Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In this episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans sits down with Pankaj Goel, CEO of Opkey, to explore how agentic AI is reshaping ERP implementations and the broader systems integrator landscape. Goel shares how Opkey’s platform automates the full lifecycle of enterprise applications — from design through testing and support — while addressing long-standing inefficiencies in implementation models. The discussion highlights the growing urgency for speed, cost efficiency, and business outcomes in the AI Era, and how digital workers are enabling organizations to rethink both delivery models and competitive positioning.

AI Transforms ERP

The Big Themes:

AI Reshapes ERP Delivery Models: The conversation underscores a major disconnect between modern cloud ERP adoption and outdated implementation methodologies. While enterprises are rapidly shifting toward cloud-based systems like Oracle, SAP, and Workday, many systems integrators still rely on legacy approaches rooted in early-2000s practices. This mismatch results in inefficiencies, cost overruns, and delayed outcomes. Opkey addresses this gap by introducing AI-driven automation that aligns delivery models with the speed and flexibility required in today’s AI Economy.

Massive Time and Cost Savings: The platform delivers measurable efficiency gains. Customers report up to 40% reductions in day-to-day operational time post-implementation, while testing cycles shrink from weeks to just a few days. For systems integrators, implementation costs have dropped by approximately 25% in early deployments. These improvements not only enhance productivity but also enable faster innovation cycles, allowing businesses to respond more quickly to market changes.

A Win-Win Ecosystem Vision: Opkey’s strategy is built around creating value for all stakeholders: ERP vendors, systems integrators, and end customers. By improving implementation success rates, reducing costs, and accelerating time to value, the platform fosters a “win-win” ecosystem. This holistic approach ensures that innovation benefits the entire enterprise software value chain, rather than optimizing for one group at the expense of others.

The Big Quote: “Copilots. . . help you understand your information better, whereas agents and agentic AI is a fundamentally different way of conceiving work. Think of an AI agent as a digital worker, just like you used to have Oracle administrators in past and your business analysts."

More from Pankaj Goel and Opkey:

Connect with Pankaj on LinkedIn or learn more about Opkey Release Advisor and CALM.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack the convergence of tech and energy and what it means for the future of business leadership.

Highlights

00:00 — We are seeing here in 2026 the collapsing of traditional industry boundaries. AI is helping to drive this. A whole new way of doing business is powering this. And mostly what's happening is we're seeing visionary leaders in the tech industry, energy, utilities, power, and other places realize the old story that what got us here won't get us there.

00:35 — So I wanted to talk a little bit today about a big new partnership between Google Cloud and a century-old industrial power company called Baker Hughes. And they're looking together to join forces to do things that neither could do individually, to juice up the AI Economy and address insatiable demand for power in AI data centers.

01:38 — So much growth here, and all this is forcing traditional industry boundaries to be reconsidered. These digital-native software companies are now worried about where electrons come from, and they’ve got to get upstream integrated into the power and energy industry to keep this going.

02:20 — Now you got these extremely capable companies like Baker Hughes that have never faced such an extraordinary spike in demand. This fusion or blurring of the lines between the tech industry and the energy/power industry is going to be enormously important.

03:01 — They’re looking at the possibility of fusion reactors. Fusion is one of the world’s most high-potential but difficult technologies, and if it works, energy problems are solved. The fusion of the tech industry into the energy industry will shorten that distance dramatically.

04:14 — Are you hung up on the traditions of the past? Or are you seeing a very different future where those boundaries don’t exist? Don’t be caught on the back edge of that.

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In this episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans speaks with Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, about the company’s latest leap into AI-driven enterprise software. Miranda outlines Oracle’s introduction of “agentic applications,” a new category that blends AI agents, automation, and business workflows into outcome-driven systems. He explains how Oracle’s strategy has evolved from embedding AI into apps to building thousands of agents — and now to delivering fully agentic apps that transform how users interact with enterprise software. The conversation highlights both the opportunity and confusion customers face in this rapidly shifting AI landscape.

