Addressing concerns around governance and data security, Ng said Oracle’s AI agents work directly and interact with Fusion applications through application programming interfaces (APIs). “Whatever guardrails that already exist in the apps are observed at the AI layer,” he said. “Agents are just doing the job on behalf of a particular person with a security profile.”

Oracle is also bolstering its internal operations with these tools, using agentic AI to build applications, handle first-line customer support and replace complex rule engines by allowing developers to simply describe desired system behaviours in natural language.

But as AI agents take on more workloads, it raises questions about the future of traditional SaaS pricing, which has long been tied to the number of people or seats licensed to access the software. Currently, Oracle provides generous token allowances – around 30 million tokens across different large language models – for agentic applications without charging a premium for an AI version of its software.

Ng acknowledged that if agentic applications eventually allow a finance department of 100 people to operate with only five, Oracle’s pricing model will have to adapt. “Today, we are charging by seats because there’s still a need to have accountants running reports, so the seats are not going away yet,” he said.

“But down the line, let’s say in five years, if people start to reduce the number of seats, Oracle is not going to charge by the number of seats. But at this point, we’re not seeing a mass exodus of people from their contracts.”

Amid the potential of agentic AI, Ng pushed back against suggestions that core ERP systems will become commoditised.

“If you’re a $2bn company and you tell regulators that your general ledger is going to be all over the place, how do you go to the SEC and prove that you are financially compliant?” said Ng, referring to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “That layer is not going away. It’s the experience and productivity layer, and how you interact with the data, that’s evolving.”