regalado

>> So for example, on my own department IT, we're doing vibe coding now. So what used to take weeks to write, takes hours to write now, at least from a version one perspective that you can basically modify to perfection, but it's a velocity improvement factor for us. For our frontline employees, how can we take away all of the manual tasks that they're doing and replace it with agentic framework? And by the way, we sometimes use agents loosely. It could just be a robotic process automation, which is an early form of AI that we're doing, so like on the accounting side.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Deterministic workloads, easy to knock down.

Dan Regalado

>> For sure. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Non-deterministic.

Dan Regalado

>> Right.

John Furrier

>> John had a long flight from the East Coast, like to know that coming in.

Dan Regalado

>> Yes. Yes. Downloading reports, creating Excel spreadsheets, comparing them manually can be done by RPA now. And then if there's anything that's non-deterministic to your point, we could shift it to AI, LLMs for deep reasoning, but we're not going to start there. We're going to start with people doing the reasoning manually from a human in the loop perspective and slowly move them to that.

Alison Kosik

>> So when John arrives at the Wynn after a long flyer from the East Coast, he'll have a drink and a sandwich waiting for him.

John Furrier

>> My agent will be talking to their agent. Let them know I'm coming in hot. Coming in hot.

Dan Regalado

>> But what we will not replace is the human factor.

John Furrier

>> That's key. By the way, this is a huge debate in the industry. It's human and AI, not AI human.

Dan Regalado

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> Human is driving the AI. That's the value.

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And that brings craftsmanship back into work.

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> That brings in creativity.

Dan Regalado

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> Problem solving.

Dan Regalado

>> Warmth. Right?

John Furrier

>> That's where people think, "Oh, my job is being lost." Actually, jobs are being accelerated to new positions.

Dan Regalado

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> Thoughts on what those look like as I guess people's superpowers get ...

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> AI scales intellect and intelligence.

Dan Regalado

>> To your point, skillsets are going to change. How exactly, it remains to be seen, but the humans will be able to elevate the type of work that they do. But what I really meant was at the Wynn, we pride ourselves with amazing guest experience like you've experienced, and that's because of the people working there. We have a big lettering in our back of house that says, "People make people happy." We will not take that away. We will not replace that with AI. We will enable our teams to be better because of AI.

John Furrier

>> I'm really glad you said that, because a lot of people need to hear that. And that seems to be the consensus from executives.

Dan Regalado

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> The people get better. Yeah. Things get done more faster, accelerate to productivity, coding, marketing.

Dan Regalado

>> For sure.

John Furrier

>> Legal, hot area, healthcare.

Dan Regalado

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> A lot of services are coming in. Any vision around the kinds of new service that you could enable the business and the people? What's the discussion in the executive C-suite at the Wynn Resorts? What do you guys talk about?

Dan Regalado

>> Yeah. So definitely, AI is in the middle of all of these discussions. To my earlier point, how do we leverage AI in these three lenses? That's every week we talk about it. And then every week, we measure our progress against it. Our CEO, our C-suite is very much a force driving this adoption in a responsible way.

John Furrier

>> Has AI changed the interactions among the C-suite? We're seeing commentary from the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang who said things like, "Developers are going to have a token compensation budget to play with." That brings up the people conversation with, that's HR and finance get involved. So you're seeing operational things at the C-suite that were usually handled by the CIO.

Dan Regalado

>> For sure.

John Furrier

>> So you start to see more of an integrated team, teamwork and partnership.

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> What's your vision around this? Is this real? Is this something that you see happening?

Dan Regalado

>> It's definitely happening. Even my job, some of my mundane tasks before are being aided by AI now, like reporting, analyzing complex reports. It's now being aided by AI, hiring. AI experience before was not in our questionnaire. AI experience now is very much in our questionnaire and interview, because we want to hire people who has experience and open-mindedness in embracing this technology. Yes.

John Furrier

>> All right. Awesome. Awesome.

Alison Kosik

>> Great conversation, Dan. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE. I love the glasses, by the way.

Dan Regalado

>> I'm not recording.

Alison Kosik

>> Okay, I'll remember that.

John Furrier

>> Take a photo. Selfie.

Dan Regalado

>> Yes.

Alison Kosik

>> All right. We're going to take a quick break here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live technology coverage. We'll be right back.