Dell’s CFO is using AI agents to run his finance team—and has helped the AI business go from $0 to $25 billion

As recently as a few years ago, Dell appeared to be a name destined for the business history books. The stock lost nearly a third of its value in 2022, and it was hard to see the once iconic PC-maker’s place in a post-PC world. Then something extraordinary happened. In the span of two years, Dell quietly built a $25 billion AI infrastructure business from scratch, posted total company record revenues of $113.5 billion, and it is now guiding Wall Street toward $50 billion in AI server sales next year alone.

Recently Fortune visited Dell’s CFO in New York to find out more about how the company pulled off something almost no company of its size has managed to do: Reinvent itself in real time. David Kennedy is a 27-year veteran of Dell, and was confirmed as CFO in November 2025 after serving as interim. In a conference room overlooking the chaos of 34th Street, Kennedy walks me through the recent record performance posted by the Round Rock, Texas-based giant (No. 44 on the Fortune 500).

“If you take the 12 months we’ve just finished, we did $34 billion in AI-optimized server orders in Q4, which tapped us up to $64 billion for the full year, and we exited the year with $43 billion in backlog,” Kennedy said. Fourth-quarter AI server revenue alone surged 342% to $9 billion. “What’s super exciting is our next five-quarter pipeline of opportunities has never been higher.”

For fiscal 2027, Dell has guided for $50 billion in AI-optimized server revenue, representing 103% growth year-over-year. Kennedy attributed........

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