Artificial intelligence, as expected, was the focus of Oracle's revamped and rebranded customer event, which has changed its name to World of AI from Cloud World at the last minute, just a few weeks ago. In his annual address to the event, company founder Larry Ellison threw everything at technology, including the kitchen sink.
In a lengthy address, Ellison described the two biggest opportunities – at least for Oracle and its users – as AI learning and AI thinking. Public data training is the fastest-growing business opportunity in history, potentially bigger than the Industrial Revolution, a veteran technology leader has said.
Reasoning about private data will be more valuable, and according to Ellison, who created the first Oracle databases 48 years ago, the company's extensive heritage means it already has a lot of this.
“What will change the world is when we start using these wonderful electronic brains to solve humanity's most complex and enduring problems,” Ellison said.
He went on to reject characterizations of the current AI frenzy as being akin to the dot-com bubble that destroyed many fortunes at the turn of the century, although he acknowledged that there are tech companies that claim to be AI companies that are nothing of the sort.
“The smartest people I know are investing fortunes, or rather, they are investing their fortunes in creating and training these AI models. That's how important [and] they are extraordinary,” he said.
“I think overall we will live much better, healthier, longer lives, eat better, live in better houses. The world should be a much better place because these tools are extremely effective. [although] some of the things they'll do are a little shocking.”
Bringing things back down to earth, AI World's opening remarks fell to CEO Mike Sicilia, who described a “once-in-a-generation moment” and said Oracle has made no secret of its ambitions to become a leader in artificial intelligence, providing trusted services to transform organizations in every industry.
“We don't just show up with some AI bells and whistles attached to our technology,” Sicilia said. “There is no other company that brings together data, infrastructure, applications and trust to realize every AI ambition for every business at every single layer of the technology stack.”
Representatives from Oracle clients including car rental firm Avis Budget, Brazilian pharmaceutical and biomedical research organization Biofy Technologies, US energy and utilities provider Exelon and hotel group Marriott International joined Sicilia to discuss. how they collaborate with the vendor on all matters related to artificial intelligence.
Ty Breland, chief human resources officer and executive vice president of operational services for Marriott International, said he is using AI to empower the organization's 800,000 employees spread across about 9,000 hotels and improve the guest experience.
Marriott began its artificial intelligence journey with Oracle in 2023, and as the two organizations deepened their partnership, Breland said it was important to him that his employees didn't feel forced to interact with potentially unwanted, even threatening, new technology.
Early in planning the initial rollout among Marriott's public customer service agents, the technology team asked them for feedback on what pain points they really wanted to solve. The end result, according to Marriott executives, was something people genuinely wanted to use.
Breland said, “When we started implementing these solutions, they became contagious. They wanted more.”
“If we get it right, AI doesn't replace the human touch, it takes the human touch forward,” he added.
Oracle hits the AI database update button
Amid a flurry of announcements made at AI World, Oracle announced a major upgrade to the Oracle AI Database, moving from 23ai to 26ai and promising to “build AI into the core of data management.” The firm said this advances its vision of a next-generation AI-powered database spanning the entire data and development stack.
Essentially, the update allows customers to run more dynamic agent-based workflows that provide them with specific answers and solutions based on a combination of private database data and public information.
Building on an open AI strategy, 26ai's capabilities are expected to give customers more freedom of choice when building and deploying AI applications and services. In a sign of growing cybersecurity concerns about so-called “collect now, decrypt later” attacks, it also now includes the NIST-backed quantum-resistant ML-KEM algorithm to encrypt data while it is in motion.
The firm also announced the general availability of the Oracle AI Data Platform, which is designed to enable customers to securely connect generative AI models to their enterprise data, applications and workflows, as well as expanding its long-standing partnership with AMD to launch the first publicly available AI supercluster powered by AMD GPUs Instinct MI450 series. This will begin with an initial deployment of 50,000 GPUs towards the end of 2026 in anticipation of further expansion and is designed to help customers scale their AI projects.
