What's Next After AI Adoption? HPE CEO Antonio Neri on the Future of Enterprise Transformation

Enterprise AI has reached an inflection point driven by agentic AI, and Antonio Neri has a front-row seat to what that looks like across HPE's global customer base. HPE reported fiscal Q2 2026 revenue of $10.68 billion, up 40% year-over-year, with earnings well above expectations, and the results reflect a customer base that has moved from AI experimentation into production deployment at scale. Neri tracks inference growth as his primary demand signal, and that metric is accelerating across every customer segment HPE serves.

At HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, Daniel Newman sat down with Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to examine where enterprise AI adoption actually stands, what the HPE-Juniper thesis is delivering for customers navigating the full infrastructure stack, and what Neri sees as the defining decisions enterprises need to make over the next three to five years.

Their conversation covers how agentic AI has changed the pace of enterprise adoption, with HPE itself running 1,200 use cases through a lifecycle process and 250 already in deployment. Neri walks through why networking has become the primary bottleneck to extracting maximum productivity from accelerated computing, how HPE's GreenLake Intelligence and OpsRamp acquisition have enabled a unified self-driving infrastructure model, and why HPE is converging security and networking at the silicon level in its next-generation campus and branch switches. He also addresses HPE's intentional customer segmentation across enterprise, sovereign, and hyperscaler markets, and why the company's margin discipline and full-stack integration strategy positions it for durable shareholder value as the AI infrastructure buildout scales toward 250 gigawatts of compute power by the end of the decade.

Key Takeaways:

🔹 Agentic AI has driven a genuine inflection in enterprise adoption. Neri marks the acceleration in agentic AI six months ago as the catalyst that moved enterprises from pilots into production-grade deployment across finance, HR, legal, supply chain, and engineering. HPE is living this internally with 250 use cases already in deployment.

🔹 Networking is the primary bottleneck to AI infrastructure productivity. With 250 gigawatts of compute projected by decade's end and networking representing 15 to 20 percent of total data center spend, every gigawatt translates to a $10 billion networking opportunity. Neri argues that Juniper gives HPE the products to compete across scale-up, scale-out, and data center interconnect.

🔹 HPE's self-driving infrastructure strategy spans every networking domain. The self-driving concept that began in campus and branch has expanded to data center, data center interconnect, and routing, all unified under GreenLake Intelligence with AI ops at the core. OpsRamp has become central to that capability.

🔹 Security is being built at the silicon level, not added at the software layer. HPE's next-generation campus and branch switches will converge networking and security in silicon, protecting tokens at the hardware root of trust rather than attesting through multiple software layers above it.

🔹 Customer segmentation is a deliberate margin strategy. HPE prioritizes full-stack NVIDIA integration for enterprise AI factories, supercomputer adjacency for sovereign deployments, and selective engagement with hyperscalers, avoiding the off-balance-sheet capital deployment patterns Neri views as poor long-term shareholder value.

🔹 The enterprises that win the next three to five years will be defined by how fundamentally they change how they operate. Neri's internal example: agentic AI compressed his forecast process from three days of curated data to real-time, unfiltered visibility. The companies that apply that operational honesty at scale will separate from those that do not.

The AI infrastructure buildout is early by Neri's read, and the companies treating it that way, investing in networking, security, governance, and full-stack integration now, are building the foundation that will determine AI outcomes at scale. HPE is making that case from both sides of the equation: as a customer running its own agentic AI deployments and as the provider building the infrastructure beneath them.

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ANTONIO NERI:
All of that has come together in one unified operative model where the intelligence has been built at the core and that's why we believe as a company we are ahead of the game when it comes down to providing solutions to enterprises through that unification.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

The Six Five is live here at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas. What an event it's been so far. We've had a few great keynotes. We've had a number of announcements. And of course we are in the middle of a boom across AI, networking, security, compute, and so much more. And I couldn't think of a better person to have here with me today than Antonio Neri. Antonio. Great to have you. Welcome back to the show.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for joining us at HP discover this very very critical week. I will say a fun week.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

It's been a fun week. It's been a good week. I know you're a World Cup fan. You know you even got a little reward. You got to watch the great Lionel Messi score a hat trick right in between probably dinners your three or four dinners last night. But What a start that's been, by the way.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Well, it was a great day. Obviously, we had the keynote early in the morning, and we had record attendance. It was unbelievable to see that room. It was almost two football fields. Think about it, how wide that room was. More than 9,000 people came to see it. But wrapping the day with my fellow compatriot, which I know because I met him a couple of times, it's remarkable to see what he's doing. It's just the best ever.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

Yeah, the best in the world. I remember four years ago sitting there watching that final. Do you think they could do it again?

