AI agents are changing work — and Dell’s John Roese says it’s just beginning

To gain a better understanding of the longer-term impact that autonomous agents will have on the nature of work, Dell Technologies Inc. has been taking a closer look at how AI is already changing how work gets done.

This has been a central focus for John Roese (pictured), Dell’s global chief technology officer and chief AI officer. The company has been running fully autonomous agents for close to two years, and this has led to valuable insights, according to Roese.

“For the last six months, the two topics I’ve spent most of my time on have been tokenomics and the impact of agents, primarily AI agents, on the composition of work inside of companies,” he explained. “What is this going to do to work inside of companies and at the world level?”

Roese spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Factories – Data Centers of the Future interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI is leading to major changes in job definitions and capital expenditures for organizations.

Autonomous agents and the future of jobs

Roese has been engaged with colleagues within Dell and industry experts outside of the company to identify a common language for job classifications. This will be a key element in being able to determine the most productive role for agents.

“The biggest conclusion was knowing what kind of work happens in your company in these classifications is essential because it creates a common language between what agents are going to do and what people are going to do,” Roese told theCUBE. “And if your goal as you move into agentic is to rebalance work between those two things, if you’re not even using the same language and you don’t even define it the same way, you have no hope. But if you do, it becomes really clear what parts of the jobs are going to move to agents, which ones aren’t, and that for the first time gives you clarity about what the future of jobs looks like.”

That clarity is further reinforced by a deeper understanding of what role agents should play within an organization. Roese believes this will require organizations to engage in a reevaluation of positions, based on the shifting balance of work between the human and the agent.

“It’s not because agents will do the job, but because they will extract types of work from every job, and that will free up space for that job to be redefined,” Roese said. “The consequence of that is that as you deploy agentic, there is a massive organizational design exercise that you have to think through because if you don’t do an organizational redesign, you will have a whole bunch of jobs that used to have 100% work inside of them that now have 30%. It just made it very clear to us that there’s a profound change coming.”

The deployment of AI agents is also driving changes in how CIOs and CFOs are thinking about capital expenditures. The use of advanced models to build agents has created a whole new field of “tokenomics,” where the cost of generating data to feed AI has complicated the CapEx picture.

“People suddenly realized that the API-based token production services are now usage based,” Roese noted. “They’re not flat rate. As you use more advanced models to do more advanced things, if the only way you can do that is over an API into some service that’s out of your control, the economics get quite complex. CFOs now care about hybrid AI because they know that it’s a way for them to control the economic expansion that could happen if they don’t have an ability to selectively place where they consume their tokens.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Factories – Data Centers of the Future interview series:

Photo: SiliconANGLE