Combining artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into cloud services is becoming a hot trend. All three of the big hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — have announced AI features and now Oracle is getting into the mix.
Oracle teamed with Cohere, provider of a cloud-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI) platform for enterprises, to develop AI services designed to help organizations streamline decision-making and automate business processes. These services will be built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and leverage Oracle’s Supercluster capabilities.
Specifically, the partnership will allow Cohere access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to construct and deploy its AI models.
Oracle hopes to enable customers to take advantage of the latest innovations in business processes by featuring AI throughout its portfolio of cloud applications and plans to integrate these features just as it introduced machine learning (ML) features in Oracle Database and MySQL HeatWave. The company has also promised to deliver AI services to the data center, enabling the use of live data in combination with generative AI capabilities, and even has plans to embed AI throughout its industry-specific applications, starting with healthcare and public safety.
“Together, Oracle and Cohere will help enterprises worldwide accelerate their AI initiatives, drive greater value and deliver new levels of automation that maximize business success while ensuring their data is secure and private,” said Martin Kon, president and COO at Cohere, in a statement.
The vendor claims that with its high-bandwidth Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network in the cloud, OCI can run AI workloads that deliver high performance and low latency. As part of the agreement, Cohere’s models will be integrated into Oracle’s range of cloud applications such as Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle NetSuite.
In addition, Oracle’s services that use Cohere's large language models (LLMs) can be customized and improved based on Oracle’s industry knowledge and data. Customers can further refine these models using their own data for increased accuracy in specific use cases. The service will also allow customers to have control and ownership of their data.
AI is trending
Just like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft, Oracle hopes to capitalize on their underlying technologies by selling them to enterprises through their cloud services. Offerings such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Clouds’ Vertex AI take a similar approach to Oracle, putting a large range of machine learning (ML) models into the hands of customers. Other services like Azure ML have taken a different approach, utilizing Snowflake data warehouse solutions to explore the extent of ML capabilities while saving time on transferring between systems.
The trends driving AI show no signs of slowing down. According to Gartner’s 2023 Market Databook, 30% of enterprises are expected to implement an AI-augmented development and testing strategy by 2025, up from 5% in 2021. And according to IDC, global spending on AI software, hardware and services is expected to top $150 billion in 2023 and exceed $300 billion in 2026.
Meanwhile, IDC’s research found the top AI solutions enterprises are looking to adopt within the next two years include AIOps, augmented intelligence, discovery and analysis, intelligent task and process automation, and preventative maintenance. Banking and retail are the verticals expected to invest the most in AI over the forecast period.