Mike Sicilia CEO at Oracle provided the keynote address at Oracle AI World Tour in London’s ExCeL Centre. Sicilia spoke about the speed in which AI innovation has accelerated in the past 12 months at Oracle in the UK. Furthermore, he emphasised AI’s role in elevating human judgment and transforming business operations.
“We’re not here today to define your future with AI. We’re here to provide you with the tools that you need to shape it. To remove the issues weighing your business down, so you can focus on what lifts it up. What you do with it, comes from only what you can imagine.”
Sicilia drew an interesting historical comparison with past changes in the aviation industry. The shift from propellers to jet engines.
Airlines didn’t just change their mission with the shift from propellers to jet engines. “They’ were still moving people and goods, but what changed was capability. Jet engines expanded what was possible. Faster routes, longer distances, entirely new markets, because the underlying technology could finally keep up with rising expectations. And that’s exactly what AI is doing and will do for enterprises.”
Sicilia said Oracle AI has made significant strides in the past year, with new innovations in healthcare with the launch of Oracle Health Clinical AI agent – Clinic Note. New generative AI capabilities were incorporated into the UK sovereign cloud infrastructure to support the UK government’s vision of AI. Oracle has also recently renewed its partnership with Oracle Red Bull Racing, bringing AI to the racetrack.
The company made key announcements including the Oracle Health Clinical AI agent, new agentic apps for supply chain and finance, and the AI data platform for unified data management.
AI is a system-level shift, not a gadget
AI is like the move from propeller planes to jet engines: it doesn’t change the mission (running a business) but massively expands what’s possible (speed, scale, new markets). The real value is not “bolt on copilots” or small productivity boosts, but re-thinking entire systems and workflows around AI.
Built-in, not bolted-on AI
Sicilia confirmed Oracle’s strategy was to build AI into every layer:
- Infrastructure (OCI) – high performance, secure, regulated
- Industry ready
- Database & Data Layer – AI “very close to the data” for ground truth decisions
- Applications (Fusion, etc.) – AI and agentic apps embedded directly into business workflows
- AI Data Platform – unifying data (Oracle and non Oracle) with semantic models and ontologies
The company’s emphasis was on engineered integration rather than stitching together separate tools.
From experiments to real, mission-critical impact
Sicilia said AI is already delivering measurable outcomes. He cited a manufacturing company planning a €150M expansion used AI agents across cash flow, balance inquiry, document intelligence. AI proposed a €50M credit line, orchestrated risk checks and approvals, shrinking work that took months or a year to hours. Healthcare companies going from biopsy to therapy in hours, speeding drug development.
In addition to agriculture, where fields and greenhouses that self optimised for yield, water use, and margins. He encouraged enterprises implementing Agentic AI to focus on core systems and mission critical data, not side projects or “edge experiments.”
“It used to be all AI all the time; now it’s all agents all the time,” Sicilia added.
“AI is not here to replace expertise. It’s here to elevate, by taking on the invisible complexity underneath, like analysis, coordination and prediction. AI can move human judgment way up the stack. Leaders then spend less time reacting and more time deciding. Teams stop managing processes and start shaping outcomes. And this is why AI feels different right now.
“We’re not just now experimenting for novelty. We’re using it to solve real constraints, either hiring faster, seeing financial risk earlier, preventing supply chain disruptions, or resolving issues in real time. And that transformation isn’t just a technology transformation, it’s a human transformation. It transforms how we all work.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for businesses
The overriding theme from Sicilia’s address is that AI changes how work gets done. People can focus on strategy instead of administration, insight, even foresight instead of reconciliation and relationships instead of doing things like routing tickets. In Sicilia’s words, AI doesn’t just make enterprises faster, it gives them the altitude to think bigger.
Sicilia highlighted the transformative impact of AI on business strategies emphasising its role in customer experience and operational efficiency. Oracle has been preparing for the AI moment for decades. The company runs mission critical workloads with strong resilience and security.
Furthermore, it has been the custodian of key enterprise data for 50 years. Therefore, the company is in pole position to reap the rewards of the AI evolution currently engulfing enterprises.
Its role remains deceptively simple. It is not to define the AI future of businesses, but to provide tools, platforms, and integrated stack to enterprises. The purpose is to remove complexity and risk (security, governance, scale). To let businesses shape their own AI driven future.
The company is confident that their AI-ecosystem contains all the necessary security and governance to enable businesses to scale operations. However, these issues together with trust (corporate, governments and consumers) remain the Achilles heel for society’s embrace of Agentic AI.
