Nearly every technology conference today has a focus on artificial intelligence, and this week's Dell Technologies World was no exception. But what stood out was the focus on how businesses can actually execute on AI, especially by building more AI capabilities into their infrastructure.

Top trends at Dell Tech World 2026 that are pushing businesses to increase their on-premises AI capabilities include increasing demand for data and AI sovereignty, the need for tighter governance, especially for agents, and more direct control over these critical systems.

In the opening keynote, Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell said the company is working to move AI closer to the data and infrastructure. "Abundant intelligence is here," Michael Dell told attendees. "Intelligence is becoming infrastructure."

Enterprises are realizing that piloting AI through a public cloud API is simple, but moving that pilot into large-scale production requires internal, dedicated server and compute resources. Without on-premises or hybrid architecture, enterprises face hurdles around data capacity and latency, especially as businesses move from traditional AI to agentic systems.

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However, a top pressure is definitely the increased costs of using cloud-based LLMs. In his keynote, Dell discussed the concept of "tokenomics," and Dell Technologies vice chairman and COO Jeff Clarke -- during his Day 2 keynote -- said that token usage for AI has risen by 320-fold and that, by 2030, global token consumption is predicted to grow 3,400%.