Oracle wants to be at the centre of India’s digital and AI-led transformation across enterprises and the public sector. It views AI and cloud technology as critical for the delivery of advanced business efficiency, automation and innovation across operations. Shailender Kumar, senior vice-president and regional managing director, Oracle India & NetSuite JAPAC, discusses with Sudhir Chowdhary the top tech trends and Oracle’s cloud momentum and AI innovation here. Excerpts:
What are the top tech trends that have dominated this past year?
Over the past year, digital transformation has been driven by rapid adoption of cloud and AI, especially agentic AI and generative AI. AI is changing everything. We are seeing the success of AI in robotics, healthcare, molecular discoveries, financial services, and more. In 2026, customers will stop experimenting with AI and start scaling it across functions – be it finance, HR, sales, service, supply chain, IT or even product development. The competitive edge will go to enterprises that embed AI directly into enterprise applications and cloud infrastructure and not added as a standalone tool.
How is Oracle positioned to capture India’s cloud market growth?
Customers have trusted Oracle with their most sensitive data for decades. Our cloud strategy stands apart because it is built to be both complete and open. Oracle delivers a full-spectrum cloud portfolio across infrastructure, platform, data, and applications, enabling customers to run every critical workload on a single, integrated cloud. At the same time, it gives enterprises real choice – how they deploy, where they run, and how they modernise – across public cloud, dedicated regions, hybrid, and multicloud environments.
This combination of end-to-end capability with deployment flexibility allows organisations to innovate at speed, meet regulatory needs, and avoid vendor lock-in while scaling with confidence. Today the company provides customers with everything they need to unlock the full potential of enterprise AI. Oracle AI is engineered seamlessly into every one of our products and included at no additional cost.
Tell us about your cloud strategy.
As Indian enterprises embrace multi-cloud and tighter data-sovereignty norms, Oracle is advancing its distributed cloud strategy in India that brings Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services closer to where data is created and regulated. With multiple cloud regions in India, the company enables customers to meet residency, latency and compliance requirements. At the same time, Oracle’s multi-cloud integrations with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud allow organisations to combine best-of-breed services without compromising on security, performance or regulatory control.
How is Oracle enabling customers to adopt AI and automation at scale across industries?
Oracle makes it easy for customers to use AI to solve their most important problems. Organisations want AI to power innovation, but they also want it to be secure, fast, and cost effective. Oracle is enabling AI and automation at scale by embedding intelligence across its entire cloud, data and applications stack. Through OCI Generative AI, or Oracle Autonomous AI Database, customers can securely build, deploy and scale AI without moving sensitive data.
Indian enterprises can use AI across Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to automate finance, HR, supply chain and customer service with built-in generative AI copilots. Oracle’s strategy also includes industry-specific AI for BFSI, telecom, manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries, backed by India cloud regions, AI-ready infrastructure, and a strong ecosystem of partners and developers to accelerate real-world adoption.
Customers like IFFCO are transforming farming practices with cloud and AI by using AI-powered drones and AI-processed data to enhance agricultural productivity. Kotak Mahindra Bank is empowering thousands of employees with AI-driven goal suggestions and data-rich evaluation support during appraisals. TVS Credit is helping citizens fulfil their aspirations through accessible financial solutions by using generative AI to help customers strengthen their credit scoring and accelerate loan processing time.
What is your growth vision over the next 3-5 years, and sectors will drive it?
Our growth vision for Oracle India is to be at the centre of the country’s digital and AI-led transformation across enterprises and the public sector. AI and cloud technology are essential to ensure the successful delivery of critical services, drive economic growth, and maintain global competitiveness. We see strong momentum building around data-driven decision-making, cloud-native core systems and large-scale AI adoption. Growth will be driven by OCI for high-performance computing and generative AI, along with continued demand for our industry-leading ERP, supply chain and HR platforms. Sectors like BFSI, professional services, retail, e-commerce, telecom, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government will lead this shift as they modernise legacy infrastructure and scale digital services securely.
What is the single most important shift Indian enterprises must make now to stay competitive in an AI-driven global economy?
The single most important shift Indian enterprises must make today is to move from experimenting with AI to embedding it deeply into their core business processes. AI can no longer sit on the edges as pilots or point solutions – it must be built into finance, supply chains, customer engagement and decision-making. This requires modern cloud infrastructure, clean and unified data, and a strong culture of continuous innovation. Enterprises that make AI foundational to how they operate will be far better positioned to compete globally on speed, efficiency and innovation.