Automating away rote tasks with machine learning can do more than nibble down at super-sized business processes. When ML is embedded deep in the machinery of infrastructure, it can transform the jobs of people who use it and drastically impact business outcomes.

For example, Oracle Corp.’s new database with ML automation will change the workdays of database administrators, hasten automation, and stand in for MIA security pros, according to Monica Kumar (pictured), vice president of database and big data cloud product marketing at Oracle.

“It’s the first and only self-driving database in the industry,” she said.

Kumar spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the bounty that database automation brings to line-of-business, development and security. (* Disclosure below.)

Flying high on autopilot

The Oracle Autonomous Database pairs machine learning with Oracle’s decades of database optimizations to automate away as much manual labor from database administration as possible, allowing organizations to focus on tasks of higher value to the business. The product is shipping now, and customers are already reporting huge time savings and productivity gains, according to Kumar.

The Autonomous Database is “self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing,” Kumar said. It’s capable of provisioning, upgrading, patching, tuning, monitoring and backing up all by its lonesome. It’s available in the Oracle Cloud and on-premises.

The Autonomous Database cuts costs and reduces time consumption of administrative tasks by 80 percent, according to Kumar. One customer — a rental car company — cut down its time to provision databases from two weeks to eight minutes. “That means they can now roll out projects faster and improve their customer services and offers they’re making to customers,” she said.

A user in the shipping and oil industry reduced the time it takes to query complex data set from 20 minutes to a few seconds.

The self-patching security features address the dire shortage of security professionals in a landscape of constantly multiplying and mutating security threats. “There are 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs that are open in the next couple years. We don’t have enough people to fill those jobs,” Kumar said, citing a study by Cybersecurity Ventures. “Even if we did, we can’t keep pace with the amount of security threats and challenges that we need to navigate and address.”

As for job-loss fears, database admins using the product are finding that it’s simply shifting them to a role of greater collaboration, according to Kumar. “They can become a partner to the business. They can focus on application life-cycle management, on data security, on data architectures,” she concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Oracle Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE