Artificial intelligence was predictably front and centre at Oracle’s revamped and rebranded customer event – which changed its name to AI World from Cloud World in a last-minute switch-up just a few short weeks ago. In his annual address to the event, company founder Larry Ellison threw everything and the kitchen sink at the technology.
In a lengthy address, Ellison described the two biggest opportunities – for Oracle and its users at least – as AI training and AI reasoning. Training on public data is the fastest growing business opportunity in history, potentially bigger than the industrial revolution, said the veteran tech leader.
Reasoning on private data will be more valuable and according to Ellison, who built Oracle’s first databases 48 years ago, the firm’s extensive heritage means it already holds a great deal of it.
“What will change the world is when we start using these remarkable electronic brains to solve humanity’s most difficult and enduring problems,” said Ellison.
He went on to reject characterisation of the current AI hype as akin to the dotcom bubble that ruined many fortunes at the turn of the century, although he did concede there are tech companies that claim to be AI companies which are nothing of the kind.
“The smartest people I know are investing fortunes, to be specific, they’re investing their fortunes in building and training these AI models. That’s how important [and] extraordinary they are,” he said.
“I think by and large we are going to live much better lives, healthier, longer lives, eat better food, live in better houses. It should be a much better world because these tools are so enormously powerful [although] some of the things they will do are a little bit shocking.”
Bringing things back down to earth, AI World’s opening keynote fell to CEO Mike Sicilia who described a “once in a generation moment” and said Oracle was making no secret of its ambitions to stand as an AI leader, delivering trusted services to transform organisations in every industry.
“We’re not just showing up with some AI bells and whistles bolted on to our technology,” said Sicilia. “There’s no other company that’s bringing together the data, the infrastructure, the applications, and the trust to power every AI ambition for every business at every single layer of the tech stack.”
Representatives of Oracle customers including car rental firm Avis Budget, Brazilian pharma and biomedical research organistion Biofy Technologies, US energy and utility supplier Exelon, and hospitality group Marriott International, joined Sicilia to discuss how they are partnering with the supplier on all things AI.
Ty Breland, chief human resources officer and executive vice president of operations services at Marriott International, said he was using AI to both empower the organisation’s 800,000 employees – who are scattered across around 9,000 properties – and enhance the guest experience.
Marriott started its AI journey with Oracle in 2023, and as the two organisations deepened their partnership, said Breland, it was important to him that his own people didn’t feel forced into engaging with a potentially unwelcome, even threatening, new technology.
Early on when planning its initial deployment among Marriott’s public-facing customer service agents, the technology team sought feedback from them as to what pain points they actually wanted to solve. The end result, so say Marriott’s leadership, was something that people genuinely wanted to use.
Breland said: “As we started to deploy those solutions it became contagious. They wanted more.”
“If we get this right, AI isn’t replacing the human touch, it’s bringing the human forward,” he added.
Oracle hits Database AI upgrade button
Amid a plethora of announcements made at AI World, Oracle unleashed a major upgrade to Oracle AI Database, moving from 23ai to 26ai and promising to “architect AI into the core of data management”. The firm said this advances its vision of a next-gen AI-native database spanning the entire data and development stack.
At its heart, the upgrade enables customers to look to run more dynamic agentic workflows that provide them with specific answers and solutions from a combination of private database data and public information.
Building on an open AI strategy, 26ai’s capabilities will supposedly offer customers more freedom of choice when building and deploying AI apps and services. In a nod to growing cyber security concerns over so called harvest now, decrypt later attacks, it also now includes the NIST-backed quantum-resistant ML-KEM algorithm to encrypt data when it is on the move.
The firm also announced the general availability of Oracle AI Data Platform, which is designed to enable customers to securely connect generative AI-models to their enterprise data, applications and workflows, and the expansion of a longstanding partnership with AMD to launch the first public AI supercluster powered by AMD’s Instinct MI450 Series GPUs. This will begin with an initial 50,000 GPU deployment beginning towards the back end of 2026, pending further expansion, and is designed to help customers scale their AI projects.
