US is head over heels for AI agents, while Europe remains dubious

Europe's view of artificial intelligence is cautious, yet it must confront AI-driven cyber threats. To bolster their enterprises and compete with U.S. firms, Europe must re-evaluate its approach to AI adoption, according to Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. Regardless, humans cannot match AI-based threats, Mueller asserts.

"Europe has always been skeptical of innovation originating from the U.S." Mueller stated. "With AI, there's a significant amount of conservatism, a lot of waiting." Sovereign cloud is a significant subject, but it's also a convenient excuse. It's not a wise tactic to wait for sovereign cloud when conducting business on a global scale, as many European nations are doing.

During an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, Mueller discussed AI cybersecurity strategies and Oracle Corp.’s agentic AI offerings with Dave Vellante, chief analyst for theCUBE Research, and Krista Case, principal analyst for theCUBE Research. They highlighted the need for improved security measures in agentic AI frameworks, such as the Hugging Face security incident, where an autonomous AI agent executed an intrusion while defenders later utilized an open-weight model to analyze the attack once commercial frontier models blocked the forensic data.

Europe must urgently address its technological debt accumulated over two decades, as AI exacerbates the consequences of deferred maintenance. While Europe may not have experienced on-premises solutions, it can only consume AI elasticity-wise now. Constellation Research recently published an analysis of "agentic AI washing," a term for companies overstating the incorporation of agentic AI into their products.

When Oracle's AI database offerings were evaluated against Constellation's stringent criteria, the research firm determined that the portfolio met agentic AI requirements without violating that classification. "Last year, agentic AI uptake was for advanced companies to create the data source and data plane for those agents," Mueller explained.

"This year, everyone is debating the superior agentic framework. Next year will mark the significant scaling of backend systems. And this is a great message for Oracle customers knowing they have a highly scalable database." Oracle has reaped benefits from its long-standing status as a secure transactional database provider while implementing a strategy that offers customers a conventional database with the option to transfer external workloads to a data lakehouse.

Database scalability is crucial for agentic success as it enables customers to migrate to the cloud when necessary and continue deriving value from their agents. Crucially, enhanced security is required at every stage, according to Mueller. "You need to select which models to utilize and have a sandbox to determine that," he said.

"You need to collaborate with a few CISOs to conduct red team, not red hat, but black hat, white hat attacks or whatever [you need] to understand what is occurring there." A related point on this is that if you think state actors will spy on you, you must be quantum safe. The full video interview, part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's "AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now" event, is available here.

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