Tonight I attended an Oracle meetup in downtown Nashville.
A while back I signed up for this event not knowing what it would entail, I was pleasantly surprised. The talk was given by Roger Barga, the Senior Vice President of AI & Machine Learning at Oracle. His extensive knowledge across many technical domains was evident.
We learned about a variety of AI services offered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the physical infrastructure used to support the services, and how Oracle aims to provide custom solutions for everything from a small on-premises server to a sovereign nation.
Lately there has been a trend of articles speaking about the burst of the AI bubble and how ROI from AI tools isn’t meeting expectations. Roger conveyed a different message. There is significant growth associated with the expansion of these technologies across the world and the process is just beginning.
The message was Oracle moves with agility and grit internally to create products fast while maintaining a high bar for delivery. If something falls over and is not right, pick it back up and make it work. That resilience carries directly into their approach to AI.
Roger emphasized the vast amount of opportunity to disrupt current business processes with agentic AI. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides all the current frontier models for use in its services. Additionally, they appear to have a culture of using these tools internally in order to validate use cases and refine products that may eventually be provided to the public. This culture of building with their own tools extends all the way down to the infrastructure level. Even their data centers consisting of thousands of GPUs are built with AI in mind to gather information from logs, monitoring tools, and identify whether an issue stems from hardware, software, or performance.
Beyond Oracle’s perspective, it’s worth considering how AI is perceived more broadly. While media seems to create the impression that these technologies were released yesterday, the truth is we are in the early stages of a world where AI is embedded in the systems we already use every day.
Onboarding to a new job?
Biometric scans associated with your identity and company role may provide the access you need without the traditional wait time.
Curious about company processes?
Ask an LLM empowered with RAG and a vector database to provide you the documentation you need to move quickly.
Need to learn a new codebase?
Chat with the LLM to learn about the project’s utility, local setup, and data flow.
These tools empower developers to make better decisions, in less time, with less manual support. Empowering developers is only the first step, but it’s a great way to build systems and products that can then be transferred to other domains.
Once there is a defined pattern for building reliable LLM applications using RAG and a custom dataset internally, the same technology could be used to deliver intelligent tools like an AI drive-through. The AI knows the menu, detects invalid orders, asks questions, and processes payments. Package this into a product, and suddenly every drive-through could be automated.
This is just one application of many that could come to fruition. But every new AI application adds to the complexity of the software landscape.
This is a lot of software to maintain.
While media often stirs fear about AI taking away tech jobs, it’s equally clear that AI will create them. The effect is Ouroboros-like: repetitive, predictable roles disappear, while creative and complex knowledge work is sustained by entirely new industries.
With Oracle building its campus in Nashville, there will likely be many new tech jobs brought to the city. My hope is that we can work together to build a community of technologists in Nashville that support each other’s development and help nurture a budding tech scene.
There are already a number of meetups that happen regularly in Nashville, and this event was a great reminder of why I need to keep showing up and meeting new people. These technical conversations are rare in my everyday life outside of work, yet they are invaluable. They spark creativity and fuel my inspiration to build new things.
I met several new friends tonight and enjoyed our conversations. I look forward to meeting again. I want to thank Roger for delivering an excellent talk and thoughtfully answering the crowd’s many questions.
Events like this remind me that meetups are not only about technology, but also about people, community, and the ideas we share that shape what gets built next.
Cheers!