At the annual Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, the Oracle Corporation CEO, Mike Sicilia, declared that the company is seeing real, tangible value in artificial intelligence — rejecting the notion of an AI bubble — and emphasized that demand for AI capabilities is already exceeding supply.
Infrastructure Strain Becomes Reality
Behind the rhetoric lies a significant infrastructure challenge. Oracle and its peers are racing to build vast data-centres, secure GPU capacity, and scale cloud offerings capable of training and running frontier AI models. For instance, analysts now expect the AI infrastructure build-out to hit nearly $490 billion in the coming year.
The Business Pivot: From Hype to Execution
For years, many in tech debated whether AI was more hype than substance. Oracle’s comments signal a shift: the question now is no longer “Will AI scale?” but “How do we operationalize, monetize and regulate it at scale?”.
That means corporate strategists, CIOs and tech-leaders should focus less on the existence of AI and more on the mechanics of its deployment:
- Are your data infrastructure and architecture ready for frontier models?
- Do you have talent, governance and risk frameworks that match your ambition?
- Can your business pivot from experimentation to production-grade AI?
Resilience, Risk & the Growth Inflection
However, this transition is not without its risks:
- Capital-intensive infrastructure build-outs carry long-tail pay-off risk — heavy upfront investment with uncertain returns.
- Supply bottlenecks — from advanced chips to data-centre real estate — mean high demand may yet encounter structural friction.
- The window between promise and performance is narrowing: organisations must translate AI capability into measurable business outcomes or risk investor fatigue.
Readovia Insight
For readers of the AI channel, here’s what matters: the era of asking “Should we do AI?” is effectively over. The question now is “How fast, how effectively, and how responsibly can we scale AI?”.
Success in AI now depends on operational readiness, execution, and measurable impact — a divide that increasingly separates forward-thinking leaders from those still chasing the trend.
