New Delhi, June 25 -- AUSTIN - Somewhere inside Oracle's workforce this year, one in eight jobs disappeared. The people who held them did not lose their places to a competitor, a recession, or a failed product. They lost them, by the company's own account, to the software Oracle is racing to sell everyone else. In an annual report filed with regulators on Monday, the company disclosed that its global headcount had fallen by 21,000 over the past year, and named the cause in language unusually direct for a corporate filing, the adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence across its operations.

Oracle Corporation employed about 141,000 people at the end of May, down from roughly 162,000 a year earlier, a reduction of nearly 13 percen...