Is Your Analytics Strategy "AI Powered"?
- Ambs
- Jan 15
- 2 min read
A few months ago, I had the privilege of contributing to the EOUC e-Magazine’s (OraWorld) Fall Edition. While the seasons have changed, the core message of my article - "Beyond Dashboards: The Future of Oracle Analytics Is AI-Powered" - is more relevant now, than ever. As we move through early 2026, the shift from looking at data to interacting with it via AI has accelerated.
Core Summary: Bridging the Gap to "AI-Ready" Data
In this article, I explore how Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) has evolved from a visualisation tool into an intelligent partner. If you haven't caught the full piece yet, here are the three core pillars I break down:
Automated Discovery: How features like Auto Insights and Explain act as "data detectives," scanning datasets to find correlations and anomalies that a human eye might miss.
Democratised Machine Learning: The power of "One-Click ML" and OCI AI Services (Vision, Language, and Document Understanding), allowing business users to perform advanced sentiment analysis or image recognition without writing a single line of code.
The AI Assistant & Metadata: A deep dive into the Oracle Analytics AI Assistant. I explain why the secret to preventing AI "hallucinations" isn't just a better LLM - it’s about building a robust "Semantic Model" and using AI-powered column naming to make your data more descriptive and "AI-ready."
More AI Sophistication in OAC: November and January Releases
Since this article was published online, Oracle hasn't slowed down. The November 2025 and January 2026 updates have brought more AI sophistication into immediate reality:
AI Agents & Feedback Loops: The January 2026 release introduced Oracle Analytics AI Agents, allowing for more autonomous data exploration. Plus, we now have a direct feedback loop to help "train" the AI Assistant, making its responses more accurate for your specific business context over time.
Natural Language Evolution: The AI Assistant can now tackle more complex spatial and pattern-based questions, like identifying clusters and outliers just by asking your questions in plain English.
Workflow Integration: We’ve seen a massive push toward "embedded AI," moving insights out of standalone portals and directly into the tools where decisions happen (like the new AI Assistant support in embedded mode from the November update).
Also in this Edition of OraWorld e-Magazine:
Beyond my deep dive into AI, this article issue contains some of the best technical resources from industry experts:
The "How-To": Connecting OIC with Autonomous Database.
The Architecture: The evolution of RAC interconnect on Exadata.
The Security: Setting up Oracle SQL Firewall (a top priority for 2026).
The Strategy: A great piece on exploring business viability without AI.
A Heartfelt Thank You
Re-reading this reminds me how much work went into this edition. Huge thanks again to the EOUC community. I'm especially grateful to Jon Mead for the insightful reviews and Mirela Ardelean for the invitation to share my thoughts.
Catch Up Here!
If you missed it in the initial fall rush, grab a coffee and catch up on the full edition here:
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