AI agents could rewrite the rules of office work: Dell’s Rob Bruckner

AI agents could push companies to rethink how they divide work, reducing the meetings, hand-offs and coordination that move tasks between employees and teams, said Rob Bruckner, President, Client Solutions Group (CSG), Dell Technologies.

Bruckner, who has around three decades of industry experience, said enterprises are still fitting agents into processes that humans created to coordinate their work. The next phase could see companies design workflows around agents’ capabilities, he said.

“Humans have actually oriented the division of labour and the workflows around how well you could scale and coordinate the work,” Bruckner told ET AI. “I don’t think we even have enough experience of actually watching agents do the work to realise that you can optimise that entire workflow differently.”


Employees may already use AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for research, coding and meeting summaries. Bruckner’s argument concerns what comes next, which is rethinking the steps and coordination that connect those individual tasks.

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Rethinking the hand-offs

The first step, according to Bruckner, will involve dividing existing workflows between humans and agents. People would exercise judgement and give approvals, while agents take on more execution and coordination.

Meetings, emails and hand-offs keep work moving between teams, but they also take time. Bruckner sees AI agents could reduce some of this coordination and make workflows more efficient.

“Because there’s so much human coordination to the workflow, it also is a place that slows down improvements and learning,” he said.

Agents could connect information and carry out tasks across different stages of a workflow, Bruckner said. Once companies establish feedback and controls for these systems, they could reconsider how teams divide the work and which steps they need.

“I believe there’ll be a massive optimisation that occurs,” he said.

The starting point varies with a company’s size and experience with AI, according to Bruckner. Large enterprises must contend with legacy processes and data across multiple systems, making adoption a broader exercise in how their technology and operations fit together, he said.

Smaller companies, on the other hand, can design their operations around AI from the outset, he said, without having to adapt established processes.

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More AI on the PC

As businesses work through those questions, Dell already sees interest in local AI changing customers’ hardware choices, Bruckner said.

Customers are choosing more memory in Dell’s Precision workstations to run larger AI models on their machines, he said. Professionals use these workstations for demanding tasks such as computer-aided design, 3D rendering and data analysis.

“If we had been selling certain levels like 16GB, we’re seeing a kick up to 32GB. If we had 32GB, we kick up to 64GB,” he said.

Customers are thinking about the size of the models and the workloads they may want to run on their PCs, according to Bruckner.

That interest also revives demand for local storage, he said. Moving work to the cloud had made PC storage less of a concern, but businesses now want more room for models and datasets on their machines, he added.

Running more AI locally increases the relevance of workstations with greater memory, storage and graphics processing capacity, he said.

For Dell, the shift also brings its PC and infrastructure businesses closer together, Bruckner said. The company wants to make products such as the Dell Pro Max with GB10, which uses Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell platform, easier for enterprises to manage, he said.

Dell is working towards adding Windows on Arm support and Microsoft Intune management to the product, Bruckner said, although the company has not announced those plans publicly. Intune lets IT teams manage corporate devices and applications.

Ultimately, Bruckner expects the choice between local and cloud AI to depend increasingly on how much capability companies get for their money, an “intelligence per dollar” calculation.