This week at Oracle AI World (previously called Cloud World, which signals the company’s priorities), executives and industry leaders gathered to explore how AI adoption can reshape work and redefine how HR pros lead, hire and grow talent.
In his opening keynote, Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia set the tone, saying AI is “not just about changing technology but about changing how business is done everywhere.” That shift is already underway in many workplaces. Oracle data shows that 80% of employees say AI has improved their work experience.
In human resources, AI is streamlining everything from recruiting to retention. Sicilia emphasized that AI in Oracle’s human capital management applications is “shortening time to hire and bringing thousands of employee and manager hours back.”
Exelon CEO Calvin Butler took the stage with Sicilia. He spoke about innovations in his company and addressed the common fear that AI will eliminate jobs. “Most people think of AI from a standpoint of ‘it’s going to cost you to lose jobs,’ ” he said. “But if we think of deploying that technology in that way, we’re going to miss the whole opportunity.”
Instead, Butler described how organizations can use AI to reskill their workforce. “We retrained and retooled [employees] because [we have] this technology,” he said. However, he added that if people don’t know how to use it and aren’t familiar with it, it won’t work.
Chris Leone, executive vice president of development for Oracle Cloud HCM, told his keynote audience that organizations will increasingly adopt AI. He pointed out the area of building and using AI agents, calling 2026 “the year of operationalizing” AI. According to Leone, 2025 has been a year of “pilots,” many of which have stalled for lack of scaling.
Meanwhile, this week, Oracle is sharing news of its latest products. Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of analyst firm Valoir, was in attendance at AI World. She said Oracle designed its newly announced AI Agent Marketplace to make adoption easier and more scalable.
“It allows Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications customers to find, deploy and manage validated AI agents built by Oracle’s partners directly within their existing enterprise workflows,” she explained.
Unlike standalone marketplaces, Oracle embedded its new solution so users can install and operate AI agents in the same environment as its prebuilt agents. “Oracle, like its competitors, recognizes that adoption is key to winning the biggest piece of the AI pie and scaling adoption through ecosystem support is key,” Wettemann said.
AI is now ‘easier to adopt and harder to avoid’
Wettemann added that Oracle is making AI “easier to adopt and harder to avoid.” She noted that, as a differentiator, Oracle isn’t charging for AI agents or for use of Agent Studio, giving customers the flexibility to experiment and deploy widely without budgetary limits.
Oracle is also investing in trust and transparency. “A key part of the adoption and deployment battle for AI is trust,” Wettemann said.
She pointed out the importance of Oracle’s new observability and evaluation tools. These allow users to monitor latency, error rate and performance quality, she said. Additionally, prompt management libraries help track and manage agent versions for ongoing reliability.
“No one wants to unleash an AI agent on enterprise data,” Wettemann said, “without being sure it will act appropriately and deliver accurately.”
