CFO David Kennedy Lifts the Lid on Dell's AI-Powered Finance

At the heart of a US$25bn AI infrastructure business – one that helped Dell generate US$113.5bn in revenue in the year ending January 2026 – sits CFO David Kennedy. 

With almost three decades of experience at Dell Technologies under his belt, David has risen through the ranks and was appointed to lead the organisation's finance department in November 2025. 

“If you take the 12 months we’ve just finished, we did US$34bn in AI-optimised server orders in Q4, which tapped us up to US$64bn for the full year and we exited the year with US$43bn in backlog,” he stated in a recent interview with Fortune.  

“What’s super exciting is our next five-quarter pipeline of opportunities has never been higher.”

Agentic AI at Dell

Dell, like many organisations, is building proprietary AI agents that can handle finance within the bounds of its internal governance frameworks. 

“I’ve started to deploy agents to do reconciliations, do accounting journal entries,” David noted. 

“We’ve launched digital twins in our supply chain and services organisations. We have our own internal sales chat CRM model, which has handed back multiple hours per week to our sales force.”

What's more, agentic AI is helping David carry out the more routine tasks like organising his calendar, automating emails and even analysing forecasting data. 

AI factories for the win 

Dell Technologies recently announced significant advancements to the Dell AI Factory alongside NVIDIA. 

This move targets organisations that are increasingly opting to develop AI capabilities in-house and on-premises – rather than relying solely on cloud-based solutions.

The Dell AI Factory was launched in March 2024 and has since achieved more than 4,000 customer deployments, with early adopters reporting up to 2.6 times return on investment (ROI) within the first year.

The platform is powered by NVIDIA GPUs – networking and AI software designed to handle retrieval-augmented generation and multimodal search for agentic workflows and large-scale data processing.

“It’s all about data,” says David. “How do you manage it, store it, use it, deploy it?”

“You’re only as good as the data you have, so you’ve got to make sure that’s clean. And then trying to direct the agent in the right format – because an agent wants to work 24/7.”

AI focus and workforce reduction

As AI adoption rages, Dell has followed the path of many major corporations, resizing teams in a bid to adapt to the new era of work.

Nearly 10% of Dell’s workforce were laid off in 2026, amounting to 11,000 employees, Fortune writes. 

“Despite these difficult decisions, we continue focused efforts to empower our employees and attract, develop and retain talent,” said Dell in a statement announcing the layoffs. 

AI, David revealed, is motivating Dell to channel efforts towards higher-value work. 

Elsewhere, the company is pushing ahead with hardware advancements. The new Dell Pro Precision workstations, for example, are designed as next-generation systems for AI developers and data scientists.

Arthur Lewis, President of Infrastructure Solutions Group for Dell Technologies, says: "We're the first original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to ship the GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip with our Dell Pro Max desktop, bringing enterprise-grade AI computing directly to developers' desks."