Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 18, 2024
The News: Oracle announced several new AI capabilities for Oracle Fusion Apps at its annual CloudWorld user conference, focusing on helping customers execute complex tasks, automate workflows, and improve organizational efficiency. The newest AI innovations include more than 50 new AI agents and a range of other AI capabilities that assist with authoring, advising, and recommending actions across multiple functional areas, including finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service.
Oracle Announces New AI-Powered Features for Fusion Apps
Analyst Take: At CloudWorld 2024, Oracle announced several new AI capabilities within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite designed to help customers successfully execute complex tasks, automate workflows, and drive efficiency. The capabilities are embedded into the platform and incorporated into the license cost without any additional usage charges.
The latest AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion Applications include:
- 50+ AI agents across ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX: Oracle announced more than 50 AI agents that are designed to help its customers fully automate end-to-end business processes while also delivering personalized insights, content, and recommendations in the context of specific business processes. The agents are also able to be customized to support specialized user roles.
Oracle’s rollout of intelligent agents is in line with other major SaaS vendors, which are each trying to make the case that greater automation of business processes that don’t require significant human input can drive significant productivity and efficiency gains. While Oracle says that today’s agents will have a human in the loop to ensure agents function as expected, it is likely that soon, some processes will run fully autonomously unless specific thresholds or exceptions are hit, in which case a human can be summoned to verify the action or act in place of the agent. - New AI innovations in Oracle Cloud ERP: Oracle announced several new capabilities within its ERP offering that are designed to help customers optimize financial processes, improve predictions and insights, and automate and organize transaction records, leveraging both predictive and generative AI.
As a whole, the ERP innovations are designed to make it easier for customers to find, interact with, derive insights from, and record critical data from within their organization, driving better and faster decision-making and forecasting. - AI-powered skills insights in Oracle Cloud HCM: Oracle’s HR solution is being upgraded to take advantage of AI to drive the speed and accuracy of skills & insights and better align talent with business priorities. The inclusion of new bespoke skills inventory allows HR leaders to use AI to gain a complete catalog of their organization’s skills that is always kept up to date and can be modified, refined, or enhanced using data from across the enterprise and third-party sources.
Organizations are realizing the need to level up their talent acquisition, development, and management practices to attract and retain top employees. The use of AI within the platform is designed to help speed up the integration of internal and external data that can be used to power key insights, while also making it easier for HR leaders and managers to uncover critical trends and learnings from their data. - New AI innovations in Oracle Cloud SCM: With the increasing digitization of manufacturing environments, Oracle has incorporated new AI features that are designed to assist organizations with improving manufacturing and operational performance. The suite includes a new smart operations workbench that provides real-time insight into work orders and generative AI-powered shift reporting. Generative AI-assisted authoring in Oracle Order Management enables users to more quickly develop order acknowledgement emails and order change history notes, improving efficiency, productivity, and accuracy.
- New AI innovations in Oracle Cloud CX: Oracle Cloud CX has been updated to include generative AI-assisted authoring capabilities, which are designed to help sales teams efficiently engage with buyers by providing AI-generated answers to contract-related questions, emails and activity summaries, and executive summaries for quotes and proposals. AI is also being deployed within Oracle CX Unity to detect customer engagement signals based on role, title, and aggregated topic engagement, and provide the next-best-action recommendations.
These updates are quickly becoming table stakes within CX software. Organizations that do not utilize this type of functionality are failing to leverage the insights contained with the data they already collect, and may be putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the market.
Leveraging the Power of Oracle’s AI Approach
While most SaaS vendors are rapidly incorporating AI within their platforms, applications, and tools, Oracle has two major advantages. First, Oracle is the only enterprise vendor to offer a fully integrated technology stack, from hardware and infrastructure to database and applications, where AI enables them to innovate quickly and deliver new features every quarter.
Ownership of the full tech stack also enables them to embed AI within their core offering, instead of applying an add-on, seat-license model, or apply a consumption-based or outcome-based model that can add additional cost, uncertainty, or confusion in the market.
The challenge Oracle faces is convincing customers to fully activate its AI functionality to derive the most benefit and value from AI. Oracle says that many AI features are set up to be either opt-in or opt-out, to address the concerns of using AI within certain regulated jurisdictions or industries.
Oracle says that as subsequent product releases are announced, features that were opt-in in the past will eventually be required to be turned on, to ensure continuous innovation and that the platform works smoothly. The company’s challenges will be getting customers that are still using on-premises versions of their software to migrate to cloud versions, and then get them to adopt AI features and functions in a timely fashion. This will ensure Oracle can continue to generate the revenue required to support continued innovation while also reducing the amount of support for older versions of the product.
You can read the press release detailing the news at Oracle’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group 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 The Futurum Group as a whole.
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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.
