John Roese on Agentic AI, Quantum Computing, and the Future of Work at Dell

Prioritizing AI Projects with ROI

• 🎯 Return on Investment (ROI) is the most critical factor before funding any AI project, ensuring alignment with business outcomes like profit, revenue, and cost reduction.
• 💡 Theoretical AI uses are less valuable than practical applications that demonstrably improve business processes and achieve measurable results.
• 🚀 Dell received 800 GenAI ideas, but focused on a select few by prioritizing areas with the highest potential ROI, such as supply chain, sales, services, and engineering.

Escaping the 'Proof of Concept Prison'

• ⛓️ Companies often get stuck in the 'Proof of Concept prison' by focusing on experimentation without a clear path to production and scaled implementation.
• ✅ Transitioning from experimentation to production requires demonstrating material ROI, aligning with future business strategies, and meeting technical, security, and regulatory requirements.
• ⚙️ Dell encourages experimentation but has a strict process for production, ensuring projects contribute to the future of the business rather than masking existing issues.

The ROI Flywheel Effect

• 🔄 High-impact AI projects that deliver tangible ROI create a 'flywheel' effect, generating value that funds further AI development and accelerates adoption.
• ⚡ Starting the flywheel with projects that produce happiness or goodwill but no material ROI is a common misstep, hindering sustainable growth.
• 💰 Focusing on core business areas like sales, services, and supply chain is crucial for generating the initial fuel for the flywheel, enabling later investment in other areas.

Agentic Systems vs. Reactive AI

• 🤖 Agentic AI represents the digitization of skills, enabling autonomous operation without direct human intervention, unlike reactive AI tools that require human input.
• 🧠 Agents possess a more complex architecture including a knowledge graph and tool-use capabilities, allowing them to reason, learn, and act independently to achieve objectives.
• 🤝 The future of enterprise AI lies in multi-agent systems that collaborate to perform complex tasks, mirroring human team dynamics but with AI agents.

New Frontiers: Quantum Computing and Emerging Careers

• ⚛️ Quantum computing offers a fundamentally different way of performing calculations, with the potential to dramatically accelerate AI training and inference.
• ⚡ The synergy between AI and quantum computing is accelerating progress in both fields, creating a mutually beneficial cycle.
• 🛠️ AI adoption is creating new job roles such as software composers, thermal plumbers (managing GPU cooling), and AI explainers who bridge the gap between AI outputs and human understanding.
• 🏗️ A significant, often overlooked, job creator is the construction of the vast infrastructure required to power the AI transformation.