Oracle pins hopes on 'Star Wars' productivity jump to lightspeed from AI-assisted engineering

Oracle is betting that AI coding will deliver "Star Wars" levels of software engineering productivity, CEO Mike Sicilia told investors last week.

With its shares sharply down over the past year, Big Red claims its engineers' productivity will skyrocket as the company mainlines the AI wonder drug it prescribes to customers.

Speaking at Deutsche Bank's 2026 Technology Conference, Sicilia insisted that AI would be a net positive for the software industry, despite fears of a so-called SaaSpocalypse in which coding tools and agents strip value from business application vendors.

Many SaaS companies have seen their valuations plummet 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. [But] the fact that we're able to disrupt ourselves and become so productive is because we have decades of experience with building and delivering mission-critical applications and infrastructure like Oracle Database," he said.

Sicilia, who began his career as a software developer in 1993, said he would once have dismissed today's claimed productivity from a single AI-assisted engineer as fantasy.

"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 told the investor conference.

Curiously, Oracle has told contributors to OpenJDK – the open source Java project that it stewards – not to submit AI-generated code or other material.

In a post tagged "legal," Oracle said it was drafting a full policy on generative AI but had set interim ground rules.

It cited risks involving review workloads, safety, security, and intellectual property.