Viewers tuning into Netflix to watch the popular “Squid Game” or “Ginny & Georgia” probably don’t equate the experience with building AI models using enterprise tools, but one tech company executive says his company has a mission to change that.

“Netflix brought shows in ‘as is,’ and they gave them the Netflix value,” said Elad Ziklik (pictured), vice president of AI and data science services at Oracle Corp. “I want to bring the best AI software and hardware to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and do a fulfillment by Oracle on that. You’ll get the Oracle security and identity and single bill and everything you’d expect from a company like Oracle. We are looking to become the Netflix of AI.”

Ziklik spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Oracle’s automation strategy and how evolving technologies, such as ChatGPT, will revolutionize AI applications for business.

Solving business problems

Over the past several years, Oracle has pursued a machine learning strategy to drive automation in Oracle’s database portfolio. AI has been integrated into many of Oracle’s business applications, and the company’s MySQL HeatWave platform has in-database machine learning among its many features.

“We’ve developed a full suite of machine learning and AI services for pretty much every use case that you would expect right now, from applying natural language processing to understanding customer support tickets or social media,” Ziklik said. “What most customers want is business AI. They just want the business problem solved by applying AI to it. Our focus is making it easy for customers to apply AI where they need to, in the right business context.”

In October, Nvidia Corp. and Oracle jointly announced an agreement to add tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to Oracle’s AI infrastructure. The agreement included the H100, Nvidia’s fourth-generation premier purpose-built AI processor.

“We’re going to be first to onboard the new Nvidia H100s, the new super powerful GPUs for large language model training,” Ziklik said. “This recent partnership with Nvidia is another step in bringing the best AI infrastructure capabilities into this platform so you can build any type of machine learning workflow or AI model on Oracle Cloud.”

Year of the chatbot

Oracle’s ambitious plans for enterprise AI are part of a broader evolution within the technology world, where 2023 is shaping up to be the “Year of the Chatbot.” AI-fueled chatbot technology is drawing the attention of mainstream media, thanks in part to recent publicity surrounding OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“General purpose bots are interesting but still limited,” Ziklik said. “It’s about task completion. If I want to automate my expense report processing today inside Oracle, we have a chatbot where I can submit my expenses. The key is around managing the right expectations of what this thing is capable of doing.”

Ziklik recalled a telco customer he worked with to implement a chatbot that became the only choice to interact with customers using language translation. The technology wasn’t perfect, and the company heard about it.

“Customers said: ‘This technology sucks, it’s not good, I hate it, I hate your company, I hate your support,’” Ziklik said.

But when offered a choice between waiting four hours to speak to a live person or an immediately available chatbot that understood the user’s language, the response became overwhelmingly positive.

“The feedback, even though it was the exact same technology, was amazing,” Ziklik recalled. “The key lesson I picked up from this experience was it was all about the right expectation and working around the right use case.”

Is ChatGPT the killer app for the right use case? OpenAI’s technology has proven adept at generating believable content, yet Ziklik noted that ChatGPT’s reliability may not yet be ready for prime time.

“Right now it is a complete black box that sometimes produces magic and sometimes produces just nonsense,” Ziklik said. “We will start seeing this type of app solving for specific business problems. In the next 6, 12, 24 months, this will start getting more dependable, and it’s going to change how industries are being managed.”

Meanwhile, Oracle has concentrated on building up its AI practice with a specific focus on the healthcare industry. Near the end of 2021, the company acquired healthcare technology giant Cerner Corp. for $28 billion.

“We truly are looking to become the leader in AI for healthcare,” Ziklik said. “If you have a business problem you want to apply AI to solve, we want to be your platform.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Oracle’s Elad Ziklik:

Photo: SiliconANGLE