Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia says AI-assisted coding is producing “Star Wars” levels of engineering productivity inside the company. Oracle’s annual report, meanwhile, shows it has 21,000 fewer employees than it did a year earlier, The Register reported.
Speaking at Deutsche Bank’s 2026 Technology Conference in late August, Sicilia said that when he started as a developer in 1993, he would have dismissed what one AI-assisted engineer can now produce. “I’d have said that’s like Star Wars, futuristic stuff. There’s no way… but it is real. I mean it is super real. It is incredibly interesting,” he said.
He argued that AI will help the software industry rather than hollow it out, despite fears of a “SaaSpocalypse” that has pushed down many SaaS valuations this year. “The software industry will probably be disrupted in a positive way. Let me be clear, I don’t mean the SaaSpocalypse fears and all these things,” he said. He credited Oracle’s ability to “disrupt ourselves and become so productive” to “decades of experience with building and delivering mission-critical applications and infrastructure like Oracle Database.” Oracle’s shares have fallen sharply over the past year.
Fewer people
According to its annual report, Oracle had about 141,000 employees in May 2026, down from about 162,000 a year earlier. U.S. headcount fell by 9,000 and international headcount by 12,000. The filing links some of the decline to AI: “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” It also warns, “We may initiate new restructuring plans in the future.”
Mixed signals
The Register pointed out that Oracle has told contributors to OpenJDK, the open-source Java project it stewards, not to submit AI-generated code while it drafts a full generative AI policy. It cited review workloads, safety, security and intellectual property. “Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models, diffusion models, or similar deep-learning systems,” Oracle’s interim guidance says.
Customers have also complained about the AI-driven support portal Oracle relaunched late last year. They say support note numbers disappeared, automatic service requests could no longer be created, and patch searches got worse.
For enterprise software buyers, Sicilia’s remarks raise a practical question. If a vendor’s engineers really are producing more with fewer people, customers will want that to show up as faster releases and better support, and the portal complaints suggest it hasn’t yet.
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