Holger Mueller: Europe's AI skepticism is a costly delay

The comments came during an Oracle event titled "AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now," where Mueller spoke with theCUBE Research analysts Dave Vellante and Krista Case. His argument ties two threads together: European caution about US-built AI, and the security reality that defenders are already facing AI-driven intrusions. He points to the Hugging Face incident, where an autonomous agent carried out an intrusion and defenders turned to an open-weight model to analyze it after commercial frontier models blocked the forensic material, as evidence that the same technology can be used on both sides.

Within that framing, Mueller positions Oracle as an example of the infrastructure bet. He notes Oracle has long been a secure transactional database provider and gives customers a traditional database with the option to move external workloads to a data lakehouse, which he says matters because database scalability is what lets customers upgrade to the cloud and keep getting value from their agents. Constellation Research also recently examined "agentic AI washing" — companies claiming more agentic AI than they deliver — and concluded Oracle's portfolio met its criteria.

Mueller's reading of the adoption cycle is that last year advanced companies built the data plane for agents, this year is a fight over the better agentic framework, and next year will be about scaling backend systems. The stakes, as he frames them, hinge on whether European enterprises treat sovereign cloud as a prerequisite or an excuse, and on whether they can retire years of accumulated tech debt quickly enough to adopt AI at the elasticity he says it now requires. Whether that message lands with the European buyers he is addressing is likely to shape how quickly they close the gap he describes.