Oracle hosted its premier annual conference in Las Vegas, renamed in 2025 as “Oracle AI World.” This marked the first annual conference with new CEOs at the helm: Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia. The big questions top of mind for attendees are the priorities of these new leaders, how they will meet their stated growth goals for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the details behind Oracle’s AI strategy, and real examples showing where and how this vision comes together. The impression from Oracle AI World? Clay and Mike: two hands on the wheel, one innovating with infrastructure and the other tuning AI within the enterprise stack. All leaders focused on how Oracle solutions made tangible business gains for its main-stage customers.

Notable client stories at the event included ADT, Avis, Exelon, Falabella, GM Financial, In-N-Out Burger, Lloyds Banking Group, Marriott, McDonald’s Corporation, Michaels, National Police Board of Finland, OpenAI, Talcott Financial Group, Texas Children’s Hospital, TikTok (ByteDance), Uber, UBQ Materials, etc. Interestingly, they included 32 sessions outlining some details of their “client zero” story — i.e., ways they’ve transformed their business with AI.

Here’s our big takeaways from the event:

  • Clay Magouyrk reinforces OCI messaging and doubles down on networks. Magouyrk restated his mission for OCI: highest performance, lowest cost, and most secure infrastructure. He emphasized key principles such as “everything everywhere,” performance SLAs, simple global pricing, multicloud interconnect with no cross-cloud egress fees, 100G and 400G direct connect, etc. What was new? Magouryk doubled down on OCI’s networking story, announcing its scalable dedicated network Acceleron and calling out its unique architectural decisions. Other announcements included Dedicated Region25 and Multicloud Universal Credits.
  • Mike Sicilia told Oracle’s story through the client voice. Sicilia opened with a classic “AI powering higher-performing individuals” statement, noting that AI at its best augments individuals for their core responsibilities while also opening their purview to more strategic insight. Sicilia quickly pivoted to changing businesses with client stories from Exelon, Avis, Marriott, and Biofy. These conversations brought out themes on AI revolutionizing supply chain, edge operations, customer experience and loyalty, real-time decisioning, etc.
  • Larry Ellison shares his vision at AI World 2025. Delivered via a sweeping 2-hour keynote, Ellison outlined Oracle’s ambition to reshape entire industries using its AI stack. He spotlighted Oracle’s role in hosting leading LLMs and detailed use cases across sectors — from fraud detection in financial services and remote patient management in healthcare to genomic testing in biopharma, AI-driven greenhouses in agriculture, CO₂ removal via biomineralization, and commercial drone logistics. While bold and expansive, the vision is long-term, with transformative results expected over decades, not years. If Clay and Mike are at the helm, Larry is at the bow focusing on what’s ahead.
  • Oracle’s full-stack AI strategy comes to the fore. On the more near-term and pragmatic side, Oracle positioned itself as the “central nervous system” of the agentic enterprise; Oracle’s integrated platform promises rapid value for existing customers by simplifying integration and data governance. Oracle offers “free” agents, powered by the newly available Oracle AI Data Platform, which combines OCI, the Autonomous AI Database, and the Generative AI service.
  • Most notably, inclusive pricing makes budget certainty the new standard. Oracle is embedding over 600 new AI agents directly into its Fusion Applications at “no additional license fee.” Oracle’s decision to bundle AI features at no additional user-based subscription cost rewrites the AI business case, replacing metered experimentation with predictable total cost of ownership — at least for now. As Executive Vice President Steve Miranda states, “all the new AI features and agents are provided at no extra cost.” This makes AI a core subscription entitlement, not a premium upsell. Finance leaders must form new baselines for multiyear models and use this as leverage to renegotiate all vendor terms that still treat AI as a premium SKU.
  • The Fusion AI agent marketplace is free yet unincentivized for contributors. It’s a new hub for certified, partner-built AI agents, with about 40 launch partners (e.g., Deloitte, Stripe) each contributing at least five agents via Oracle’s Agent Studio. It marks a shift from monolithic apps to composable business capabilities, enabling a network effect where shared workflows accelerate automation and raise the innovation baseline. Currently nontransactional (partners that provide IP for free), legal and commercial constraints may limit participation. All agents meet Oracle’s enterprise-grade security standards and benefit from full support services. It is unclear whether clients are responsible for leveraging the underlying infrastructure.
  • Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM gets tons of feature updates, plus the Career Coach launch. The HCM panel started with some impressive stats: Over 1,550 features were delivered in 2025 alone, 60% of Cloud HCM customers are deploying genAI and agentic AI, more than 100 embedded AI capabilities were delivered in Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM through 25D, there was 13x year-over-year growth in AI usage in production, and overall AI usage surged 45x. Oracle also launched Career Coach, a new agentic AI feature in Fusion Cloud HCM that analyzes the backgrounds, skills, and interests of internal and external candidates to surface better job matches, boost applicant quality, and give hiring teams more comprehensive talent insights.

What’s the WIM (“what it means”)? Oracle’s new CEOs reflect its enterprise priorities: cloud and enabling AI via its powerful enterprise app portfolio. It chose to reiterate core OCI messaging with clarity while delivering a powerful AI stack story that resets client cost expectations. But make no mistake: Oracle is positioning itself to build upon its own leverage and to increase that leverage with its customers. As is the case for all platforms today offering up “free” in the AI world, it is important to understand the flywheel effect as your platform dependency deepens. This reframes C-suite decisions from tech procurement to strategic alignment with Oracle’s operational model — raising the risk of outsourcing business process innovation and narrowing competitive differentiation to what Oracle’s ecosystem allows.

Interested in connecting with one of us about Oracle’s strategy? Clients can reach out to schedule a call with our analysts at inquiry@forrester.com.