Cherian Varghese on AI strategy
From Exclusive from LEAP 2025: Zoom, Oracle Power AI in Saudi Arabia · · Gulf Business
“Every single vendor if he or she doesn't talk about AI life for them is incomplete so they have to introduce that AI has to be in every single layer of their architecture. If you are in the infrastructure space you have to introduce AI there, if you are in the data layer no brainer you have to introduce AI there and if you're in an application layer you have to introduce it there.”
On , Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President of Technology - Middle East and Africa at Oracle Corporation, spoke about AI strategy during Exclusive from LEAP 2025: Zoom, Oracle Power AI in Saudi Arabia on Gulf Business.
About Cherian Varghese
Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President of Technology for the Middle East and Africa at Oracle, has been a prominent voice on artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in 2025. In a September 2025 TEDx talk at AURAK, he examined whether AI augments or undermines human intelligence, stating that AI will automate many jobs to "95% perfection" and that the technology is at an early stage, with society having "traversed only 5% of the AI journey." He also discussed the Stargate project, a conglomerate involving Oracle, OpenAI, and a SoftBank-funded company, and warned that AI-generated content could be manipulated by politicians to alter historical narratives, placing responsibility on ethics and compliance leaders. At LEAP 2025 in Riyadh, Varghese announced that Zoom had introduced an AI component hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, building on their existing partnership. He described Oracle's strategy in the region as a hybrid model of public and sovereign data centers, citing data sovereignty requirements in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf states. Varghese noted that Oracle has been operating in Saudi Arabia for 30 years and now has the largest number of public data centers of any vendor in the region, with sovereign cloud partnerships with STC and du Telecom. He characterized the current moment as the beginning of an exponential growth phase for AI, predicting it will become as ubiquitous as the internet.