Everyone Has the Same AI Models. Here's What Sets Agents Apart - Richmond Alake, Oracle

Richmond Alake was talking about agent memory before most people had heard of it, and now he argues the next layer after the control plane is an intelligence plane: what an agent knows, what it remembers, what it's allowed to see, and how it gets better. Using the WWII codebreakers who worked out that "AF" meant Midway, he shows why having the same information as everyone else isn't the same as intelligence. He then demos an agent built with an ontology and semantic layer that gets answers right 99% of the time using 32K tokens, versus 200K for a naive agent, and covers Oracle's agent memory package, deep data security, private inference, and fine-tuning small decision models for memory routing. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:20 Agent memory in one minute 1:39 The control plane 2:43 The software factory 3:54 The intelligence plane 4:38 AF is Midway 7:37 Where it fits in the agent stack 8:16 What the intelligence plane is 11:33 Agent = model + harness 13:13 Why now: decision models 14:01 Demo: governed vs. naive agent 17:07 What your team should do now 18:07 Agent memory, security and private inference 20:52 Demo: fine-tuning memory routing 24:41 Wrap-up: own your memory Richmond Alake https://www.oracle.com Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!