Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

At Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, Cloud Wars host Bob Evans sits down with Bonnie Tinder, founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence, to explore what enterprise customers are actually experiencing as they implement artificial intelligence. Drawing on conversations with seven Oracle customers across industries, including Heathrow Airport, Baylor University, and Northwell Health, Tinder identifies the critical factors shaping successful AI adoption.
Oracle AI Gets Real
The Big Themes:
Clean Data Drives AI Success: Clean, reliable data emerged as the most important foundation for successful enterprise AI adoption across all seven customer conversations Bonnie Tinder conducted at Oracle AI World. Organizations emphasized that their systems of record needed to be established and optimized before AI could deliver meaningful value. Baylor University, which implemented Oracle applications in 2020, spent several years strengthening its data foundation before expanding AI-enabled workflows.
Employee Trust Determines AI Adoption: Trust emerged as a recurring theme. Organizations recognize that employees need confidence in AI-generated information before they will consistently embrace new workflows or recommendations. Introducing unreliable systems or poorly designed processes can damage that confidence and undermine subsequent technology initiatives. Consequently, customers emphasized careful implementation, credible outputs, and practical applications that improve employees' daily experiences.
Enterprise AI Must Enable Action: The conversation ultimately centered on the transition from systems that record information to systems that help organizations take action. Evans observed that AI is becoming increasingly effective at identifying previously hidden problems, including potential employee turnover, security vulnerabilities, maintenance requirements, and fraud risks. However, uncovering these challenges creates additional responsibilities for business leaders. Tinder argued that organizations must use predictive insights to prevent problems from escalating rather than simply accumulating more information about potential risks.
The Big Quote: "I mean, you could look at the problems that it surfaces and get depressed about it, or you can like actually do something to ensure that those problems don't escalate and snowball."
More from Bonnie Tinder:
Connect with Bonnie on LinkedIn and learn more about Oracle's latest advances.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze the extraordinary growth of Google Cloud, Microsoft's impressive performance, and the changing competitive dynamics of the AI revolution.
Highlights
00:02 — Earlier this week, we got Q3 results from both Google Cloud and Microsoft, and I think the big news for me about both those, while both companies performed very, very well and the growth is really eye-popping, Google Cloud, for the three months ended September 30, is growing three and a half times faster than Microsoft Cloud.
00:36 — Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 30% to $63.9 billion. So, I'm not in any way trying to criticize what Microsoft did here. I mean it's the equivalent of a $250 billion business growing at 30%. That's just unprecedented, unheard of.
01:43 — This isn't a flash in the pan or a one-time thing. Let's look at the growth rates for Google Cloud and Microsoft Cloud over the last seven quarters. Taking nothing away from Microsoft, but the comparison here is striking. And in a detailed article later this morning, I got a couple of bar charts on there that show quite graphically the differences in the growth trajectories of these two stellar companies.
02:38 — And it really is striking, the difference between Google Cloud going like this and Microsoft just barely better than flat. So, I want to again say kudos to Microsoft. It's got a company now, with its growth over the next few quarters on an annualized basis, it's somewhere between a $250 billion and $300 billion company, and the last quarter growing at 30%.
04:18 — Google Cloud added an incremental $5.9 billion in Q3 versus Q2. Microsoft added an incremental $4.6 billion. So, while Microsoft's overall number is bigger, and it deserves full credit for that, Google Cloud is winning more new business quarter to quarter, right here, right now, than Microsoft is, and that is stunning.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Larry Ellison, Mike Sicilia, and Clay Magouyrk are positioning Oracle for its next phase of AI-driven growth.
Highlights
00:03 —We're here at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, and really, the last couple days, were an AI innovation blitz across technologies, partnerships, go-to-market plans, across the whole breadth of Oracle's portfolio, and some striking new technology vendors that some might consider potentially competitors of Oracle's now coming in with partnerships.
01:24 — Oracle is accelerating, and what I like to point out to anybody who talks about the debt issues: yes, that's real. It's not an ideal thing, but there's a time sequence that's going on here. And what the great news is for Oracle is, with $664 billion in backlog, or RPO, it's got plenty of money in line that's going to be converted to revenue.
