The Oracle Open World convention is the corporation’s largest annual event – showcasing product features and big announcements from Oracle, as well as exhibitions from partners and customers from all around the world. This year, the event was held in San Francisco from the 22nd to the 25th of October.
A big highlight of the OOW were the predictions from Mark Hurd, Chief Executive Officer at Oracle. Back in 2015, Mark Hurd had done some predictions about what technology would be like by 2025, including:
- 80% of IT budgets would be committed to Cloud Apps and solutions
- 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data centres
- The Cloud could be the most secure place for data
- Artificial intelligence technologies will be in almost every new software product
After reviewing his 2015 notes, he recognised that whilst his predictions were correct, he might actually have been “too slow” as we are already seeing the predicted results in 2018.
The reality is that the Cloud adoption is happening much faster than predicted: it is accelerating, it is core and is foundational to modern business. Only last year, 15% of corporate centre data shut down, as business have shifted from data corporations to big providers.
During this session, Mr Hurd also took the opportunity to make more predictions that are due by 2025:
- 100% of Cloud Apps will include artificial intelligence – Cloud Apps will further distance themselves from legacy applications. The same for other technologies such as Blockchain.
- 85% of interactions with customers will be automated – As analytics help understand the complexity of customer’s needs, there will be a more thoughtful way to deal with customers via digital assistants with no need to go through the “who are you?”, “what’s the problem again?” questions customer service staff currently deal with.
- 60% of IT jobs have not yet been invented (but will by 2025) – Jobs like Data professionals, Robot Supervisor, Human to Machine UX Specialists, Smart City Technology Designers and AI-Assisted Healthcare Technicians will be required. It is expected that more people will be working in IT and that they will do more important IT tasks.
In a nutshell, Oracle believes that the combination of Cloud foundations plus artificial intelligence means greater productivity and innovation. Oracle does not see artificial intelligence as an independent solution but as a core feature that will be involved in every solution.
We are looking forward to the next predictions review. The next decade certainly seems a very promising era for artificial intelligence.