Delivering on the Oracle CloudWorld promises of Gen AI

Some time has passed since Oracle CloudWorld, but as we enter the new year, it feels like  a good time to reflect on our thoughts at the time and consider how Oracle are delivering on their announcements.

In my recent webcast, Reflecting on OCW, I shared what Inoapps had learned from Oracle CloudWorld. While it was mainly centered on my area of applications, the theme that was pervasive throughout was generative AI. Every conversation I’ve had since with Oracle or customers has had an element of AI within it.

In my webcast, I defined what was meant by Generative AI. Do you remember when every cloud presentation started with ‘what is cloud?’ or ‘what is IaaS v SaaS?’

AI is embedded in everything we do today. Decisions on lending and often in recruitment use AI, predicting the future based on historic data. It’s what fuels the targeted marketing in your social streams, suggestions on shopping platforms or film streaming providers. I’m writing this early in the morning and I have already unlocked my phone with face-id, turned on my heating from said phone, and used a chatbot to check a delivery. Later I’ll use AI to find an address using sat nav technology.

AI might not be new, but the acceleration over the past 12 months has been coined the AI Revolution. In this blog, I’ll talk more about that, but if you want to hear all my thoughts on CloudWorld, take a look at the webcast.

In the webcast, I talked about what Oracle is doing to facilitate AI, partnering with NVIDIA for faster chips or GPU to give the processing power that’s needed, and with Cohere for the Large Language Models, so that organizations who want to explore or develop AI have a cost efficient and cost effective platform to do so. Just last week, Oracle announced their Q2 results and talked about some amazing projects where organizations like Elon Musk’s xAI are using the Oracle AI platform to develop generative AI projects so successfully, there’s now a shortage of those GPUs.

At CloudWorld I was impressed with Larry Ellison comparing AI to fire and nuclear—amazing fuels that come with risks—and as quickly as people are spinning up AI projects, legislation and discussion is going on to control or rather, to provide guide rails for AI to understand those risks.

Even before the AI Revolution started, we had concerns about AI. Worries about inherent bias. AI needs large amounts of data to train it, so what if that data is flawed? The revolution has frightened many—will AI replace their jobs? This was one of the main reasons for the recent screenwriters strike in the US. Schools and Universities worry about AI delivering papers that fail their normal plagiarism tests.  

The European Union has announced their first AI framework. This followed the White House executive order on AI. They are not the same, as this article from Forbes discusses, and it will be interesting to see how these guide rails develop, because in a world that’s changing this fast, traditionally slow legislation will be out of date very quickly.

In my world of applications, there was lots of promise. There was a bit of reclassifying existing innovation as AI. Positioning what's already in the applications, like digital assistants, and helping recruiters matching CVs to job descriptions. And there was the promise of more…

One Inoapps customer attending Oracle CloudWorld is very excited by the promise of generative AI writing contracts. Taking the terms they selected and writing it as a single document rather than simply a series of paragraphs. Other areas promised by Steve Miranda in his keynote was around how much more could be done in recruiting and training and what we already see in the new module of Oracle Grow. He promised 50 new uses of generative AI in the next couple of releases, and I have to say I'm impressed with Oracle keeping up that narrative. Not only announcements at Oracle CloudWorld, but a continuous stream of what's going on from their strategy to specific areas that development are working on.

Steve Miranda asked customers to identify and help him determine where his priorities should be. Here at Inoapps, we constantly review Oracle innovation with our Managed Service customers to understand what they can use today, and we help identify what they need to address the business challenges they still face.  We are currently exploring the analytics area, where we anticipate we’ll see the first adoption of AI innovation in the applications world by our customers.

Our takeaway at Inoapps around generative AI is that Oracle has a serious proposition as a platform provider. They will continue to inject it into their applications and analytics, and we will deliver that to our customers. We will look at the art of the possible with our customers as Oracle introduces more ways to optimize their businesses. Inoapps will also have a continuous discussion with our customers and analysts as this exciting technology develops, while keeping abreast of the legal and ethical considerations.

If you want to discuss what generative AI means for your Oracle portfolio, reach out and AskInoapps.