Oracle CEO Safra Catz kicked off CloudWorld 2024 with a keynote that focused on the influence of Oracle technologies on customers. She took a global tour of companies from various industries drilling down into how Oracle had made an impact. One customer was the CIA, Oracle’s very first client from the 1970s.
La’Naia Jones, CIO at the CIA, spoke to Catz about the agency’s ambitions for GenAI. In response, Catz spoke of how those ambitions are helping Oracle to develop enterprise products. That’s the keyword when it comes to Oracle’s approach to GenAI: enterprise.
Commitment to Enterprise GenAI
In 2023, there were indicators that Oracle’s GenAI strategy would steer clear of consumer GenAI products and focus in favor of a primary focus on enterprises. Those indicators have come into sharp focus: Oracle is steadfast in its commitment to delivering GenAI capabilities to the enterprise.
So, what’s the impact on customers? In his keynote, “Delivering Real Value with Generative AI,” Greg Pavlik, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, not only revealed some of these customers were and the benefits they’ve realized, but also how Oracle delivered those benefits.
Pavlik explained how many enterprise customers could see the value of GenAI but needed help, and tools, to apply it in a business context. He cited an array of businesses that are using Oracle to implement GenAI to drive business value.
One customer, M.A. Mortenson Company, a major construction company, showed that it wasn’t only tech organizations that could benefit from GenAI. It is using the technology for summarization, proposal generation, and in critical areas of HR and finance.
The outdoor advertising firm Outfront Media is another company applying GenAI to create weekly sales performance summaries and utilizing sales data to generate personalized, region-specific sales emails.
Joining Pavlik on stage, Dan Ockenfels, manager, PE Go-To-Market Systems Operations at LinkedIn, explained how his company has benefitted from the GenAI services provided by Oracle.
LinkedIn has 1,200 to 1,300 service agents working on the Oracle Service Cloud platform monthly. Ockenfels cited the summarization capabilities of GenAI as a critical productivity enabler, while reducing time and costs.
Another company working with Oracle to support its AI and GenAI use cases is the healthcare start-up Evidium. We spoke with Evidium CEO Carl Bate on location at CloudWorld.
“For AI to be scalable and really useful in healthcare, there’s a couple of things we need to crack,” he says. “The first is that GenAI is super powerful but it’s a black box. So we need to find ways that we can harness it so it can be used transparently and you can have valid biological and mathematical reasoning incorporated within it.”
The company is working with Oracle to help it achieve this and other core goals. “The team at Oracle has been very responsive,” he says. “We got our first cluster with OCI and this was provided to us on a very cost-efficient basis for a young company. It was provisioned rapidly and we got access to the tech teams.
“Now we’re integrating fully with Oracle Healthcare. This is really exciting for a young company.”
AI Permeates the Oracle ‘Stack’
Oracle promised to integrate AI and GenAI capabilities across its core pillars, and it’s delivered. Pavlik explained how AI had been embedded at every layer from infrastructure to data to AI services and SaaS apps.
One of the latest developments announced at CloudWorld was the introduction of GenAI agents to OCI. The first OCI GenAI Agent to be rolled out is the RAG Agent, which provides out-of-the-box retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities, accessing Oracle Database 23ai AI Vector Search. Ultimately, the agent removes the complexity of carrying out these processes manually and committing excess time and money to R&D.
Oracle hasn’t just made a play for GenAI by responding to a gap in the market. It is accelerating its existing trajectory and responding to the needs and use cases of the enterprise.
In many ways, its position today as arguably the leader in enterprise AI is a testament to close to 50 years of innovation. It has built AI capabilities into an existing technology stack that was primed and ready for the transition. Like a wise elder, Oracle has addressed AI and GenAI innovation from two angles: what do we do well and how can we do it better?
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