Rise of Agentic AI

The Big Themes:

From Features to Outcomes: A major shift is the move from feature-based software to outcome-driven systems. Instead of executing predefined tasks, AI agents are now given business goals, such as optimizing supply chains or improving financial performance, and they generate multiple strategies to achieve them. Users then act as decision-makers, selecting preferred options. This represents a profound change in human-computer interaction, where software becomes a collaborative partner.

Explosive Growth of AI Agents: Oracle’s rapid expansion from around 50–100 agents to over 1,000 demonstrates the accelerating pace of AI adoption. This growth reflects both customer demand and the scalability of AI-driven architectures. The agents are not limited to simple automation but are capable of reasoning, analyzing enterprise-wide data, and making recommendations. This scale also lays the foundation for agentic applications.

Future of SaaS Reimagined: Miranda makes it clear that SaaS is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Traditional applications will coexist with agentic systems for now, but the long-term trajectory points toward AI-driven interfaces becoming dominant. Oracle plans to expand agentic capabilities across its entire application suite, from finance to supply chain to HR. As AI-to-AI interactions and data integration improve, these systems will become even more powerful.

The Big Quote: “These are agents where you're giving the agent a business outcome and a goal, and the agents [are] recommending to you optimizations or how you get there. And then you, as a user or human in the middle of this process, actually instruct those agents on which of the plans to execute, and it goes ahead and automates and executes those transactions. So it's a fundamentally different way of presenting the applications."

More from Steve Miranda:

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn or learn more about AI agents for Fusion Applications.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Oracle is redefining enterprise software by fusing AI agents directly into applications.

Highlights

00:03 — Again, busy days here in the early part of 2026. I had a great video interview with Oracle Executive Vice President Steve Miranda. He's been in charge of applications development at Oracle for more than 20 years, and Steve made a few key points about these new agenetic applications.

00:56 — And his main point was, you take all the existing value that applications have had about governing processes being established, customers are comfortable with them, and then you enhance those with new agentic AI capabilities to allow those now, instead of just applications, these AI agentic applications, to do more than they had been able to do before.

01:59 — And at the same time, I think one of the big points here that Miranda said with these now is that business people are going to be able to spend less time managing their processes and more time devoting their efforts and energy and their technology to being drivers of business outcomes that they want: more growth, more innovation, better experiences for customers.

02:49 — This whole confusion, and in some ways this just crazy time we’ve been through, you know, where SaaS business applications are going to go away — I guess, you know, almost two and a half years ago, when Satya Nadella made this point — such an intelligent person.

04:07 — I think what Oracle is doing here, and especially in the words of Steve Miranda, is going to bring a lot of calm and assurance to people that it is not an either/or game: agents or business applications. Now it’s both.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Oracle is using AI to unify and transform the fragmented healthcare ecosystem.

Highlights

00:03 — Early in 2026, we're seeing big strides made across all industries with AI, but in particular, there's enormous promise for AI in healthcare. So, I had a chance recently to speak with Oracle Executive Vice President Seema Verma. She's in charge of healthcare and health and life sciences.

01:06 —And one of the things that Seema talked about here is that, for too long, every part of the healthcare industry has been caught up in these point solutions, which worked well for their very narrow slice. But in these days, that's just too much manual effort, too much time required, too much movement attempting to stitch together different data models.

01:33 — And especially now with AI coming, the data has to be centralized. It's got to be in one place, clean, secure, and ready to go. So in this video interview, Seema talks about some of the advances Oracle's making. She said, “We're addressing the big pain points.”

02:06 — She talked a lot about identity, authentication, the ability for doctors and offices to be able to listen and look directly at the patient instead of typing on the keyboard while the AI is recording and transcribing it and bringing up other relevant information.

04:05 — So I do love this big, sprawling effort here, the end-to-end initiative. I think more and more we're going to be seeing that the big application, slash agents, slash data, slash AI, companies like Oracle are going to go after this more on a big, comprehensive basis. 

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