Oracle CloudWorld: A Lot of AI Surprises Coming in Years Ahead
Generative AI is fundamentally changing things at Oracle.
![Larry Ellison at Oracle CloudWorld 2023 Larry Ellison at Oracle CloudWorld 2023](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltc8255cc79d3e5798/6537c7b29801e358d9b2d5fd/Larry-Ellison-Oracle-CloudWorld-2023.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Oracle’s Larry Ellison said the Oracle Public Health Data Intelligence Platform is the most important thing his company is doing.
“We’ve unified national population-scale health data, for the entire population of a country,” he said. “This is designed to take all of the electronic health record (EHR) data for a country, for all the patients in a country, and put it together, all the diagnostic laboratory data, everything, putting that into a single Oracle autonomous database for the entire population of a country. When you take all of this health data and put it in one place, you get enormous benefits. Suddenly, the first benefit is when you go to train AI models, you have 1,000 times more data than you used to have. You have all the data. Often for a drug, the best data you had was obtained during the clinical trial. But once the clinical trial is over, they don’t gather nearly as much data. This is like a clinical trial for everything that goes on forever. We keep collecting all of this data, and then we use that data to train models and the answers we get from those models enable detailed personalized medicine.”
At CloudWorld, Oracle announced limited availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service. The new generative AI service will support large language models (LLMs) to help organizations automate end-to-end business processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences, while keeping their data secure and private.
Built on OCI in collaboration with Cohere, an AI platform for enterprise, the OCI Generative AI service is a managed service that enables users to integrate LLMs in their own applications through an available API. Once generally available, this service and Cohere models will work with AI Vector Search, a feature of Oracle Database 23c that provides retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a generative AI technique that combines pretrained LLMs and proprietary business data to deliver responses with higher accuracy. This service will also form the basis for generative AI capabilities embedded across Oracle’s suite of SaaS applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle NetSuite and industry applications such as Oracle Cerner.
“Through our partnership with Cohere, customers will be able to embed generative AI easily and securely into their technology stack with full confidence that our solutions align with their most stringent data security and privacy requirements,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our approach further enables organizations to refine these models using their own data — so the models will understand their internal operations like no one else.”
Oracle also unveiled new AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion Customer Experience (CX) — and its health care solutions.
The new AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion CX aim to help marketers, sellers and service agents grow revenue and deliver optimum customer experience. The latest AI capabilities free marketers, sellers and service agents from time-consuming and manual tasks by unlocking relevant content, recommendations and insights with automation and conversational interfaces.
In addition, Oracle announced several significant enhancements to its health care solutions. These included new cloud-based EHR capabilities, generative AI services, public APIs and back-office enhancements designed for the health care industry.
Oracle’s next-generation EHR platform is focused on improving patient and provider experiences with easy-to-use, consumer-grade applications. The platform will provide convenient self-service options that help patients, while reducing provider burden and administrative workloads, the company said.
Built on OCI, the EHR platform will offer performance, data security and access to AI technology. Customers will be able to adopt capabilities of the platform, without reimplementation, in a modular fashion on the timeline that works best for them. Select capabilities will be available in the next 12 months.
Oracle Health will make its clinical and financial resources, such as vitals, appointments and orders, available via public APIs. While continuing to comply with all regulated requirements, these new APIs will enable deeper integration with Oracle’s clinical solutions and allow partners, customers and third-party vendors to create more advanced customizations, as well as net-new experiences and workflows.
Oracle‘s Clay Magouyrk said Oracle partners are benefitting from its use of AI and generative AI.
“At least from the new generative AI service layer, I think it’s actually a time of great change for partners,” he said. “If you look at SIs, a lot of customers want access to this technology, but they don’t have the skills. And so I think it does create new opportunities for those partners where we work together with many of the largest SIs, people like Accenture or Deloitte and others, to make sure we both understand the environment. And then we we jointly solve problems for customers.”
It also opens up a deeper partnership opportunity with ISVs where they can take new technology and build integrations that use both generative AI services as well as access to other pieces, Magouyrk said.
“Imagine extensions to your SaaS applications, [future] custom features for industry applications, custom integration with the database, and those partners then build that on the platform,” he said. “And the fact that, for example, at Oracle, our services are available in all of our regions, we have so many of them around the world, that then becomes a massive differentiator because those partners, when they build on our platform, they get massive scale applications.”
Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Global Industries, said there’s also an opportunity in AI and generative AI for partners to offer differentiated change management services, particularly in verticals like health care and life sciences, where they have to think through patient consent, identification, tokenization and more.
“So no matter if the training data is in a shared model or a dedicated model, you want to make sure that as an institution who’s the supplier of the data, that you’re not inadvertently violating Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) policies and things like this,” he said. “And that requires some process inspections and thought leadership from our partners to help customers who probably have not had to have policies in place at that level because the data was static or the data was not really moving. And I think it’s a unique opportunity to work with partners to serve the customers and get that right.”
At CloudWorld, Oracle and Uber announced Collect and Receive, a new offering on the Oracle Retail platform connecting retailers and consumers to enhance last-mile delivery.
Supported by the Oracle Retail Data Store and cloud platform technologies, retailers can now link to Uber Direct, the company’s white-label delivery solution, via pre-integrated APIs. This joint solution enables retailers to rebalance inventory while giving customers more choices, including same-day and scheduled delivery options, order pickup, and returns to the closest retail or postal location. The service is available for Oracle Retail customers in the United States and Canada.
“At Uber, it’s crystal clear that on-demand delivery is a core expectation for consumers, and today’s retailers are taking note,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO. “Every month, more than 3,500 brands use Uber Direct to power millions of same-day local deliveries. Together with Oracle, we can make it easier than ever for retailers to leverage on-demand delivery —and even returns — to delight consumers, streamline logistics, and ultimately boost loyalty and sales.”
At CloudWorld, Oracle and Uber announced Collect and Receive, a new offering on the Oracle Retail platform connecting retailers and consumers to enhance last-mile delivery.
Supported by the Oracle Retail Data Store and cloud platform technologies, retailers can now link to Uber Direct, the company’s white-label delivery solution, via pre-integrated APIs. This joint solution enables retailers to rebalance inventory while giving customers more choices, including same-day and scheduled delivery options, order pickup, and returns to the closest retail or postal location. The service is available for Oracle Retail customers in the United States and Canada.
“At Uber, it’s crystal clear that on-demand delivery is a core expectation for consumers, and today’s retailers are taking note,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO. “Every month, more than 3,500 brands use Uber Direct to power millions of same-day local deliveries. Together with Oracle, we can make it easier than ever for retailers to leverage on-demand delivery —and even returns — to delight consumers, streamline logistics, and ultimately boost loyalty and sales.”
ORACLE CLOUDWORLD 2023 — At CloudWorld 2023, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison (pictured above) said his company has a long history with artificial intelligence (AI), and has a lot of surprises coming with generative AI.
Oracle CloudWorld is happening this week in Las Vegas. Key themes are the importance of distributed cloud services; partners are key for customer success; and greater simplicity and control.
When addressing generative AI, Ellison said Oracle has been using AI for a very long time, “but this is different.”
“Generative AI is a revolution, a breakthrough, fundamentally changing things at Oracle,” he said. “This makes AI central to almost everything we’re doing and fundamentally changes how we build applications, run applications; it changes everything.”
Oracle CloudWorld: AI Building Apps Faster, More Secure
For example, Oracle isn’t going to be writing new applications in Java anymore, Ellison said. If it’s starting a brand-new product, it’s now generating the code via APEX. With APEX, the development team is dramatically smaller, development speeds up and it doesn’t generate security bugs because the AI system wrote it.
“So as long as you’re willing to spend fewer people and less time building your application, it will be more secure and more reliable,” he said. “If there is no human labor, there is no human error. The only way you can build a secure system, a truly secure system, is to eliminate human error. This is a very big deal.”
When it comes to generative AI, everyone wants to know what comes next, Ellison said Tuesday at Oracle CloudWorld.
“I’m going to start by telling you what I think comes next, which is a worldwide race to build what comes next — to build better AI, still better AI, which will deliver a better future and will have significant associated risks like all new technologies from the first technology fire, which can be misused … to later technology like nuclear power, which can be misused,” he said. “All new technologies can be misused. However, by and large, technology and advances in technology have made our lives better, have made us as human beings more prosperous and more comfortable.”
In addition to health care, other industries can be transformed using 21st century technologies, Ellison said. That includes growing indoors to improve agriculture, providing better support to first responders and more.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Tuesday at Oracle CloudWorld.
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