Oracle’s Mark Hura: Your AI Edge Is Your Data, Not the Model
At the RAISE Summit in Paris, Oracle’s president of global field operations, Mark Hura, made a compelling argument: the true advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) lies not in the model you purchase but in your private data and where you choose to store it.
Pitching AI Beyond the Model
July 9, 2026 – 3:22 pm
(Image by: TNW)
The conventional pitch for enterprise AI often starts with the model, but Hura wants to shift this perspective. He emphasized that winning companies with AI are not focused on acquiring an AI stack; instead, they are pursuing specific outcomes.
Industry Examples
Hura provided concrete examples across various sectors:
- Banking: The focus is on speed and fraud prevention.
- Healthcare: Oracle’s clinical AI assists in patient summary creation, medical history retrieval, and voice note conversion for conversation records. It suggests medications, follow-ups, and referrals, ultimately saving time for both patients and clinicians.
- Construction and Engineering: AI has reduced certain processes by 72%, resulting in significant cost savings for a customer who saved over $130,000 annually.
- Energy: AI predicts equipment failures by fusing outage and weather data, enabling efficient crew management.
The Data as the Core Competency
Hura’s central argument revolves around the data:
- Frontier models are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but the edge in AI now comes from a company’s private data fused into these models. This data is where intellectual property resides.
- Oracle’s strength lies in its database capabilities, enabling it to integrate AI directly where the data already exists, which reduces both costs and security risks associated with data migration or copying.
Strategic Approach to AI Implementation
Hura offered sharp insights into strategic considerations:
- Enterprises often accumulate complexity through acquisitions and half-migrated systems, making it challenging to integrate AI from the bottom up.
- Starting with the biggest business problem as a CEO-level decision ensures that AI implementation aligns with industry outcomes, such as enhanced guest experiences or reduced hospital readmissions.
Sovereignty in a European Context
Addressing a European audience, Hura highlighted the importance of data sovereignty. Banks, hospitals, and utilities often prioritize having their data under their control, and this definition is continually evolving. Oracle’s approach aligns with these concerns by keeping data where it belongs and leveraging AI capabilities directly within those environments.