Oracle CEO: “We’re freeing people from system burdens. We’re giving people more time to be human.”

While much focus on AI has been about increasing machine intelligence levels, it should really be about how you can support your people to become better versions of themselves - more capable humans.

So said Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia during the opening keynote, ‘Where AI means business,' at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas today.

For AI to be successful, he said, there are four key ingredients:

1. Access to data, but securely and with the right permissions
2. The ability to understand that data in the context of your business and the systems therein
3. High-performance infrastructure that enables AI to operate efficiently, at scale, and cost-effectively
4. AI needs to work inside the applications and processes where decisions are made and actionable intelligence is derived

A foundation of innovation

“This is where I think Oracle has a unique advantage that has been decades in the making. We’ve built technology that manages your data, runs your business, and powers your most important workloads,” Sicilia added.

These are:

• AI database delivers AI directly to enterprise data that is trusted
• Cloud applications put business intelligence to work, efficiently and safely
• Data platform provides the context and security AI needs
• OCI provides the efficiency and performance needed to operate AI at scale

He said the company had put more information at people’s fingertips than ever before. But added that work has historically been organized around software rather than people and what they need.

“[AI] allows for far more intuitive software. In fact, AI should allow you to barely think about the software at all. So instead of navigating applications and managing processes, you simply tell the system what you’d like to accomplish,” he said.

“Because it understands your business, it can figure out how to get the work done. So instead of spending your day operating the software, the software is working and operating for you.”

Applying AI to build a bridge between humans and machines

The ability for AI to recognize, anticipate, and then help is what Oracle is striving for when it comes to AI: creating meaningful connections between people and technology.

“We’re freeing people from system burdens. We’re giving people more time to be human. That’s the ambition we have for AI. Not simply more capable machines, but more capable people. People who have more time to think, to create, to solve problems, and to care for one another,” Sicilia added.

"Of course, as these systems take on more responsibility, they must also earn more trust… More AI intelligence does not mean fewer controls. Trust is what allows us to put AI to work where the stakes are highest and, therefore, the benefits can be the greatest.”

As expected, a slew of related announcements were rolled out on the first day of Oracle AI World, including:

• A revamped and rebranded version of what was formerly Oracle Cloud Success Navigator, now dubbed Oracle AI Success Navigator. It marries specialist AI agents, best practices, guidance, and training to help businesses more quickly move from theory to real-world value from their Oracle Fusion application implementations.
• Deep Trust AI Architecture, acting as a blueprint that bakes in trust to help organizations speed up their path to AI innovation without increasing risk
• Oracle Fusion Companion, which delivers an intelligence capable of understanding business objectives to decide upon and orchestrate the relevant agents, applications, approvals, and workflows required to achieve said goals.
• Oracle Fusion Agentic Home offers workers a more personalized experience, powered by AI, to help delegate work to agents as appropriate and track progress.
• New and expanded capabilities for Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse, including AI Data Catalog, Business Semantic Layer, Data Lake Accelerator, Data Studio, in addition to centralized controls and security
• New Oracle Fusion agentic applications to serve specific use cases such as customer experience, HR, and supply chain operations

Sicilia challenged event attendees to bring Oracle the problems they’ve learned to live with as well as their ambitions. He asked them to come forward to talk about the things they couldn’t do and the things they want to do, but haven’t had the technology to support those efforts, until now.

“We want the complexity to move into the background, and the possibilities for people to move to the foreground,” he said.