I have been attending Oracle’s annual conference since it was Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, and one thing I have learned over the years is that the event can be extraordinarily valuable or surprisingly overwhelming. Much of the difference comes down to what you do before you arrive.

Oracle AI World is enormous. Thousands of customers, Oracle executives, product specialists, implementation partners, technology providers and consultants converge in Las Vegas for a few days, alongside more sessions, demonstrations and commercial offerings than anyone could reasonably absorb. 

After all these years, I often think about how I would approach the conference if I were attending as an Oracle customer. If you arrive expecting to figure out your agenda once you get there, you will certainly see a lot. You may not necessarily find what is most relevant to your company. I made that mistake myself in earlier years. Today, I’d approach the conference very differently.

The official agenda would be my first stop, but not my last.

Rather than building my agenda around what the conference offers, I would begin with three or four questions my company genuinely needs answered. Perhaps we are trying to understand where AI can realistically improve Finance. Perhaps we are struggling with adoption after a Cloud implementation, planning a rollout into a difficult country, evaluating a whole transformation or simply trying to solve a problem that has been sitting unresolved for months. I would take those questions to AI World.

One of the greatest advantages of the conference is the concentration of Oracle expertise available in one place. Product managers, solution architects and specialists who work directly with specific applications and technologies are there. If I were evaluating functionality or trying to understand where Oracle is taking a particular product, I would use the opportunity to see demonstrations, ask detailed questions and hear directly from the people closest to the technology.

I would also look well beyond Oracle’s sessions and the showcase.

After years on the partner side, I know how much expertise comes to this conference without necessarily being visible from the exhibition floor. There are firms and individuals specializing in particular industries, countries, applications, integrations, regulatory requirements, data, AI, change management and highly specific Oracle problems. Some sponsor large booths. Many do not. That distinction matters.

Companies naturally know the Big Four and the large system integrators, and those firms play an important role in the Oracle ecosystem. But they are not the entire ecosystem. There are highly specialized Oracle firms with deep expertise in problems that may represent only one workstream within a large transformation, but can be critical to the company trying to solve them.

If I were a customer, I would want to know who those people are before I arrived.

One effective way to find them is LinkedIn. In the weeks before AI World, search the event hashtag and look at who is talking about attending. Do not search only for companies. Search for expertise.

Who is discussing the problem you are trying to solve? Who has posted a success case with Oracle ERP + Oracle AI applied to a key business process for your company? Are there other customers I could talk to? Who has worked in the countries where you are deploying? Who understands the regulatory, integration or organizational issue that is creating difficulty for your program?

The people you find may never appear prominently in the official agenda or have a large presence in the showcase. They may nevertheless be exactly the people worth meeting.

And I would schedule those meetings before the conference.

A twenty- or thirty-minute conversation arranged around a specific business problem can be far more useful than an hour spent moving from booth to booth. Of course, AI World is a commercial environment. Vendors are there because they want to meet customers, and customers know that. But a commercial context does not prevent a conversation from being substantive. The difference is specificity.

“Tell me what your company does” will probably produce a sales pitch. “We are rolling Oracle into Europe next year and are concerned about how the new electronic invoicing laws in that region will affect our global template” can produce a very different conversation.

That is why I would build a significant part of my AI World agenda around one-to-one meetings. Not dozens of them, and certainly not every hour. The unexpected conversations between sessions remain part of the value of being there. But I would arrive with several carefully selected meetings already on my calendar.

For someone attending for the first time, this may be the most important advice I can offer. AI World is simply too large to approach passively. If you try to consume the conference as it is presented to you, the number of sessions, vendors, demonstrations and conversations can become overwhelming very quickly.

Instead, use the conference to conduct your own search.

Identify what your company needs to learn. Find the Oracle people closest to those questions. Search for customers who have faced similar challenges. Look beyond the most visible consulting firms for specialists who work on the specific problems you need to solve. Use LinkedIn to find who will be in Las Vegas, and put a few of those conversations on your calendar before you arrive.

The value of AI World is not only what Oracle or the exhibitors decide to put in front of you. It is the extraordinary concentration of knowledge that happens to be in the same city for a few days. You just have to know what you are looking for.

I will be back in Las Vegas this October, once again from the partner side of the ecosystem, and I am already building my own agenda. At an event this large, the best agenda may be the one you build yourself.