ANTONIO NERI: Look, it's hard to be back to back. But if there is one that can do something that nobody ever imagined is Leo Messi, I believe it's going to be hard because this World Cup has one more extra game to play. But look, the Argentinian team looked good. They sure did. And if he's on form, it's going to be hard to beat him.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

All right, we got to talk some tech. I could ramble on about, you know, I'm a passionate fan myself. So it's just like, I knew you'd be excited. So I just want to hit you on that a little bit. But it's been, first of all, you had to one-up a pretty big keynote last year, because you guys did the Spear experience last time. And so, but I agree with you. The room, the energy, I mean, it's been just a tremendous year for HPE. You know, I track you both as an industry side, and I track you very closely on the securities and equity side. And it's been, you know, just want to congratulate you.

ANTONIO NERI: 

We're still undervalued. So we're clear. But it's slowly catching up to our vision and strategy and strong execution we had in the last four quarters. And honestly I think the thesis of the junior acquisition is playing out now and people are recognizing that.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

I think being able to pull forward a couple years was very well received. I call it the God candle that you got in response. And well deserved because it's been a long time that I think it's been underappreciated. But more to go as you said. So let's talk a little bit about the customer side. You're here at an event. The customers are all around you customers partners. You know A.I. is in this. It's I always say it's still really early. You know I see these still interviews on CNBC where they're like oh we're in the third inning. I got on CNBC and I said I think we're still in the parking lot. Yeah. And we're still you know cooking a hot dog and having having a beer in the pregame. Like I think it's extremely delicate.

ANTONIO NERI: 

That's what we do with tailgating.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

That's actually what I said. I said we're tailgating and people think you're crazy. I'm like I don't think people realize how big this actually is. But you're you have the front row seat to customers that are turning A.I. into productivity and efficiencies. I mean what are you seeing in those companies right now that are getting there early and that are getting results at the very beginning of this guy. Boom.

ANTONIO NERI: And they have a lot of that here on the show floor. I mean we have seven acres of technology on display and the story is being told by customers which is what I love. One thing you standing up there and and sharing your point of view. One thing is customer telling how they're using this technology for their advantage. And look I spend more than 50 percent of my time talking to customers and partners. And when I think about the adoption of AI, it really hit an inflection point six months ago with the advancement we see with agentic AI. And that's why we spend a lot of time around the agentic enterprise. And look, we see it ourselves. We have 1,200 use cases under a lifecycle process and 250 already in deployment. The value of the agentic AI is really bringing together AI in a process-oriented approach where you hyper automate using AI that workflow. And we see it across all the functions, finance, HR, legal, supply chain, services. And then, of course, in engineering, you see the value of this technology to us that are coding and application development. So clearly, enterprises are seeing the value. And then there is one metric I watch all the time. the growth in infancy because the moment that inflection point continue to grow in France and is going to be the largest part of what we're going to see by the end of the decade. And that's why I'm very encouraged about the adoption. But most importantly I'm encouraged about what we have to offer. That's why our AI factory for enterprise so critical.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

And it's interesting because that inflection that you were watching created a boom for a number of parts of the infrastructure stack that I think a lot of people somewhat, you know, we talked about what was underappreciated, this entire CPU boom, which you were well positioned to benefit from. I mean, a year ago, people, you know, there was a story, it's all GPU, XPU. There is no more future CPUs or this. diminishing thing. And now we're finding that people are buying two-year-old CPU just to get as much capacity as possible. Memory, I mean, we knew memory was a big thing for training, but what inferencing has done and now agents have done for the need of memory. And then, of course, you being a full infrastructure stack, all the way down to the supply, you've got storage. You've got to get things close to memory because you can't put enough memory. And so what I'm saying is it's really created this gravity.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Well, I mean, look, I understand the hype around accelerated computing. which of course was the GPU progress we saw, tremendous progress in the last two years. But everything else in the stack has to catch up. And so the next layer of that stack is memory. And to me, storage is an extension of memory. That's why you see now things like KB cache and other things growing very rapidly. But ultimately, the biggest bottleneck is networking.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

