I don’t know how they choose the names. I picture a conference room. Whiteboard walls, stale coffee, the low hum of an overactive HVAC system. A bunch of VPs in identical blue shirts are tossing around words that sound vaguely futuristic but also, you know, approachable. "Synergy." "Nexus." "Apex." Then some marketing intern, probably named Chad, pulls up a list of "popular but not too popular" baby names from a decade ago.
And that’s how you get Zora.
Except, this time, something went wrong. Something went profoundly, existentially wrong. Because while Deloitte and Oracle were busy patting themselves on the back for birthing their new corporate AI baby, "Zora AI™," a simple search would have shown them another Zora.
Zora Emery Willis. A real person. A baby girl who was born and died on the exact same day, October 17, 2025. Her life was measured in hours, her memory honored in a quiet, private obituary.
And now her name is a trademarked product designed to "eliminate data siloes."
There's Something Deeply Wrong with "Zora AI"
Let's be clear. It's probably a coincidence. A deeply unfortunate, gut-wrenching coincidence. I'm not suggesting some Deloitte executive maliciously scraped an obituary database for a new brand name. That would be cartoonishly evil. No, the reality is far more damning.
They just didn't look.
They didn’t care enough to do the five seconds of due diligence it would have taken to see that this name was already associated with a very real, very recent human tragedy. The name wasn't just a collection of appealing syllables; it was a vessel for a family's love and loss. It's just a name. No, 'just a name' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of corporate soullessness.
The machine they built, Zora AI™, is meant to "spot trends" and provide "contextualized insights." What a perfect, crushing irony. An all-seeing, data-crunching oracle that couldn't even perform a basic Google search on its own name. What other "context" is it going to miss when it’s running your entire supply chain?
This isn't just a branding misstep. It's a symptom of a much deeper sickness in the tech industry. It’s the logical endpoint of a culture that sees the entire human experience—our language, our art, our names, our grief—as raw material to be mined, processed, and repackaged for profit. They’re like digital strip miners, carving up the landscape of our culture and leaving a sterile, featureless pit in its place. And for what, exactly...
What does it say about your company when the name you choose for your revolutionary, "deep reasoning" AI is already tied to a headstone? Does anyone in these meetings ever look up from their spreadsheets and ask, "Hey, maybe we should check if this name belongs to, you know, a person?"
Translating the Corporate Gibberish
If you can stomach it, let's look at what this ghost in the machine is actually supposed to do. The press release, Deloitte and Oracle Accelerate Agentic AI with Zora AI™, is a masterclass in saying absolutely nothing with the maximum number of buzzwords.
Zora AI™ is an "agentic AI" that will "unlock deep reasoning agentic AI workflows." It's built on the "NVIDIA AI stack" and runs on "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)." It teams up with "embedded AI agents" to form "multi-agent teams." It’s all meant to "fundamentally change how work gets done."
Let me translate that for you. They’ve built a more complex version of a chatbot that can talk to other chatbots inside Oracle's software. That's it. That's the revolution.
John Fanelli at NVIDIA says enterprises want "advanced AI agents to automate complex, cross-functional processes." Translation: "We want to fire a lot of mid-level managers and data-entry clerks."
Mauro Schiavon at Deloitte says they're "helping organizations unlock real value." Translation: "Our consulting fees for implementing this thing are going to be astronomical."
Roger Barga at Oracle talks about helping "future-proof our joint clients’ technology investments." Translation: "Please don't leave us for Microsoft or Amazon. Look, we have a shiny new toy, too."
It’s all the same empty corporate-speak we’ve been hearing for decades, just with a new coat of AI paint. They promise to break down siloes, but all they do is build new, more expensive ones. They promise to free up humans to focus on "growth and innovation," but in reality, they just create a new class of human worker whose job is to babysit the algorithm and clean up its inevitable, nonsensical mistakes. Offcourse, they won't tell you that part.
This Zora AI™ is designed to reconcile data, spot trends, and catch errors. It’s a glorified accountant. And they gave it the name of a child who never got to draw a breath. The sheer, unthinking tastelessness is staggering. Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe in a world where we're all just data points to be optimized, this is the most honest branding I've ever seen.
So, We're Naming Robots After Dead Babies Now?
This whole affair leaves a uniquely foul taste in my mouth. It's not just the clumsiness of the branding; it's the profound emptiness it represents. A family's most private sorrow, unknowingly plastered onto a product designed to make corporate processes 2% more efficient. It’s the perfect, grim monument to our era: a digital ghost named after a real one. And the worst part? Nobody even noticed.
