John Roese Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

John Roese has honed Dell’s AI program from a sprawling set of 900 projects to fewer than 100, each laser-focused on improving the company’s revenue, profit, costs, or regulatory risk. “Sometimes I get called militant,” says the global CTO and chief AI officer, who concentrated investment on sales, services, supply chain and engineering.

The approach has paid dividends. A generative AI search system built after Dell cleaned up its sales data freed up 13 hours a week for each of the company’s 20,000 sellers, and the firm’s fiscal 2026 revenue rose 19% to hit record highs of $113.5 billion—all while operating expenses fell 3%. Roese has recently expanded Dell’s program from a handful of autonomous agents to more than 200—an initiative he says has cut the average time required to take a new agentic AI use case from idea to production from more than seven months to between two and four weeks. But the new Dell he’s helped build is ready to bet on constant change instead of today’s winners. “I don't expect any AI tool to last more than two years,” he says. “I build my architecture to replace them.”