Oracle exec tells workers that its own AI rollout didn't go so smoothly

Oracle spent billions over the past two years helping other companies run AI. Its own companywide AI rollout came much later.

During an internal town hall this week, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that last year, the company still hadn't found a way to make generative AI broadly useful to its own workforce.

Now, after rolling out OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex, employees are writing code dramatically faster, but creating new bottlenecks along the way.

"When I think about where we were a year ago," Magouyrk said, "I don't think we figured out how do we make AI really that useful for ourselves."

Oracle had made some progress in using AI for customer support last year, but it had not yet found broad use across business units, such as developers, finance employees, and sales teams.

That started to change, Oracle Chief Information Officer Jae Evans told employees, in April and May, when the company rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise, and OpenAI's software development tool, Codex.

Rather than simply making the tools available, the company established corporate standards, security controls, and internal policies and reached 80% adoption within three months, Evans said.

"We made it so easy to use and adopt that we might have gotten a little bit of sticker shock," Evans said, so now the company provides visibility into which models employees are using and how much they cost.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra costs 2.5 times more than other models, like could be used for many purposes, Evans said, citing Terra as an example of a lower-cost model that could be used for routine tasks.

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The executives said AI has dramatically accelerated software development, but also created new bottlenecks elsewhere in the engineering process.

"We see developers able to generate code using this tool in like a week's time," Evans said. "Normally, that would have taken a team of developers two to three quarters to go develop."