Oracle has unveiled a new suite of AI agents integrated into its Fusion cloud business applications, aimed at automating comprehensive tasks across multiple business domains such as finance, HR, supply chain management, quality control, sales, and customer service. As businesses intensify their AI investment to gain productivity, Oracle’s initiative marks a significant enhancement in how AI agents can manage complete tasks beyond simple question-and-answer setups.

These AI agents, leveraging generative AI models, are adept at carrying out multi-step processes that stretch across different software tools, adapt to new scenarios, and handle natural-language prompts. This flexibility allows the agents to perform more efficiently and with fewer errors compared to more rigid systems.

Oracle’s Executive Vice President, Steve Miranda, emphasized the impact of these agents during his address at the CloudWorld conference: “It blows away anything we’ve ever been able to deliver before,” Miranda said. “It’s a tremendous change in terms of input and output from our applications across the board.”

One practical application demonstrated includes an AI document agent assisting a sales executive by capturing a photo of a vendor’s price quote, extracting and translating relevant information, and creating a purchase order—subsequently processing the vendor’s invoice for payment review.

These AI agents integrate Oracle’s large language models with a technique known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which utilizes information from a company’s own documents to provide context for the AI’s responses. Miranda Nash, Oracle Group Vice President for Applications Development and Strategy, highlighted the challenge of achieving consistent results from these models, stating, “It’s not easy to get consistent, reliable results out of these LLMs,” emphasizing the significance of this technology in enhancing business operations.

This development comes as companies continue to invest heavily in AI, with expectations of significant productivity boosts. According to a survey by Boston Consulting Group, businesses expect a 30% increase in AI spending in 2024, though the anticipated return on these investments remains moderate among firms with varying levels of AI maturity.

Oracle plans to roll out these AI agents within the next 12 months, incorporating them into the Fusion cloud applications at no additional cost, promising a seamless upgrade in functionality and efficiency for its users.

Oracle operates from Reading, London, Bristol and Solihull in the UK.