eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
SAN FRANCISCO–Like a lot of IT product and service providers, Oracle is all in for the idea of making artificial intelligence available wherever possible.
Unlike a lot of IT product and service providers, the world’s largest and most successful database provider actually has the deep pockets and wherewithal to pull this off. Only a handful of others—Google, Facebook, IBM, Dell EMC, Intel, Samsung, Apple and HPE come to mind—also can afford to embed such a futuristic feature in far-flung places.
With this in mind, Oracle on Oct. 2 at its annual OpenWorld conference at Moscone Center revealed new artificial intelligence-based apps for a phalanx of business applications. The new Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps are built into the existing Oracle Cloud Applications in order to provide useful AI-based modern business applications.
“The AI Oracle is embedding not only goes across finance, HR, recruiting, supply chains, commerce and marketing applications but also for salespeople and service apps—chatbots for automated answers, for example. So a broad range of capabilities will be demonstrated (at OpenWorld),” Jack Berkowitz, Oracle Vice-President of Products and Data Science for Adaptive Intelligence, told eWEEK.
“We’ll also be showing how to actively interpret business data to set the context for the decisions that we’re recommending for people.”
‘Connected Intelligence’ Will become a Key Topic
Oracle also will be talking about the notion of “connected intelligence” with the advent of all this new IT, Berkowitz said.
“So this is not just a set of pinpoint capabilities that you as a salesperson might interact with, but it’s a coordinated outcome across either the touchpoints of a consumer or of a business, or for the employees,” Berkowitz said.
The new Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps are available within Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud, Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud, and the new Oracle Customer Experience Cloud. Here is more detail on their capabilities:
- For finance and procurement: New AI-powered capabilities help streamline financial processes and technology requirements, reduce costs, modernize operations, and enhance collaboration. By analyzing historical trends and business risk data, finance and procurement professionals can derive suggested discount rates on invoices, optimize cash flow, and create the optimal balance between buyers and suppliers. They are able to enrich supplier profiles and provide optimized payment terms in real time.
- For human resources: AI helps improve talent management, provide complete workforce insights, and increase operational efficiency. By applying natural language search and deep learning technologies to resumes and job postings, HR professionals are able to find and source the best candidates. They also can determine the likelihood of success and longevity by using insights from previous recruitment engagements and current job indicators, such as sales achievement or performance ratings.
- For supply chain: AIs enable enterprises to rethink traditional supply chain systems to make them dynamic, efficient, intelligent, and autonomous. The capabilities in Oracle’s Supply Chain IoT applications enable supply chain professionals to manage and use insights from big data sources, such as connected equipment. The applications use predictive analytics and machine learning techniques to detect and analyze key signals in device data, and then to act on these insights through their associated business functions and connected processes. This means predicting and preventing machine failure before it happens, auto-discovering optimal ways to segment planning data, and auto-tuning planning engines.
- For manufacturing: New AI-powered capabilities enable enterprises to meet production goals by enhancing the management of discrete and process manufacturing operations. The new capabilities drive factory and shop floor improvements by demonstrating how incident detection, root cause analysis, and smart resolution are performed within minutes in a connected factory.
- For customer service: AI can empower customer service professionals to streamline processes and enhance the customer experience by utilizing consumer data and relevant news alerts.
- For marketing: Empower marketers with the insights needed to better understand their target audiences and optimize offers by utilizing consumer and business data.
- For sales: New AI-powered capabilities utilize business data to empower sales professionals with accurate next-step recommendations to close deals and optimize sales offers. The new capabilities also prompt themwith smart call points by pulling data from live news and event feeds to surface and prioritize key insights. These powerful insights empower sales teams with up-to-the-minute information about accounts so they are always prepared before making contact.
Oracle claims that its Data Cloud, upon which the new AI runs, is the largest third-party data marketplace in the world, with a collection of more than 5 billion global consumer and business IDs and more than 7.5 trillion data points collected monthly. By applying advanced data science and machine learning to Oracle’s web-scale data and an organization’s own data, the new Adaptive Intelligent Apps can react, learn, and adapt in real time based on historical and dynamic customer data, Berkowitz said.
The new AI capabilities will be rolling out in the Oracle Cloud starting Oct. 2 and continuing for the next several months. This will be an ongoing initiative. For more information, go here.