About Antonio Neri
Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has been active in public appearances and earnings calls discussing the company's growth driven by demand for AI infrastructure. In June 2026, Neri reported a "record breaking" second quarter, citing strong demand across HPE's portfolio in networking, cloud, and AI. He stated that the company raised its fiscal 2026 guidance and provided an early outlook for fiscal 2027, which he attributed to the "durability of the demand" and a pipeline that "remains multiples of the current backlog." Neri described the Juniper acquisition as a "home run" and noted that the combined portfolio is strengthening HPE's market position.
At HPE Discover 2026, Neri highlighted the role of networking as a critical enabler and bottleneck for AI, and announced new products and partnerships, including a quantum computing alliance with six companies. He discussed the shift toward "agentic AI" and the "agentic enterprise," stating that AI adoption has accelerated in the last six to nine months. Neri also addressed financial strategy, saying HPE expects to return to two times leverage by the end of fiscal 2026 and return approximately 75% of free cash flow to shareholders starting in 2027. He characterized the current period as a "technology platform shift" driven by AI agents and emphasized that "the future belongs to the fast."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Antonio Neri's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Host0:00
Announcements, including a host of new quantum computing partnerships and the expansion of its AI factory platform with NVIDIA. Joining us now first on CNBC is HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri. It's great to have you back, Antonio. Welcome.
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Antonio Neri0:14
Good morning, Sarah. Thank you for having me.
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Host0:16
Good morning. So tell us a little bit about the quantum announcements and where you play. Because there's growing excitement here from investors and businesses around this promising technology.
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Antonio Neri0:28
Well, Sarah, we are here in Vegas where we're hosting our flagship event, HPE Discover. We have more than 13,000 customers and partners joining us. It's an incredible, buzzing event. But as you spoke, as you said, obviously the narrative is around AI, but quantum is a technology that has tremendous potential. So we announced a Quantum Scaling Alliance with six of the top quantum companies. And the idea there is to be able to scale quantum computing faster so we can make it a reality. At the core of that is making sure we can scale the quantum technology we have today and don't wait for all the qubits volume that we need, but really do it in a way where networking, which obviously now HPE has a tremendous portfolio, and software, creates the environment for companies to start developing quantum applications.
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Host1:18
Your partnerships with — you mentioned six — Intel, Quantum Machines, Rigetti, Berlin. What does that start now?
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Antonio Neri1:27
It starts now. And our approach has been more quantum agnostic so that we can bring any company that's developing quantum technologies and be able to work together so we can actually use the power of all the knowledge that we have to scale quantum faster, so we can develop applications today and don't wait for the full quantum qubits volumes to be available.
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Host1:49
How big of a market is this, especially relative to your other exciting market, which is AI servers?
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Antonio Neri1:56
Yeah, well, I think the future will dictate how big it is. I think it's going to be enormous. But we have to be pragmatic about the fact that ultimately it's going to be used in specific use cases where the return on that investment will deliver the value. But in the end, as you know, as an engineer, I have been for many, many years, you have to start today. You have to really plan the future. And ultimately we can shape the way we want it. But obviously there are a lot of challenges around technology, manufacturing, serviceability. And then most importantly is the applications aspect of it.
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Host2:33
Antonio, it's David. You know, you put out four announcements, I think, in total today. And they all used the same phrase: agentic enterprise. And I went back a year ago, it was just you were using just AI. So I'm curious as to sort of what's actually different about an AI agent acting autonomously in a customer's environment versus sort of the tools that enterprises are already using.
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Antonio Neri2:54
Well, David, great to see you. Those announcements just today. But in the last three days, we have made a number of announcements. Yesterday it was all about networking. Today it's all about the agentic enterprise, as you said. What I see, David, is that in the last six to nine months, we see an acceleration of adoption of AI in the enterprise. And the way that's happened is happening through the use of agentic workflows. So when I think about agentic enterprise, I think about agents that can do work in a value stream process where together with an orchestration of a super agent can actually deliver the value to the enterprise. And we see it ourselves in our company. We have more than 1,200 use cases, 250 already in production. And the value is not a single agent. It is the value of bringing agents together. And I actually believe that the future will be dictated not only by the workforce of humans, but the workforce of agents.
