Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Oracle has introduced new AI-driven tools within its Fusion Cloud Sales and Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) platforms to help enterprises streamline administrative tasks, improve supply chain efficiency, and enhance customer engagement. These AI-powered tools utilize connected finance, supply chain, and operational data to automate workflows, optimize decision-making, and boost productivity across departments. Offered at no additional cost, this update highlights Oracle’s strategic focus on AI adoption across multiple enterprise functions.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Oracle’s new AI-driven features in Fusion Cloud Sales and SCM and their impact on enterprise efficiency.
- Key AI capabilities, including customer engagement, supply chain automation, and risk management.
- Oracle’s competitive positioning against Microsoft and Salesforce in AI adoption.
- Market implications and potential benefits for enterprise sales and supply chain teams.
The News: Oracle has launched new AI agents and generative AI features in both its Fusion Cloud Sales and Fusion Cloud SCM platforms to enhance business operations and decision-making. These AI-powered tools, now available to customers, leverage real-time finance, supply chain, and operational data to provide personalized, intelligent recommendations and automate routine tasks.
In Fusion Cloud Sales, AI capabilities automate key sales functions such as email generation, account activity summarization, and customer insights management, reducing administrative workloads and enabling teams to prioritize strategic customer engagement. In Fusion Cloud SCM, AI agents assist procurement teams in accelerating purchasing decisions, support manufacturing teams in ensuring compliance with safety and operational guidelines, and help suppliers manage production updates and sustainability reporting.
Oracle is offering these AI agents as standard features in both Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), reinforcing its effort to integrate AI-driven automation into core business applications.
Oracle Bets on AI-Driven Sales and Supply Chain Transformation
Analyst Take: Oracle’s latest AI upgrades in Fusion Cloud Sales and SCM reflect a growing industry trend toward AI-enhanced enterprise operations. By integrating AI agents directly into its platforms, Oracle helps businesses reduce manual tasks while unlocking deeper, data-driven insights. These AI-powered tools handle critical functions such as automating sales interactions, managing procurement processes, improving quality control, and ensuring supply chain compliance, thereby allowing organizations to focus on strategic growth rather than administrative burdens.
From a customer perspective, the current belief among 895 IT decision-makers is that generative AI will continue to be incorporated into applications and accessed via tools such as prompts. Of the respondents, 51% indicated they expect vendors such as Oracle to deliver AI through copilots, either primarily or in conjunction with other forms of AI. Meanwhile, 35% of respondents say that they expect vendors to deliver generative AI functionality by agents either primarily or in tandem with other delivery methods. Just 15% of respondents believe vendors will evenly split delivery of AI between copilots and AI agents.
Figure 1: Delivery of Gen AI Applications
For its part, Oracle is taking a multi-tiered approach to delivering AI, offering contextual insights, prompt-based interactions, and AI agents that are designed to function autonomously or semi-autonomously. This approach dovetails with the current customer view of how they expect to see AI delivered within enterprise applications.
Oracle’s AI Strategy: Integration vs. Modular AI Services
Oracle’s approach to AI differs from that of competitors such as Microsoft and Salesforce, which often offer AI features as add-on services requiring additional subscriptions or custom integrations. Instead, Oracle embeds AI directly into its applications, allowing businesses to leverage AI automation without requiring extensive system modifications. Steve Miranda, EVP of Oracle Applications Development, has gone on record as highlighting this integration as a natural evolution – similar to the transition from on-premises systems to cloud-based SaaS solutions.
Oracle owns the entire technology stack, from the compute that powers AI training and inference tasks to the end applications themselves. This is a key advantage, in that Oracle can leverage its own long-domain expertise in these functions and verticals to improve model performance. Oracle, which reiterated its view that AI should be incorporated as a core technology capability, remains one of the few vendors to eschew add-on, consumption, or outcome-based pricing, in favor of simply absorbing the cost of generative AI, which is directly the result of owning and managing the entire technology stack.
Additionally, the introduction of multilingual support for these offerings strengthens Oracle’s presence in emerging markets and enhances its value for multinational organizations looking for seamless, AI-powered customer engagement. Oracle also mentioned in a briefing that it will also look to leverage other types of third-party models, which may be optimized in terms of cost, performance, or functionality, reinforcing the company’s commitment to meeting the specific needs of industry use cases.
The market will determine whether businesses prefer Oracle’s built-in AI or Microsoft’s more modular approach. However, Oracle’s strategy offers instant efficiency improvements and deeper automation across systems, which is likely to strengthen long-term customer relationships and loyalty while simultaneously reducing costs and administrative burdens.
The Bigger Picture: AI Driving Business Efficiency
The integration of AI across multiple enterprise functions highlights the growing role of automation in reducing administrative burdens and improving operational decision-making. Oracle’s AI-driven enhancements in Fusion Cloud Sales and SCM align with a broader industry trend where businesses seek to improve process efficiency through embedded AI tools rather than deploying AI in isolated silos.
What remains to be seen is how well enterprises will adopt Oracle’s AI-driven approach compared to competitors offering modular AI solutions with more flexibility. Oracle’s built-in AI model may reduce complexity for some customers, but businesses that prefer custom AI deployments may still look to alternative solutions.
From an investor’s perspective, Oracle’s focus on AI signals opportunities for revenue growth and greater adoption of its platform. As more businesses prioritize AI integration, Oracle’s approach – embedding AI directly into core business functions – positions it as a strong contender in the evolving market for intelligent enterprise solutions.
What to Watch:
- Customer feedback and performance benchmarks will play a key role in validating Oracle’s AI-driven approach. Success stories and early adopters could provide strong proof points for future customers evaluating the platform.
- Oracle’s no-cost AI offering is a differentiator, but it must continue to demonstrate measurable ROI compared to competitors such as Microsoft and Salesforce, who provide AI as standalone services with flexible integration options.
- Expansion into global markets with the multilingual support feature will be crucial to Oracle’s success. The company must address cultural and regional nuances to ensure effective AI-driven customer interactions across diverse geographies.
- AI-powered supply chain automation could see increased interest as companies navigate continued supply chain disruptions, making Oracle’s SCM enhancements particularly relevant.
- The regulatory and compliance landscape for AI-driven enterprise applications is evolving, and Oracle will need to ensure its AI solutions meet global data security and compliance standards.
See the complete press release on Oracle’s AI enhancements in Fusion Cloud Sales and Supply Chain Management on the Oracle 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.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Oracle Q2 FY2025 Results Focus on AI, Healthcare, and Cloud Revenue
Oracle Unveils Next-Generation EHR to Redefine Healthcare Delivery
Oracle Exadata X11M: The Enterprise AI Architecture
Author Information
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.
