LAS VEGAS - Generative artificial intelligence (AI) caught one of the world’s most famous and wealthiest tech entrepreneurs by surprise, and will fundamentally change one of the world’s oldest tech companies, which he built.

Mr Larry Ellison, who in 1977 co-founded Oracle, where he remains executive chairman and chief technology officer, said the explosive use of generative AI moved the firm further towards dropping the writing of code altogether and auto-generating it instead.

The company, known for software and its cloud services and infrastructure, is also making all new databases autonomous such that they install, configure and update themselves.

Applications will become more secure with the elimination of human errors, and teams will be dramatically smaller, said Mr Ellison: “We prototype features and iterate. So we develop things much more quickly.”

Mr Ellison, 79, whom Forbes estimates is worth US$144 billion (S$196 billion), spoke about his Texas-based firm’s new generative AI bet on healthcare at the company’s annual CloudWorld conference on Tuesday.

The company acquired electronic health record (EHR) company Cerner for US$28 billion in June 2022 and held, along with CloudWorld, its Oracle Health Conference where it demonstrated a suite of AI-powered healthcare apps.

Its star is a voice-recognition digital assistant that promises to rewrite the experience of a visit to the doctor. The assistant can recognise doctors’ commands and call up schedules, patients’ clinical histories and lab tests results on mobile phones or screens.

The app can also listen in and take notes during a consultation – upon patients’ consent – and propose actions on prescriptions and next steps for review or sign-off.

It goes on to ping patients their appointment reminders and customised health advice.

When it becomes available in the next 12 months, the promise is an end to doctors dividing their attention between computer screens and patients, Oracle said.

Mr Travis Dalton, general manager of Oracle Health, believes the digital helper will be groundbreaking.

“We’re not seeking to go from 10 clicks to seven clicks. We’re seeking zero clicks,” he said. “So the idea that AI and other technologies together can bring a system of participation where a provider never puts text on the keyboard is pretty darn groundbreaking for the industry.

“I will say in my 22 years of healthcare, everyone’s tried it but Oracle has got it to the last mile.”

The company is also injecting generative AI into other healthcare solutions dealing with back-office supply chains, finance and human resources tasks over the next 12 months.

Oracle, unlike companies such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, does not have a large language model used to train generative AI of its own.

Speaking before Mr Ellison’s speech, Deepika Giri, associate vice-president at research firm IDC, said Oracle is plugging its late entry to the race by partnering foundational model owners such as Cohere.

Oracle’s generative AI healthcare solutions may give its customers a first-mover’s advantage of maybe just up to eight months, she said.

“When you buy an application with an embedded gen AI capability for healthcare, it can build a certain level of competitive differentiation. But it won’t be too long before everybody will come on the same plane, because it’s not very special,” said Ms Giri.

She thinks Oracle’s generative AI strategy is still being played out. “They may acquire certain companies in that space and try to build. I think their strategy is wait and watch.”

For now, Oracle’s introduction of generative AI is good enough for keeping up with the market as a vendor, she said.

“The question is how well it integrates with other third-party platforms, as most large companies would want solutions from different vendors,” she said.

To that end, Oracle will make public its EHR platform application programming interfaces (APIs) – the code that lets two apps communicate with each other – to let customers and third-party vendors tap a wider range of solutions and do more customisation.

Ms Amanda Green, vice-president at Cerner Corporation, said her team has three members in Singapore to push the company’s new solutions’ sales.

Singapore has a consolidated national electronic medical records system, so talks with the Government have focused on other AI-led opportunities.

“We’re really interested in analytics, population health management, and doing good things with that data that sit on top of the digitised estate that you have,” she said.

Interoperability, the ability for customers to mix and switch both cloud and application vendors, was a focal point at CloudWorld.

In a move that some said “rocked” the industry, Mr Ellison made his first-ever visit to rival Microsoft’s headquarters to announce a tie-up with Microsoft Azure just days before CloudWorld. The partnership allows Oracle to offer customers both its hardware and software housed on Microsoft’s Azure databases.

Since offering cloud infrastructure services in 2016, Oracle has become the up-and-comer against other hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Oracle crossed the US$50 billion revenue line in its last fiscal year after its cloud revenue soared 54 per cent in the fourth quarter ended May 2023, before revenue growth tapered off to 30 per cent in the latest quarter.

Mr Ellison claims its competitive edge lies in its proprietary Remote Direct Memory Access network, which lets it offer customers cloud services at faster and cheaper rates.

The firm has 64 cloud regions, or clusters of data centres, and has been building them faster than competitors, he said.

Mr Karan Batta, Oracle’s senior vice-president for cloud infrastructure, said more tie-ups with other cloud providers will come inevitably in response to customers’ demands.

As for cloud providers that levy break fees on customers switching cloud providers, Mr Ellison said: “There shouldn’t be a charge if you want to move your data out of the AWS cloud and put it into a database in the Oracle Cloud.

“That is your data.”