Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: October 20, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Oracle introduced an AI-first user experience for Fusion Applications, featuring Ask Oracle (a universal natural-language assistant), AI-driven recommendations, visualizations, agent tracking, and a minimalist workspace to streamline tasks and reduce navigation friction.
- Oracle announced embedded pre-built AI agents within ERP/EPM, HCM, SCM, and CX workflows to automate finance, HR, supply-chain, and service operations. These native agents run on OCI and are included at no additional cost, lowering barriers to AI adoption.
- The enhanced AI Agent Studio and new AI Agent Marketplace allow customers to build or deploy Oracle-validated, partner-built agents using multiple LLMs, positioning Oracle as a hub for enterprise-agent innovation.
- Oracle embedded AI strategy is challenging consumption-based competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft, accelerating enterprise AI uptake, and signaling a platform shift where applications are natively powered—and extended—by embedded, agentic AI.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: At its AI World event in Las Vegas, Oracle made several announcements that can be read as a three-pronged push to embed “agentic AI” deeply into their Fusion Cloud Applications suite. The company unveiled a new AI-first user experience for the suite that blends natural language search, AI-powered suggestions and chat, and a minimalist workspace aimed at reducing navigation friction. The new interface combines search, AI-powered suggestions, hierarchical product mapping, and integrated chat, all shaped by real-time intelligence that tailors the experience to the way people choose to complete work.
Key features of the interface include Ask Oracle, a universal natural language-enabled entry point for interacting with Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle AI; AI-driven visualizations and agent tracking; personalized AI suggestions; an integrated AI-powered chat function; a rapid typeahead search feature that surfacing recommendations as users type into the search field; and a minimalist workspace designed to reduce distractions and only surfacing the most relevant information for a user’s role.
Oracle also announced pre-built AI agents embedded across its application domains: finance (ERP/EPM), human capital (HCM), supply chain (SCM), and customer experience (CX). These agents are designed to perform concrete tasks such as automated invoice ingestion and matching, ledger monitoring, requisition generation from quotes, sales‐order creation, and service-escalation prediction. These agents all run on the company’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, are native to existing workflows, and are included at no additional cost to users.
Most notably, Oracle expanded its development and ecosystem play via the AI Agent Studio and an embedded AI Agent Marketplace. The Agent Studio now supports major external LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, Meta, xAI) plus Model Context Protocol (MCP) for connecting external tools/data. This Marketplace also allows customers to deploy partner-built, Oracle-validated agent templates (from SIs and ISVs such as IBM Consulting, KPMG, Stripe, Box, etc.) directly inside Fusion Applications.
Oracle AI World Announcements Put AI Front and Center
Analyst Take: Like other large SaaS vendors, Oracle is rapidly refocusing its product features and messaging to focus on the delivery of agentic AI capabilities. The company recognizes that deploying AI in enterprise applications is no longer just about modelling and automation, but about making the user experience itself a fluid, task-centric component of the system. As such, Oracle has positioned AI, including agentic AI, not as an optional add-on, but as the default mode of interacting with its software applications and platform.
Oracle is leveraging its organizational assets and taking specific steps to reduce the friction many organizations encounter with deploying AI agents. First, by embedding agents across high-transaction domains (finance, HCM, SCM, CX) and offering them at no extra cost within Fusion, Oracle is making a strategic play to accelerate usage and reduce friction. This is a clear differentiator for Oracle, compared with Salesforce, Microsoft, and others that are generally charging extra for agentic and generative AI functionality, often through a consumption-based pricing model.
Second, Oracle is taking an open, flexible approach to building, deploying, and managing AI agents. It allows customers to build custom agents, deploy partner templates, and select among multiple LLMs to power them, providing customers with the flexibility to ensure that AI agents can address their specific use cases and needs. In addition, Oracle’s enhanced agent marketplaces and studio also helps to position Oracle not just as a vendor of applications but as a hub of enterprise-agent innovation. We expect that these partner templates may play a significant role in driving adoption of agentic AI, given the challenges of rolling out new technology when it is not core to a customer’s business.
It is also important to highlight Oracle’s redesign of its user interface to be “AI-first.” The ability to access the “Ask Oracle” function across the platform enables AI to be present across any workflow, which will help users not only become familiar with AI, but will incorporate it as an integral part of their daily work. This will be key for driving usage and ROI.
Impact on Oracle and its Competitors
With these announcements, Oracle clearly signals it is contesting not just in the applications-SaaS domain, but in the enterprise-AI-assistant space, including new entrants such as OpenAI, which made several announcements of apps that are designed to address specific business functions. By layering in AI as a core component of the platform, Oracle is shifting the narrative from an app plus AI approach to one where apps are integrated and powered by agentic AI.
For enterprises running Oracle Fusion Applications, the key success factors that Oracle can provide are the quality of data that feeds AI agents, the robust governance framework for safe and explainable output, and the seamless integration of these agents into existing workflows. The ability for customers to simply turn on or use these functions, without incurring additional costs, may be the core catalyst for driving use of AI agents, without needing to focus on specific ROI targets that are often attached to agentic workflows where additional consumption costs are involved. This approach likely will put pressure on other competitors to make their AI pricing terms more flexible or favorable for customers in order to drive new customer growth.
What to Watch:
- How quickly mid-market and large enterprise customers leverage the marketplace to accelerate AI deployment across departments with minimal IT overhead.
- New ISV and SI contributions likely will expand industry-specific agent templates, so it will be important to assess which verticals gain traction.
- Competitors in ERP and enterprise applications (SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft) may need to develop comparable marketplaces or deeper embedded agent solutions.
You can read the press releases announcing the news at Oracle’s web site, with specific releases focusing on new AI agents for Fusion applications, the expansion of AI Agent Studio, and the new AI-first user experience within Fusion applications.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Image Credit: Oracle
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