I was going to ask you, but you went first. Go ahead.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Yeah, well, I mean, look, the networking is the core bottleneck to get the maximum amount of productivity for this accelerated computing. And so whether it's CPU now for inferencing, and we made a number of announcements together with NVIDIA, or whether it's alternative training stacks like AMD Helios, And the need to really drive the maximum productivity for this amount of CAPEX, because we believe by the end of the decade, we're going to basically have 250 gigawatts of compute power. You don't want any GPU or CPU to be idle. And that's why our thesis on networking is growing up very, very rapidly, because networks for AI have to catch up to that demand. And I believe with Juniper, we have the best products to compete in that market.

DANIEL NEWMAN: It is worth putting an exclamation point on, first of all, Juniper being designed inside Helios, you know, we have AMD, you know, potentially seeing double digit market share. So for a long time, and you have a great partnership with Nvidia, but that size, when you're talking about 250 gigawatts, and you talk about 50, maybe even $80 billion per gigawatt. You look at what that opportunity means for you.

ANTONIO NERI: 

And then networking represents between 15% and 20% of that. So every gigawatt, let's say $60 billion, just take a middle of the road, that's a $10 billion networking opportunity per gigawatt. So multiply that by 250, and then you see the market. And so Juniper brings all the key elements to build this data center, scale up, which you talked about being inside the helio stack scale out because you now need to connect massive amount of GPUs across hundreds if not thousands of racks and then scale across because you have to drive the data center interconnect. Juniper brings all elements of that thesis to bear with the latest time to market technology. fully automated solutions with AI. And then obviously we have the on-ramp solutions as well into the network, which is core to how we use these models.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

But as part of your story, you were very thoughtful about leading with network security. And of course, you have always had a big compute business. But we talked a little offline about how it sort of took the market a while to catch up. But the fact that you're in the scale up product that he loves product that he's building. It does give you now a much bigger entree into because you've been very margin sensitive. You've focused very much and said we're going to grow enterprise. We're going to grow sovereign. We're going to you know we're going to work where we can deliver compute and make the kind of margins that we have promised to our investors and that we allow us to run the business the way you want to run the business. But some people thought maybe that meant you weren't getting exposure to that 250 gigawatts.

ANTONIO NERI: 

We have exposures. It's just intentionally we select what to play. Because look in any customer segments the one thing you know I trying to reinforce all the time. You need to think about The use case, training versus inferencing. And then you need to think about customer segmentation underneath. Obviously, hyperscalers, service providers, and model builders is one segment. Sovereign is another segment. And enterprise is another segment. In in any case in any of this weather strainer inference or whether it's segment 12 or 3 will leave when it's working we have it all right that's where we can get tremendous value for our shareholders and we bring the right solution to our customers then for compute. We prioritize the full stack integration with NVIDIA for enterprise, our AI factory, including software, because there the value proposition is time to value. And sovereign, because we have a large supercomputer business, which the adjacency to AI makes total sense. And this large service provider is all about capital deployment. And many companies are using off-balance sheet to participate there. I don't think long-term that's a good value for our shareholders. And so that's why we have been more selective. But we have the solutions, AI factors at scale with NVIDIA, now with AMD. And to your point, the integration with AMD allows us to be more synergistic between networking and compute. Yeah. So the bottom line I think we are doing the right thing to create long term value for our shareholders. Yes. That's sustainable and durable which is I think in a very important world. And then bring the right relevancy to each of these customer segment use cases. Look time will tell. But I think we are on the right path. And the fact that we got the six quarters ahead and we are pulling forward two years our original commitment and paying down the debt a year earlier. It shows that our strategy is working.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

Yeah, absolutely. Let's flip to a bit more of the autonomous conversation. You've got a lot of things going on, talking about how infrastructure gets managed. I had a good conversation with Rami about this. Not well, but we talk a lot about the consumption layer of AI, meaning when we pull out our device and we go on cloud, or we go on our enterprise tools that allow us to abstract all this data and use it. But another massive opportunity is going to be AI for the for running infrastructure. Exactly. And so you've got to build something that allows because people we don't have enough hands. We don't have enough hands to manage all of this infrastructure. There's too much. You're very focused on security. The surface of risk is too big for people to try to get.

