Key Takeaways:
Every major tech company is going all-in on artificial intelligence, including cloud infrastructure provider Oracle. Now the company’s chairman Larry Ellison has made a stunning revelation that sovereign governments could be the largest customer base for AI and cloud companies, going into the future.
Oracle Chairman Predicts Massive Cloud and AI Adoption by Governments
During an earnings call last month, the chief technical officer said that he sees national and state government applications being run on platforms like the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to a much higher level than it is currently being used. He indicated that it is starting to happen in a variety of ways.
Ellison noted that for the first time in history, the company was winning business for countries. “We have several countries where we’re negotiating sovereign regions with the national government,” Ellison added.
Major tech companies battling it out for massive contracts for cloud services from the government are not new. In 2022, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Oracle ended up winning a $9 billion contract from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to offer cloud services after a lengthy battle.
Ellison predicted that “pretty much every government” wants a sovereign cloud and a “dedicated region for that government”.
Oracle has already helped several countries use cloud tech to escape regulatory red taps. During the call, Ellison gave the example of Estonia, which is using generative AI powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT to decipher and summarize its laws and change them to be compliant with EU regulations.
Ellison compared Estonia’s case to Serbia, which had to spend eight years changing its rules to be able to join the European Union. He said that with assistance from generative AI, the Albanian government can read the entire national legislation and rewrite it following the EU’s directions within two years.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is Powering Government Services Around the World
The Oracle chairman highlighted several ways in which cloud services and AI-powered systems can make world governments more efficient, like redundancy in the case of a natural disaster and recovery from the disaster.
Similar moves are also happening in the healthcare sector and internet access projects run by governments. Serbia is leveraging the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and generative AI for automating healthcare-related services.
Meanwhile, in the remote regions of Kenya and Rwanda, OCI and Elon Musk’s Starlink are mapping rural farm areas to recognize which crops are growing in what regions and if they are being supplied with enough nutrients, thereby delivering internet-based services to a population that lacks them.
Food security and internet access at rural schools and hospitals were a few examples that Elisson listed during the call about the new AI applications currently available that weren’t heard of at least 12 months ago. He said Oracle is now in the process of delivering these cloud and AI applications.
Cloud and Generative AI Would Provide More Insight Into Governance Procedures
Dan Gardner, CEO of digital strategy firm Code and Theory, noted that humans live in a world where data and information are considered gold, and if governments want to get access to that information to take action faster, companies have to be “as efficient as possible”.
Tapan Parikh, an associate professor at Cornell University, said that cloud and generative AI applications would allow citizens to have more insight into governance procedures. However, he warned that these technologies shouldn’t be used as an excuse to not maintain oversight and control over political processes, particularly when dealing with countries that may not have the same kind of governance capacity.
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