If you’ve been following the enterprise tech landscape this year, you already know what the most urgent conversation at VMware Explore 2026 in Las Vegas is going to be: AI.
Over the past couple of years, AI has quickly evolved from pilot projects into an engine running daily business operations. Enterprise leaders everywhere are integrating LLMs and customized AI pipelines directly into business-critical workflows. But as AI moves into production, IT organizations need to balance high-performance GPU demands with strict data sovereignty and compliance requirements.
Agentic systems are the fastest-moving frontier in enterprise AI right now, and they come with a completely different infrastructure profile. Think about it: because these agents act almost like autonomous employees—constantly fetching, analyzing, and rewriting proprietary company data—they require strong access controls, traceability, and adaptive infrastructure that can meet their performance and scale requirements.
Traditional AI deployment models simply weren’t designed for this. Sending autonomous, highly-privileged workloads to the public cloud triggers operational and compliance risks that hyperscalers often struggle to mitigate. What’s even more difficult is trying to provide consistent governance and policy enforcement across disparate silos for each AI cloud or PaaS the organization uses.
The organizations that will win with AI in the next three years are the ones building sovereign, governed, production-grade AI infrastructure with control. VMware Cloud Foundation is that infrastructure, and Explore 2026 is where you learn how to build it.
Throughout the event, you’ll learn how to:
- Build and run your AI agents and workflows: We’ll dive into how you can easily and securely leverage open-source software (OSS) alongside standards-based components and tooling.
- Govern your AI fleet: Discover how to ensure your AI agents and workloads can only access the data and execute the actions they are authorized for. We’ll be covering crucial topics like observability, cost and quota controls, policy enforcement, and sandboxing.
- Protect against outside AI threats: As agents become more powerful, the threats will increasingly be AI-driven. We’ll show you how to lock down your environment and quickly recover from sophisticated AI-driven attacks.
To help you navigate the Explore content catalog, I’ve put together a curated list of my top picks for sessions on AI. I highly recommend building an agenda that addresses how to securely run multiple agents on a unified platform, without compromising on cost efficiency, performance, resiliency, or hardware choice.
My Top AI Session Picks for Las Vegas:
- VMware Cloud Foundation Private AI Services: What’s New and What’s Next? [CLOB1661LV]
- Business Impact of Agentic AI: A Customer Fireside Chat [CLOP1277LV]
- Deploy and govern AI models and agents with VMware Cloud Foundation Private AI Services [CLOB1229LV]
- Why Is VMware Cloud Foundation the Best Private Cloud Platform for Agentic AI Workloads? [CLOB1244LV]
- Accelerating AI: Mastering GPU on VMware Cloud Foundation [INVB1237LV]
- Powering Agentic AI: New Capabilities in VMware Cloud Foundation [VBT2044LV]
Hands-on Labs and Demos: Be sure to check out the AI-related HOLs (both expert-led workshops and self-paced labs) and demos available at Explore in Las Vegas.
Safe travels, and I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!
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