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News2 min read·2026-10-21DisconfirmAI Editorial

Dell CTO John Roese: AI Moat Is Proprietary Knowledge Encoded Into Agents, Not Models

At the Dell Technologies New York Symposium, Dell's Global CTO and Chief AI Officer John Roese argued that as AI tools and models become commoditized, enterprises' true competitive moat lies in encoding domain-expert knowledge into machine-readable skill files rather than in models or tools themselves. He described a concrete mechanism: once Markdown text is injected into an agent's context, the agent operates according to company-specific preferences rather than generically.

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Original publication time 2026-10-21 03:12 GMT+8

Dell's Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer John Roese believes that as AI tools and models become commoditized, an enterprise's true moat is not the models themselves but the proprietary knowledge encoded into how agents operate. Speaking at the Dell Technologies New York Symposium in an interview with theCUBE Research host Dave Vellante, he said: "The thing that is your moat is not the actual tools. It's not even the models. It's the special knowledge that's now manifesting in these new forms that really captured what you know and do differently than your competitors."

Roese described the concrete mechanism: subject-matter experts encode a company's practices into machine-readable skill files—essentially Markdown text—that are injected into an agent's working context. "It manifests as a Markdown file, just this piece of text," he said. "But that's a very special piece of text because it's a piece of text that other people don't know about." When that text is added to an agent's work, the agent no longer operates generically but instead follows the company's own biases, parameters, and rules—whether in writing code, pricing a deal, or servicing a customer.

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The premise of this argument is that agents are redistributing work between people and machines, not merely replacing a single step. Roese warned that if a company adopts AI technology but is unwilling or unable to change its operating model, "you're going to run your business just like you did before AI, but you're going to do AI to it," resulting in a bad experience. Dell itself has spent close to two years running fully autonomous agents inside its own business, and those lessons now shape its advice to customers.

It should be noted that theCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell Technologies New York Symposium, and the disclosure states that neither Dell as sponsor nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE. Roese's remarks come from a vendor executive speaking at a company-sponsored event; claims about Dell's internal agent deployment over two years and continuous knowledge-encoding improvements are enterprise self-reporting without independent verification. Additionally, if the core of the moat is "proprietary knowledge encoded in text files," the defensibility of that advantage depends on whether the encoding process itself is difficult for outsiders to replicate—a boundary the original article does not explore.

Sources

  • 原始出处siliconangle.com↗
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