Oracle bets big on India’s AI-driven cloud and data future

Oracle is witnessing rapid momentum in India across its cloud infrastructure (OCI) and SaaS businesses, with artificial intelligence (AI) driving the next phase of innovation and adoption, company executives said at the India Media Briefing during Oracle AI World in Las Vegas.

Shailender Kumar, Senior Vice President and Regional MD, Oracle India, said AI is no longer just changing industries — it is already embedded across sectors and enterprise functions. “From human capital and finance to supply chain and ERP, AI is becoming a game changer across the board. What we are witnessing is only the beginning,” Kumar said.

At the core of Oracle’s AI strategy is its AI Data Platform and the expansion of its flagship Database 23ai towards 26ai, which includes features such as vector search and support for generative AI models. The new Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse was also announced as part of this initiative. It allows enterprises to bring AI closer to their enterprise data and workflows, unify siloed data, and simplify training large-scale models. Oracle claims this brings operational efficiency by embedding AI directly into the data layer, rather than bolting it on separately.

Kumar also highlighted Oracle’s new multi-cloud capabilities, allowing customers to use universal credits across other hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

In India, this multi-cloud flexibility is expected to unlock new opportunities. Premalakshmi PR, Vice President - Cloud Engineering, Oracle India, noted that OCI is seeing 65% growth in bookings, with around 175–180 new customer acquisitions in the past year alone. About half of these are cloud-native workloads, while the other half include traditional Oracle workloads.

“OCI is emerging as a preferred cloud infrastructure in India, especially among financial services, professional services, the public sector and digital-native firms. Our strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and AMD, and investments in Zettascale data centres, are enabling customers to run large language models at significantly lower costs,” Premalakshmi said.

She added, “We are the first hyperscaler to make AMD processors and GPUs publicly available, and with our dedicated AI clusters, customers can now run GenAI and LLM workloads more economically and reliably.”

A significant infrastructure innovation highlighted was Acceleron, Oracle’s next-generation networking fabric within OCI. “Acceleron removes the typical bandwidth limitations faced by enterprises on public clouds. It enables ultra-low latency and secure, high-performance networking, helping customers move workloads quickly and reliably,” Premalakshmi explained.

India Drives GenAI Adoption Across Verticals

Among India’s top use cases are Convin AI, a contact centre solutions startup using GenAI on OCI for 100% quality assurance, and TVS Credit, which is leveraging GenAI for loan processing and credit scoring.

Other India-based customers include Federal Bank, Tata Motors, Muthoot Finance, South Indian Bank, Malappuram Finance and IFFCO. In the public sector, wins include the Ministry of Rural Development. In the healthcare sector, Oracle’s AI-infused Fusion applications are being used by leading hospital chains such as Fortis Healthcare, Apollo Hospitals, and Narayana Hrudayalaya to modernise operations and improve patient experience.

From an applications standpoint, Oracle’s SaaS portfolio—covering ERP, supply chain, HCM, and CX—grew 60% year-on-year in India during the first quarter, said Shailesh Singla, Vice President, Applications Business, Oracle India.

“BFSI remains our strongest vertical, with 100% year-on-year growth. Healthcare and IT/ITeS sectors have also doubled. Product-wise, Customer Experience (CX) saw 100% growth, driven by the CX Unity bundle and adoption by clients like RBL Bank and the Department of Income Tax,” Singla said. He added that in the HCM space, Oracle continues to partner with large conglomerates such as the Tata Group and Adani Group to deploy next-generation human capital management solutions across diverse business verticals.

Oracle also introduced its AI Agentic Studio and the Agentic AI Marketplace this year, allowing partners to develop and deploy enterprise-specific AI agents. Over 600 such agents are now in use, including 100 built during a recent OpenAI hackathon.

The IT and ITeS sector is playing a significant role in Oracle’s growth in India. Cognizant, for instance, has migrated its PeopleSoft application onto OCI, using Oracle’s agentic platform to run 35 AI use cases, with plans to scale up to 200. Wipro, another large ITeS customer, uses OCI in a multi-cloud setup to run its critical payroll systems, integrating with GCP and Azure.

“At Cognizant, we helped unify multiple siloed data marts into a real-time data lake using Oracle GoldenGate. This allowed their HR and financial agents to handle employee queries, payroll, and recruiting tasks using LLMs trained on OCI,” Premalakshmi said. “They now plan to scale this to over 200 AI agents in the coming year.”

India’s Role in Oracle's Global Strategy

Addressing questions on India’s global standing, Kumar confirmed that India is one of Oracle’s key markets across applications, infrastructure and development. “India is the second-largest development base for Oracle after the United States, with nine product development centres. Every new product launched globally is simultaneously made available in India,” he said.

On skilling, Kumar highlighted that Oracle has kept its free AI and cloud certification programme open until 31 October, targeting over a million developers this year. This is in addition to partnerships with NSDC and state governments to train students and professionals in emerging technologies.

“Our goal is to certify one million developers through Oracle University by October. We are running this in parallel with our collaboration with NSDC, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu state governments to build the next-generation digital workforce,” Kumar added.

Asked about competition from Indian IT firms building their own AI platforms, such as TCS’s AI Wisdom, Premalakshmi said Oracle’s strength lies in natively embedding AI within its stack—from infrastructure to data to applications.

“When we build AI agents, they are tightly integrated with enterprise workflows in Oracle Fusion or OCI, offering a seamless experience. Third-party agents often require additional integrations or external components to work with enterprise systems. But customers have the choice—and that is what matters,” she said.

The author was hosted by Oracle in Las Vegas to attend Oracle AI World 2025.