Oracle plants agentic AI flag in business process automation

Oracle has put forward its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications as a platform for orchestrating artificial intelligence (AI) agents and teams of agents. The supplier announced the development at its OracleCloud World Tour London event at the end of last week.

Steve Miranda, executive vice-president of Oracle Applications Development, told Computer Weekly ahead of the event that AI Agent Studio is part of an ongoing, quarter-by-quarter unfolding of the supplier’s particular approach to artificial intelligence for business process improvement.

Other suppliers will have their narratives, based on their own capacities. Salesforce is wagering on Agentforce, based, it said, on combining data, applications and virtual agents, with a sales automation and customer experience orientation, minimising “do it yourself” AI.

Oracle’s story is that its cloud Fusion Application makes up a suite that covers all business applications, from enterprise resource planning (ERP), through supply chain management and HCM to customer experience. Its AI use cases and agents can now, it said, be orchestrated to go across all of those business disciplines, and they all rest on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure.

“In 2023, we introduced large language model-based use cases – 50 initially, now grown to around 100,” said Miranda. “Any place where text could be embedded, essentially – report summarisations, job descriptions and so on.

“Then we introduced 50 AI agents embedded in the applications, automating tactical steps within a process, like a benefits agent, a supply chain optimiser in shipping, an accounts payable agent, and others,” he said.

“This next step is Agent Studio. This allows you to take those agents and orchestrate them as teams – for example, in a recruiting process, interviewing candidates, doing follow-ups and making offers. Companies may want to modify a prebuilt agent, its changing logic, removing a step, maybe going to a third party, to perform a background check. That ability to extend, all built on the OCI infrastructure, is unique to us. ”

Agent extensibility is said to enable users to modify and extend the pre-packaged Oracle Fusion Applications AI agents by adding documents, tools, prompts or application programming interfaces to address their specific industry and business needs.

The studio offers, it is said, a choice of large language models (LLMs). Users can select from LLMs specifically optimised for Oracle Fusion Applications, such as Llama and Cohere, or plug in other external industry-specific LLMs for specialised use cases.

Miranda said the Oracle partner network is showing a remarkable degree of enthusiasm for the supplier’s latest AI move.

In the statement the supplier issued for Agent Studio, Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture, said: “AI-powered innovation is enabling our clients to reinvent processes and transform the way they work, driving a new performance frontier.

“According to our recent research, agentic architectures featuring AI agents will enter the mainstream in 2025, with three times as many organisations planning to invest in these capabilities compared to 2024. As we continue to work with Oracle to help clients across industries accelerate the adoption of AI, the new Oracle AI Agent Studio will allow us to orchestrate more powerful agents from Oracle, with Accenture’s AI Refinery platform, to drive new levels of productivity and growth. ”

Mauro Schiavon, global chief commercial officer at Oracle Business and principal at Deloitte Consulting, said: “With the rapid rise of AI agents, organisations are facing an ongoing challenge of how to manage and measure the impact of these digital workers. “As leaders look to demonstrate the ROI of their AI investments, platforms like Oracle’s new AI Agent Studio can enable customisation that addresses unique business needs. ”

Dan Priest, US chief AI officer at PWC, added: “Agents can help unlock the value of AI for the enterprise. We’re entering a period of agentic organisations that will fundamentally change how we work across functions and industries.

Oracle also cited some analyst support for its approach.

Holger Mueller, vice-president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said: “The new Oracle AI Agent Studio is an impressive next step for Oracle’s AI strategy. To truly optimise the impact of AI agents, organisations need to be able to customise the way they work to fit their unique business needs.

“The evolution of AI across the enterprise is moving at a rapid pace, and by enabling agents to be created, extended, deployed and managed across the entire enterprise, Oracle will help its customers accelerate adoption and automation. ”

Mickey North Rizza, group vice-president at IDC, added: “Oracle has AI-enabled their enterprise applications over the last few years with AI assistants, advisors and agents.

“The future of work is upon us, and Oracle is helping its customers and partners quickly and easily take advantage of agents in a way that will drive meaningful business value. To have this kind of functionality at no extra cost is a huge win for Oracle customers. ”

Miranda said, in the interview ahead of the London conference, that Oracle is taking a “step-by-step approach”, and that the speed of AI development and adoption is very fast, less like “RPA 2. 0 than RPA 10. 0. It is a step function as large as any we have had in the application space ever.

“The whole reason for us to build applications is to help our customers to automate their business practice,” he said. “AI agents and Studio will be another step function in terms of process automation. None of our customers are in business to do their accounting or orchestrate their email marketing, they want to make their products better and to sell their product better, and this is a step function in automation to help them focus on what they do best. ”

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366621159/Oracle-plants-agentic-AI-flag-in-business-process-automation

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