'You get an agent! And you get an agent!' Oracle talks up build-your-own at Cloudworld 2025
While government acknowledges scale of its digital challenge
Everyone’s raving about AI agents – and Oracle has the answer for scaling their use.
AI was the unsurprising guest of honour at Oracle Cloudworld 2025 in London this week, and every speaker, interviewee and Oracle rep was eager to talk about it.
For its own part, Oracle was celebrating the launch of AI Agent Studio; a free addition to Fusion Applications that customers can use to build their own AI agents.
“Customers can either use out-of-the-box agents or create their own – it’s all about giving them the choice,” said UK country leader Siobhan Wilson.
Customers will be able to use the exact same tools Oracle has used to build its own agents, including template libraries and agent team orchestration, which users can leverage to set up multiple agents to operate alongside human workers.
We’ll be talking to Siobhan about the AI Agent Studio in the next episode of Ctrl Alt Lead, which will be live on Monday 24th March.
The other headline announcement was a $5 billion investment in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the UK, coming over the next five years. This, said Siobhan, “will help the UK government deliver on its vision for AI innovation and adoption.”
Baroness Maggie Jones, minister for the future digital economy, joined Richard Smith and Cormac Watters on-stage to talk more about the government’s plans in this area.
Addressing government fragmentation
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which Baroness Jones works within, is “at the heart of everything [the government is doing],” said said.
“We’ve recently learned, through the state of digital government review, quite how big the challenge is… As in any big organisation, there is so much fragmentation and siloed operating. We have an opportunity to address that and genuinely share data [across government departments].”
Baroness Jones is involved in the National Data Library, an election commitment to help government departments collaborate and share data. She said it is “a huge challenge,” but “the rewards are enormous.”
From Keir Starmer down, the government is prioritising work on digital. DSIT is particularly important in this, because its work stretches across every government department – although, the Baroness admitted, “to be honest, some of them are more receptive than others.”
On AI, “You don’t need me to tell you how crucial AI is to the task we’ve set ourselves. We’ve already identified that 70% of government departments are waking up to the need to use it, and we know we [in DSIT] can’t preach to them unless we’re doing it ourselves, so we need everyone to be digitally literate.”
That’s not just in government, but across the entire public sector. Baroness Jones specifically mentioned the NHS, which will come as no surprise; with Trusts using a variety of systems and frequently unable to share data, the health service is in dire need of modernisation.
“In the 21st century, this cannot continue,” she said. “We need to share data – and research successes – between hospitals.”
It’s hoped that the rising speed of tech adoption – it took 50 years for electricity to replace gas at scale, while gen-AI only took two years to reach mainstream success – will lift historically slow areas like the public sector.
The challenge is taking generative AI from the consumer space to the enterprise, and of course Oracle had examples of where it has helped customers do this. They include a company in Spain that has cut time-to-hire from 45 days to 20, and European research centre CERN, which is using AI to do more experiments faster – because time is money.
‘It starts with people’
Steven Jeffrey, public cloud platform director at Lloyds Banking Group, was the final guest, talking about LBG’s £4 billion digital transformation – prompted by a mix of changing customer demands, challenge from new banks and “the increasingly unlimited power of technology and AI.”
“We really think we’ve got an opportunity to revolutionise the way banking is done,” said Steven.
And where does it begin? Out of people, process and technology, “We start with people.”
Lloyds recruited more than 1,500 tech and data employees last year, including 300 graduates, and is working to develop an engineering culture.
“The role of the engineer is becoming central, but even the best engineer is held back by process, so we’re leaning very heavily into an iterative, agile approach – very much product-based, as opposed to projects.”
Oracle has played a big part in that iterative angle. About a year ago LBG “challenged ourselves to see how much of our estate we could actually put into Oracle Database on Azure” – before it was even available in the UK. The bank began trialling a move using the capability in the USA, doing a full deployment as soon as it came to London.
“The turning point was when we came to move our workloads… I remember sitting with 14 colleagues from around the bank and announced that all their dev test Oracle databases were now on Azure. [Because the move had been seamless] everyone thought that was incorrect and started pinging their teams!”
In LBG’s new engineering-led culture, the move to Azure means “the engineer really doesn’t care where the workload sits.”