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Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) recently reported its fourth-quarter results that managed to surpass the market’s expectations. Like all other technology players today, Oracle is also gearing up its product offerings to address the growing demand for AI-capable solutions.

Oracle’s Financials

Revenue for the fourth quarter grew 18% to $13.8 billion, slightly above analyst estimates of $13.74 billion. Net income was $4.1 billion or $1.19 per share. Adjusted EPS was $1.67. The market was looking for an EPS of $1.58.

Cloud services and license support revenues grew 25% to $9.4 billion. Cloud license and on-premise license revenues fell 14% to $2.2 billion. Hardware revenues also registered a 1% growth to $850 million. Services revenues grew 78% to $1.465 billion.

For the fiscal year, Oracle reported revenues of $50 billion, growing 22%, and an EPS of $5.12.

Oracle’s Generative AI Focus

Oracle recently announced the addition of generative AI-powered capabilities within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). The new capabilities are embedded in existing HR processes and are supported by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) generative AI service to drive faster business value, improve productivity, enhance the candidate and employee experience, and streamline HR processes.

Newly embedded generative AI capabilities include Assisted Authoring, Suggestions, and Summarization. Assisted Authoring enables employees, managers and HR leaders to quickly and easily author content and improve productivity and time efficiency. These new capabilities can generate content for users to review, revise, and approve through short prompts. The Suggestions capability guides users to achieve better and faster results based on natural language processing and best practices, while the Summarization capability helps increase efficiency by surfacing key insights from data sources for simple and impactful consumption.

As part of its AI initiative, Oracle also tied up with Cohere, a leading AI platform provider for enterprises. As part of the partnership, Oracle will integrate Cohere’s models in its business applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle industry-specific applications. The integration will enable customers to quickly and securely deploy generative AI to solve business challenges. The integration is expected to allow customers to have complete control and ownership of their data and refine AI models using their own data to increase accuracy for specific business use cases. By making generative AI pervasive across its portfolio of cloud applications, Oracle will enable customers to take advantage of the latest innovations within existing business processes. It will deploy new models for Healthcare and Public Safety and embed generative AI throughout its industry-specific applications that will boost knowledge workers’ productivity and efficiency.

Toronto-based Cohere was founded in 2019 to give developers access to NLP capabilities so that they could build safer, and more accessible machines. Today, Cohere’s large language models help organizations scale through the AI and ML requirements. The company remains privately held and has raised $434.9 million in funding from three rounds. Earlier this year, it had raised $270 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion. Perhaps Oracle could look at acquiring Cohere to compete with Microsoft and Google’s PaaS strategies.

Oracle is also helping the tech community accelerate its AI and ML capabilities by offering free training and certification testing worldwide. The new program includes instruction and certification on in-demand skills across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AI/ML, data management, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. This free curriculum has been made available to anyone, at any skill level, across various IT roles to help learners gain in-demand skills.

Oracle’s stock is trading at $114.89 with a market capitalization of $311.8 billion. It was trading at a 52-week high of $127.54 in June. The stock hit a 52-week low of $60.78 in September last year.

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