Oracle Corp Deutsche Bank 2026 Technology Conference

Thanks for having me. Cool.

Restaurants, events like this, and basically running and operating our go-to-market functions, our marketing functions, all the things that we need to do to put our best foot forward with our customers. Clay spends a lot of time on the infrastructure side, particularly the large infrastructure build-out that we have right now. Although, it's not that we exclusively split our time that way. Clay and I have been working together for a very long period of time here, long before we took these roles. So we collaborate on many things, including investment decisions, operating the company, and things like that. So it's a partnership that's been well-formed over the years, working together with Larry for quite a long period of time, and it's one that works quite well for us.

I sort of came up or grew up, I guess you would say, at Oracle in the applications business, and spent a lot of time there, particularly in our mission-critical industries application. But it's part of what we do at Oracle. It's not all of what we do.

Yeah. Well, I think what's most interesting, Brad, is that you've said, how has that conversation evolved over the last year? I actually think about it, say, how has it evolved over the last month?

Wow. Because that's how quickly things continue to change here in the AI piece.

If I went through the whole last year, we'd take up the whole 45 minutes that we have here because every month it changes, but I'll sort of summarize it in the disruption side of AI. We said this on probably a couple earnings calls ago. Perhaps the first industry to be really disrupted by AI is our own industry. It's the industry that sort of created, if you will, the AI, but the disruption factor, the positive disruption factor that we're seeing is really stunning. I started a long time ago as, in those days, called a programmer. It eventually changed into software engineer and things, but same function.

If you would've told me then that the productivity that we could get from a single software engineer was what we're getting, and the dramatic output that that person could have in production grade, I'm talking mission-critical, I'll use the application space here, but it's not exclusive to applications, would be what it is today, I'd say, "That's like 'Star Wars,' futuristic stuff. There's no way." But it's real. It is super real. It is incredibly interesting, and so I think the software industry will probably be likely disrupted in a positive way. Now, what I don't mean by that, I want to be clear, what I don't mean by that is that the SaaSpocalypse fears and all these things are that we no longer need software engineers and so on.

The fact that we're able to disrupt ourselves and become so productive is because we have decades of experience with building, delivering mission-critical applications, mission-critical infrastructure like Oracle Database. We understand the domain, we understand the regulatory constraints, we understand all the things you need to do to be able to deliver that as a turnkey service to customers. When you have that domain expertise, you can just get a lot more done more quickly with a lot of the tooling. So that's the first piece on disruption. Now, come into your question about our customers thinking about this. What are the conversations like with CEOs of our customers? Where I think the acceptance is okay. There's something to this AI stuff. This is pretty real. How do I get value from it? How do I understand the cost around it?

How much of a disruptive factor do I have to put into my organization? What is the change management? Where is the low-hanging fruit? Where is the mid-term return? What should I be thinking about from a longer perspective? That has become the nature of these conversations. I think what that leads to is that it really opens up what we largely refer to as the inferencing market, which I think is the next big thing, if you will, in AI, is that, as we have said. Look, the model is stunning, right? Codex, I mean, the ability to create source code, the ability to read and write everything on the internet, understand, have conversation, just stunning technology. Of course, from a contextual standpoint, these models do not know anything about private data, government data, and all the enterprises and governments that we serve on a daily basis.