Oracle FY27 Sales Kickoff: Fired Up in Las Vegas
Todd Swank's Diary Entry for June 14, 2026
I flew into Las Vegas Monday morning and flew home Friday, and this picture is about as much of the Strip as I saw all week. Normally Vegas offers temptation, bad decisions, and stories you probably shouldn’t publish on the internet. This time I was there with 4,500 Oracle coworkers getting fired up for FY27, talking AI data centers, and behaving like a responsible adult. Which is really disappointing for my brand.
You may remember from last week’s post, A Beautiful Day to Quit Golf, that I lost my temporary tooth, flipper, and retainer in Clear Lake two days before this trip. I couldn’t get a replacement in time, and my emergency Shark Tank-style TempTooth science project went about as well as you’d expect. I even thought about skipping Vegas, but then I reminded myself I’ve looked different my entire life. This wasn’t the hand I wanted, but I’ve been dealt this hand before. So I decided to own it, smile anyway, and not let one missing tooth stop me from doing what I love most: talking to strangers who didn’t ask for it.
The first night I had dinner with several of my recent teammates. At Oracle, every June feels a little like corporate musical chairs, except the music stops and suddenly you have a new manager, a new team, a new product focus, and three fresh acronyms you’re expected to care deeply about. Honestly, it’s not a bad thing. You get exposed to new styles, new ideas, and new ways of doing the job. Plus, changing managers every year keeps you sharp. Mainly because by the time you figure out what one of them wants, congratulations, here comes another one.
We had dinner at WAKUDA inside The Venetian, and the sushi was incredible. But honestly, I spent half the meal staring at the art on the walls. It had this erotic modern punk thing going on, like the first time I saw The Matrix and realized movies could be cool, confusing, and slightly dangerous all at once. I didn’t totally understand what any of it meant, but I knew it was working on me. The whole place felt like Tokyo, Las Vegas, and a tattoo parlor got together and made excellent sushi. That’s how they get you hooked before the bill arrives and commits a second-degree felony against your wallet.
People always ask why I love Las Vegas so much, and the answer is simple: it’s Disney World for adults. There is no other place on earth where you can walk through a fake Italian shopping mall inside a fake Venetian hotel, stumble past a full Wizard of Oz display promoting a show at a giant Sphere, and have every single part of that feel completely normal. Nobody here is pretending to be something they’re not, which is ironic because everything here is pretending to be something it’s not. That’s the magic of Vegas, and I fall for it every single time.
Tuesday morning the FY27 Sales Kickoff officially kicked off, and that’s Mark Hura, Oracle’s President of Global Field Operations, on stage. Mark has a way of making 4,500 salespeople feel like they’re part of something bigger than a quota, which is harder than it sounds. The FY26 numbers were record-breaking across the board, but honestly, what got me wasn’t the revenue figures. It was the AI story. Oracle is building data center infrastructure at a scale most people can’t picture, powering technology that’s going to change how doctors treat patients, how drugs get developed, and how the world actually works. I know AI makes a lot of people nervous. I get it. But sitting in that room, I walked away genuinely excited about the future. Not the scary sci-fi version. The one where people actually get helped.
Tuesday morning the FY27 Sales Kickoff moved from Vegas spectacle to full-on business mode, and this was my first time seeing Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia speak in person. He laid out a vision for an AI-enabled future that felt less like corporate hype and more like the ground shifting under every industry at once. On the earnings call, he talked about customers moving past AI experiments and into real enterprise solutions that improve productivity, service, and competitive advantage. That’s the part that gets me fired up. Not the doom-scrolling version of AI where everyone argues with strangers for sport, but the version where we solve harder problems, move faster, and build things that actually help people. He said the world will look very different three years from now. I believed him.
Tuesday night was the awards ceremony for the North America OCI organization, called The Larrys in honor of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. They do a really nice job turning it into our version of the Oscars, with presenters, nominees, big production value, and plenty of people dressed like they’re one acceptance speech away from thanking their agent. I’ve never been cool enough to be nominated for one of these awards, which I’m totally fine with because I also haven’t been cool enough to own a tuxedo. So really, the system is working.
We had around 120 partners in attendance too, which meant the happy hour invitations started piling up fast. I actually had to turn down several of them, which is wildly out of character for me and frankly not the kind of personal growth I signed up for. I did make it to a few, though, and they were a blast. There’s something energizing about being in a room full of smart people, good conversations, and appetizers you only eat because they’re on tiny plates and therefore legally don’t count.
I also got to spend more time with my new teammates, including Chris in the middle and my new boss, Michael. We were both more than happy to accept the free cowboy hat swag, because I am nothing if not easily bribed by accessories. I honestly can’t remember ever wearing a cowboy hat before, but now that I’ve seen the evidence, I think I pull it off. If this whole thing ever falls apart, I may ride into a dusty border town, clean up corruption, win the respect of the locals, and still be home by dinner because my horse has sleep apnea.
Just like that, it was the final day. Four and a half days, 4,500 people, more sessions, hallway conversations, and tiny appetizers than I can fully account for, and somehow I walked out the other side genuinely fired up. Navigating an event this size is its own endurance sport, but the energy in that room never really dropped. One Team. One Goal. No Limits. Easy to put on a slide, harder to actually feel, but by the end of the week I felt it. We still had one more session to go though, and let’s just say the closing speaker made staying in my seat an easy decision.
The week ended with Oracle founder Larry Ellison speaking to us, which was pretty incredible. I’ve always viewed him as one of the top technology visionaries of all time, so hearing him talk about Oracle’s future and the AI-enabled world ahead was a great way to close things out. At one point he was asked if he owned a Tesla Optimus robot yet. He said no, but he did have one from Unitree, then casually predicted that within five years we may see more humanoid robots walking around than actual humans. The part that hit me was when he said finger dexterity is still one of the hardest problems to solve. The base robot might cost around $16,000, but the one with really good hands is more than $50,000. As a guy who has spent his entire life navigating a world built for hands that work better than mine, I found that oddly validating. Apparently functional fingers are the premium upgrade. Tell me something I don’t know.