ANTONIO NERI: 

There's no human being can deal with.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

So you have a lot of thoughts about kind of the autonomous infrastructure of the future. Talk a little about how HP is approaching that.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Well, obviously, you know, we're using AI to our own benefit. And we have this concept of self-driving. And you talked to Rama about the self-driving network, which obviously are the core is that AI ops. And we have expanded a self-driving concept to all networking domains. It started in the campus and branch. We went to the data center, and we took it even to the data center interconnect with routing. I mean, if you look at some of the demos with the routers, the self-optimizing capabilities we built are insane. But because the technology is there, and we have the data to deal with it. But we also extended to our rest of the portfolio, leading with GreenLake Intelligence. And that's the self-driving intelligence we built in everything we do. So the first principle, whether I was right or lucky or a true visionary, it doesn't matter. We built everything underneath GreenLake, the infrastructure layer, to be cloud native. By being cloud native allows me to put a lot of that value into the cloud and a lot of the data to be in the cloud, which means I can observe it. And the OpsRamp acquisition has been a phenomenal success because that allows me to be more intelligent around that cloud native infrastructure. And then I can package that infrastructure for the use cases can be virtualization. It can be a I. It can be just networking deployments can be just compute and storage deployments. Doesn't matter. All of that has come together in one unified operative model where the intelligence has been built out the core. And that's why we believe as a company we are ahead of the game. when it comes down to provide these solutions to enterprises. So that unification. And so we are very happy because that allows us to cross sell and upsell across the enterprise.

ANIEL NEWMAN: 

What year did you give your everything as a service. What year did it was that 20 20 20 19.

ANTONIO NERI: 

OK. Now I remember when I was here to discover. The first thing I said was in 2018 that the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. In 2019, we said we're going to offer everything with as a company as a service. And then in 2020, we came out with our GreenLake Cloud.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

And since then, we have added… I was trying to mentally age whether that was before or after we had the brief and strange times that we shut down.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Yeah, it was before the COVID pandemic.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

It was right before, but it's still sort of… I think you said you know this is all sort of bubbling up and with the what accelerated computing A.I.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Has done it's made all that look even look even you know when I acquire Cray supercomputer and we have the other Cray one next to a quantum computer. Right. To show that this these systems will co-exist for a long period of time. It is about economics. It's about scale. It's about all of that. When we did the acquisition of Cray which was in 2019, we understood that the largest workload that would run on a supercomputer would be AI. And AI is a true definition of a hybrid workload because training generally tends to be done centralized. in these large clusters. But then enterprises bring these models, frontier models, open source models, on-premise, to give context with their data because they want to make sure they're governed, that their data is protected, and meet the compliance of regulatory environments. But more and more, the inference will also be done at the edge. So that edge-centric is still valid. The cloud, you need it by definition in order to be able to deploy AI on top of it. data driven. I didn't know that you know it would be AI. But I understood on the supercomputer infrastructure would be an AI world load. And we were right. Right. And now we understand that the next part of the inflection point is the networking as the core foundation. And that's why we we took the actions we took.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

And I like that you called out security, compliance, governance, because we've become incredibly focused on model performance.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Exactly.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

