- Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison said during a conference this week that governments need to consolidate data about citizens for the sake of AI. He said AI models can help improve government services while also saving money and cutting down on fraud.
Larry Ellison thinks the U.S. and other countries should be using AI more, but first, governments need to unify the data they collect on citizens into one easily digestible database.
Speaking with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Wednesday, the Oracle cofounder and executive chairman said that while government organizations collect massive amounts of data, it is highly fragmented, making it hard to feed it into an AI model.
“It’s not like, ‘Go to this database, and here’s all the data about my country,’” he said. “It’s ‘Go to these 3,000 databases, and here’s all the data about my country.’”
For example, an AI model can help improve and lower the cost of health care with better therapeutics and earlier diagnoses, he said, but only if it can access health care data, diagnostic data, electronic health records, and even the genomic data of citizens that is collected by governments.
“That’s the big step. That’s kind of the missing link. We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like,” he said.
A unified database can also help AI models uncover government fraud, he added. Ellison, who is friends with President Trump’s government-spending cost-cutter Elon Musk, pointed to the supposed misallocation of funds Musk has uncovered as head of DOGE as evidence that AI is needed in this area.
Larry Ellison, Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer of Oracle explains to Sir Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister of U.K, about the power data centers will hold in the future and the role artificial intelligence will play for governments #WGS25#WorldGovSummit pic.twitter.com/UueIrBV1lZ
— World Governments Summit (@WorldGovSummit) February 12, 2025
Yet in order to enable the massive use of AI in governments, Ellison said each country must invest in data centers, which must be built on domestic soil because of privacy concerns and the apprehension countries have over storing citizens’ data in centers abroad.
“Just like airports obviously need to be in our country or they’re not terribly useful, ports need to be in our country or they’re not terribly useful, data centers—because of the privacy requirements around the data—need to be in our countries or they’re not terribly useful,” he said.
To be sure, centralizing national data could threaten its safety by emboldening hackers. U.S. government agencies have often been targeted by malicious and state-sponsored actors seeking to steal information. In December, less than three months ago, U.S. intelligence officials said hackers linked to the Chinese government targeted the Treasury Department in a “major incident.”
Still, Ellison said using advanced technology is essential to providing high-quality services, saving the government money, and improving the lives of citizens worldwide.
“The digital tools we have right now are so primitive that a lot of people have been able to defeat them,” he said. “You need to seriously modernize your systems.”
