Oracle executive says agent counts miss the value of enterprise AI

Enterprise leaders should judge AI by the business outcomes it delivers, not by how many agents they deploy, says a senior vice president for Oracle UK & Ireland.

Writing for TechRadar Pro Perspectives, Kevin Kimber says that across more than 200 workshops his team has run with enterprises in Europe and the Middle East, organizations getting real value from AI began with a business problem or point of friction. Others started with the technology and looked for a place to use it.

Kimber argues that faster work is not the same as business value. He points to outcomes such as fewer payroll errors, faster shift scheduling, lower supplier sourcing costs, better win rates and cash collected sooner. If a company cannot name the key performance indicator an agent is meant to move, he says, it has a demo rather than a use case.

He also distinguishes systems that offer advice from agentic applications that carry work forward. In supplier sourcing, for example, an application could coordinate event creation, responses, scoring, approvals and contract updates, with policy controls and human oversight where required.

Kimber says enterprise context—including trusted data, policies, approvals and live process state—matters more than raw model intelligence alone. He favors coordinated specialist agents over one all-purpose assistant, arguing that their value lies in working together toward a shared business outcome. The views are his own and are not necessarily those of TechRadar Pro or Future plc.