And in the end, though, every enterprise is deeply concerned about 

running those models and what it can see, what it can't see, where its data resides. You've got lineage and sovereignty. And of course, you've got compliance, governance. And if I'm hearing you right, though, what you're basically saying is it's going to end up being a very hybrid approach. No different than the cloud it was. Right. But it becomes even more important now, I would say.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Absolutely. And when we think about security, it's quite fascinating to me. Obviously, we put guardrails around it and governance around it. And that's what we announced yesterday. And Fidelma today is going to elaborate further what that means from a technical point of view. But we build all of that inside our greenleg cloud control plane. So when you deploy the AI factory, all those capabilities come with it. You don't have to worry about it, right? And even we actually observe what the agency is doing. So you put the guardrails around the agents. And if an agent goes rogue, we actually can bring it back. And we can bring the entire environment back, no different than a human being would make a mistake sometimes through the keyboard. When I think about security in the next evolution, and you're going to see us, knowing that the network is the only ramp to use these models, right, and inference is going to be done everywhere, what if we build security at the core of the network? So we understood networking and security are converging. We are taking it one step further. We are actually doing it at the silicon level, not at the software level. So the next generation of our campus and branch switches, which we own our own silicon, is going to have both converge at the silicon layer, not at the software layer. So when a token gets through that silicon, it's being protected at the root of the infrastructure, not attested up in the layers of the stack. Yeah. Reducing risk and honestly overhead and topics topics you know because you have to add all these layers. And in the end you're never sure you are really protected. But if you do it right though the hardware root of trust. What if that that's one investment. And that's it. You have you or you're sure that's been done.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

All right. So Mercedes is going to going to win this year. Messi has a shot of repeats. But let's talk about A.I. in three to five years. Three to five years. What is going to be the kind of key defining attributes of successful companies that have landed this A.I. ship A.I. plane. I guess I should say.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Well I mean we all say the same thing generally speaking which is this is a new industrial revolution. Right. I don't think about AI just as a technology. I think about AI as a way we live and work where in the business or in the society. So what we're going to see in the next three to five years. Look some people are going to be left behind. It's all about choices. And we have to say the future belongs to the fast. We are racing to that by basically adopting this technology to change everything. You know, how you interact with us, how you place orders, how you get service, right? How we develop product again is going to change dramatically. We already see it. You know I give an example when I do my forecast calls with my team used to take three days for people to bring all the data from all over the place. And you know when you are a CEO normally they you get a version of the truth that has been judged before it gets to you. Now, not anymore.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

You're seeing it raw, pure.

ANTONIO NERI: 

I see it, and I see it in a way I can digest it. Although, you know, being in the company so long, I have instincts when people are telling me the truth or not, because they always say the truth is in the cold face. And these models are cold-blooded, because I give you a little example. The other day I was looking at something, and there's a tiny, tiny little thing in the portfolio, which is not big in the context of what we do, and the agent model said, You are behind, and the reality is that you suck. What do you mean you suck? I mean, literally, you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. So, they tell you exactly what it is, right? So, I think that's what we're going to see. That's the measure of success. How we change, how fundamentally we operate, and how we live. Personally, you know, I want some good rails how we live, but on the business side, I think this is remarkable. And it's fun to be at this point in time, you know, in the middle of all of this because This is going to go in the legacy of who you are and what you did for our customers and for our employees.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

I love it. I always say to my team is hyper personalized contextually aware. That's that's that's what I need to see. So I don't need to see a generic dashboard in CRM. I need to see the view I want to see in AI. Yeah. If your data and all the other things are done right. Correct. Present an opportunity to do what we just never could do before. And Tony at the scale that we never see at a scale we've never seen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Chat all day. But I'm betting you've got a few other things you've got to do around here.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Well, it's always meeting with a customer. We have 13,000 people here. It's the biggest event ever. So I'm really proud of what the team have put together, the brand, the showcase, the demos. But ultimately, it's the people talking to each other that creates those connections.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

Well, congratulations. We'll be watching close, and we'll catch up. You know, we always catch up around the quarter, so we'll definitely keep catching up. But congrats on a great event. Thank you. We'll watch the World Cup closely. Yeah, we'll see.

ANTONIO NERI: 

Go Argentina. A month from now.

DANIEL NEWMAN: 

Go Argentina. I always have fun watching them play. And thank you, everybody, for being part of This 6-5. We are on the road here at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas. Great event. Stay with us for more live coverage here and all the coverage of This 6-5 here at HPE Discover. Signing off for now. See you all real soon.

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