Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans recently sat down with Chris Leone, Executive Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, to discuss Oracle’s latest Fusion Applications innovations, including new agentic AI capabilities, no-code and pro-code development tools, and how Oracle is helping customers automate business processes and deliver better outcomes.
Evans kicked off the discussion by asking Leone to give an overview of what Oracle is doing with its Fusion Agentic Applications and the unique value it’s bringing to customers. “We really saw customers asking for us to put a full system together to deliver value around a particular business process that they wanted to optimize,” explained Leone.
In response, Oracle created Fusion Agentic Applications, fully integrated business applications that are outcome driven, powered by teams of specialized agents, and bring together the user experience, AI-driven insights and actions, and business processes in one system. Leone gave an example: “One of our agentic applications is Sourcing Command Center,” he said.
“The defined objective that a customer can give the Sourcing Command Center is, ‘Look, I want to reduce my supplier spend by 10% or 15%, and I want to reduce lead times for getting inventory by five or 10%.’ The agentic application identifies inventory shortages, creates RFQs, kicks off auctions, monitors those auctions, and awards winners.”
Even better, explained Leone, is something Oracle calls the “autonomy dial.” With agentic applications, organizations can progressively automate more actions and executions, reducing the need for users to manually approve or trigger each step.
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The Next Step: Customizing Oracle’s Agentic AI
Evans then asked about Oracle’s new AI-native builder experience for Oracle AI Agent Studio and how it will help customers complement the tools Oracle is providing.
“We’ve delivered over 22 agentic applications. We have a lot more coming,” said Leone. “We’re building these processes to solve specific problems, but customers will design them around their industry, around their best practices, maybe by geography.
“They’ll start to define the surface area of these processes based on the problems they’re solving, for whatever persona they’re solving them for. That’s why the builder experience is so important.”
He explained that customers can take the agentic application Oracle delivers and tailor it for their industry or build one from scratch. Leone said that Oracle looked at different kinds of low-code, no-code, and pro-code development tools and made the decision to create an experience — Agentic Applications Builder — that uses natural language to create an agentic application in the same way other companies have used the process to create traditional applications.
For more advanced users, Oracle also offers a pro-code experience with the new AI Studio Skills that lets developers use IDEs such as VS Code, along with a CLI, to build, test, and deploy end-to-end agentic applications while working in their preferred development environment.
“That just seems to be something that’s so vital now,” said Evans in response, recognizing that while companies want these capabilities to be available to everybody so they can contribute more to what their organization wants to deliver, they also need more advanced options.
“I like the way you’ve got one [experience] for people that don’t have that technology expertise, and, on the other hand, the ones with the rich expertise have something that’s meaty enough to meet their needs as well,” continued Evans.
So, how can these new AI-builder experiences help Oracle customers keep up with the rapid pace of change? “When you’re working outside of a system of record, you’re able to get a really strong recommendation, but you’re not able to actually execute the work,” said Leone. “We operate in the system of record, so we can not only make the recommendation, we can actually execute the work.
“That’s real productivity savings, and that’s why the marriage of agents and applications is such a strong one.”
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