At VMware Explore 2026: Future-Proofing Enterprise AI with a Flexible Model Strategy

Choices in commercial, open-weight, and open source models have dramatically expanded over the past month. As a result, I’m continuing to see traction in organizations shaping their AI strategies around a hybrid approach, where they make use of our AI Gateway to connect users, agents, and application services to both cloud and on-premises models. Reasons for this approach often range from privacy, control, compliance, and latency requirements to tokenomics considerations. 

While all of this may sound great in theory, the adoption friction I often encounter is with organizations struggling with how to get started. This is why I’m looking forward to leading a panel discussion that will go deep into both the ecosystem and practical use cases at VMware Explore in just over a week. 

The panel session – Future-Proofing Enterprise AI: The Imperative of a Flexible AI Model Strategy for Your Infrastructure – will include leaders who are shaping the AI ecosystem: Alex Chen, Vice President at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, Ben McCormack, Principle Software Engineer at Google, and Brett Tanzer, Vice President, Azure Solutions at Microsoft. 

Together, we’ll explore what it takes to make the most of models in the private cloud and with frontier model providers. Key areas that we will cover include:

• Verticalization and specialization – Hear how leading model providers and innovating in frontier models, mixture of experts (MoE) models, and specialized small language models (SLMs). 
• Choice – Learn how to think holistically across the ecosystem of choices to apply the right model to the right use case. 
• Data sovereignty and control – Gain additional perspective on approaches to ensure that compliance, privacy and control mandates are satisfied. 
• Optimized spending – Balance model performance, speed, accuracy, and specialization with predictable token costs. 
• What the future holds – Our panelists will offer insights into what to expect in generative AI in the coming years. 

This session is sure to provide key data points to better prepare you to make informed decisions in the fast moving AI market. In addition, ample time will be left for you to ask the panelists about your most pressing concerns. 

Save your spot at the session. I look forward to seeing you there!