Enterprises have moved from debating AI’s potential to executing it at scale with the next wave defined by agentic AI, according to Andy Sim, Vice President and Managing Director for Dell Technologies in Singapore.
At the opening of the Dell Technologies Forum in Singapore on September 9, he told the 1,000-strong audience that AI stands for “absolutely incredible”.
Drawing on recent comments by historian Yuval Noah Harari, Sim highlighted two inflection points: AI is now the first tool in history that can make decisions (agentic AI) and the first that can create new ideas (generative AI).
“We are living in science fiction today,” he said, noting that AI has shifted from advisor to operator as model usage and economics have changed dramatically over the past 12 months.
Token surge and infrastructure strain
Sim pointed to a sharp rise in AI consumption, citing more than 100 trillion tokens consumed globally in 2025 and projecting a 3,400 percent increase in total consumption by 2030 as agentic AI scales. That growth is colliding with real-world constraints of pressure on power and cooling, supply bottlenecks, and rising security risks.
High-density workloads are increasingly running on liquid‑cooled racks and warned that cyber risk is acute, with 94 percent of ransomware attacks targeting backups.
Defining enterprise readiness
Citing Dell’s Modern Enterprise Readiness Study 2026, which surveyed around 3,000 decision-makers across 35 countries, Sim said four figures capture the moment for leaders in Singapore and the region:
- 85 percent need one connected strategy spanning AI, workplace, data, and data centre modernisation to operate effectively.
- 58 percent are struggling with the pace of disruption, citing supply constraints, rising prices, and heightened productivity demands.
- 60 percent lack clarity on their roadmap across AI, security and data, underscoring that AI will follow the data, not the other way around.
- 95 percent expect security and cyber resiliency to be built into every proposal by a strategic partner, pushing organisations toward zero‑trust architectures before scaling digital workforces.
“Recognition, urgency, clarity, and trust. That is the work ahead of us,” said Sim as AI moves from pilot to production.
The Singapore forum’s agenda centres on practical pathways to deploy AI securely and sustainably, with case studies and architectural guidance on agent‑ready infrastructure, data platforms and security.
Sim quoted Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell to drive home the data imperative: “If you have no data, you have no AI. If you have bad data, you have bad AI.”
Story and photo by Edward Lim
Entelechy Asia 