02:13 — Google, a few months ago, said it was going to start to offer its TPU chips on the market to others. Oracle is now the first hyperscaler to deploy those. Snowflake and Oracle have created a native AI data service that's going to make it easier for enterprises to access and act upon all of their data.
03:32 — But, I thought the highlight at the end of the day, Larry Ellison came out on stage. There had been some question, you know, was he going to appear here? He no longer participates in the earnings calls, and he came out. It was really quite a moving discussion. He talked by himself for a little bit about the Oracle healthcare applications, the full suite they've put together, the impact AI is going to have on that.
04:33 — He said he believes that, with the help of AI, that all cancers are going to be eradicated in the next five to 10 years. He said it'll certainly be 10 years. Said it might be as soon as five, and he said, imagine if you can project into other industries the benefits and the achievements that AI can help deliver there.
05:00 — The CEOs, Mike Sicilia and Clay Magouyrk, both gave impressive keynotes. They both showed that they're not just in the position of CEO, but they're in control of the company and steering its future direction. And then you've got the extraordinary, you know, once-in-a-lifetime visionary Larry Ellison helping to guide things along from the chairman's point of view.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the growing security threats facing AI agents and why Microsoft is investing in protecting organizations from emerging attacks.
Highlights
00:25 — All these different breaches [are] happening in the space of agents ... because there's an opportunity here for people to be able to consume and utilize tokens from other providers. It's going to be a situation where we've got to keep an eye on this now.
00:44 — One of the most recent intrusions was a CERT India firm, and they didn't see any of the actual issues come in from the breach that they recently had. And this is very interesting because who then reported it? How do we know that there was a breach? The answer is that the actual providers of the different platforms are actually seeing these breaches, not the actual people being breached.
01:33 — So. what we are seeing is companies like Microsoft, with their Defender, can now pick up 60 different agent types that might be doing something nefarious within organizations. So, what we're going to see is a general view across this that we need a way to be able to secure and make sure that people are not actually getting access to information they shouldn't through agent-based technology.
02:00 — Now, even the Microsoft security chief had said that frontier models cannot be trusted. Now, does this mean that we can't trust the AI model to do something or not to do something? It's more along the lines that these models will want to solve a problem, so they will go and they will try to figure out a way to solve the problem.
03:26 — Two goals: one is make sure that we don't see any breaches happening, and number two is that we also want to make sure that we don't see people attacking for denial-of-service attacks or trying to take on and use AI credits from another organization. And I will leave you with this: Satya Nadella himself said, "We simply can't outsource responsibility for what intelligence does on our behalf," and that's very true.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Microsoft’s ambitious Maia 300 rollout and how owning its own AI chips could give the company greater control over its AI infrastructure, improve efficiency, and reduce its reliance on NVIDIA.
Highlights
00:10 — Microsoft has announced Maia 300, the company's latest custom AI chip. It's also revealed plans to expand its Azure Maia systems to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, and with this rollout, Maia will become the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.
01:02 — Microsoft expects Maia 300 to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. In other words, Microsoft expects to deliver more AI output for the same amount of power. That's crucial as demand for AI services continues to skyrocket. Now, Microsoft also says that in a full configuration, Maia 300 systems are expected to deliver up to seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200.
01:41 — Bear in mind that Maia 200 is already a very capable system, and Maia 300 really builds on those foundations — I'm going to quote Microsoft here: "To enable more coding with GitHub, more flexible AI model deployment through Microsoft Foundry, and faster interactions with Copilot, Teams, and Dragon Copilot." Now, back to that incredibly important point I made at the start.
02:05 — Maia is set to become the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services. Now, back in August, I talked about what this could mean for NVIDIA. My conclusion was that Microsoft's own chips could help level the playing field and give the company more options.
02:33 — Could Microsoft chips potentially challenge NVIDIA in the market? I think that remains to be seen. Microsoft's announcement certainly seems to suggest that it will have more control over its AI infrastructure, but it doesn't necessarily mean that NVIDIA is being pushed out of the picture altogether. What is clear, though, is that Microsoft is moving towards a much more full-circle AI business with its own chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and applications.

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