Oracle has announced 29 new AI agents for its Fusion Cloud Applications, specifically focused on supply chain management and customer experience. Of these, 13 AI agents have been developed for supply chain use cases, while 16 are dedicated to customer experience (CX).
Instead of detailing every single agent, I’ll highlight some standout examples and explain the areas they address, before discussing the debate between deploying prebuilt agents or opting to develop your own.
Increased Efficiency and Resilience in the Supply Chain
The new AI agents in Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) are designed to help supply chain specialists respond more quickly, reduce risk, and improve operations across planning, procurement, manufacturing, maintenance, and logistics.
These new agents, and those designed for CX use cases, come prebuilt with integrated security features, are embedded within business process workflows, and, importantly, are natively available within Oracle Fusion Applications at no extra cost.
The new agents cover, amongst other areas, planning, product lifecycle management, and procurement. For example, the Planning Cycle Agent automates task coordination to improve the efficiency of planning cycles. While Oracle’s Autonomous Sourcing Agent facilitates competitive bidding for purchases by actively preparing sourcing events, inviting suppliers, and even sending out notifications.
Regarding maintenance, manufacturing, and inventory management, the Inventory Tasking Agent helps to reduce delays and improve warehouse productivity by finding open work, evaluating operator skills, their availability, and zones, and assigning tasks automatically. The new Inventory Aging Advisor Agent focuses on reducing the carrying costs associated with slow-moving inventory.
Oracle has also launched specialized agents for logistics, order management, and service. Two of the most interesting offerings include the Task Management Assistant, which helps logistics teams identify and prioritize at-risk orders to improve the reliability of shipments, and the Purchase Order to Sales Order Converter Agent. This agent extracts data from PDF purchase orders and uses it to perform various tasks, such as creating and submitting sales orders and summarizing exceptions.
Supercharging Sales and Service Outcomes
Oracle has also announced role-based AI agents within Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), embedded across marketing, sales, and service processes.
“Organizations are transforming slow, reactive sales, marketing, and service processes into proactive and intelligent workflows that deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale and drive revenue growth,” said Chris Leone, Executive Vice President of Applications Development, Oracle.
“The new AI agents in Oracle Fusion Applications help organizations grow customer relationships and lifetime value by delivering customer experiences that are driven by unified data from across multiple business processes.”
In marketing, the Program Orchestration Agent assists marketing executives in integrating campaign narratives and strategies into marketing materials more effectively. The Customer Insights Agent provides users with a deeper understanding of customers through account data analysis. For copywriting tasks, the new Copywriting Agent automates content creation by drafting copy for emails, landing pages, web assets, and more.
For sales, the new Quote Generation Agent helps sellers create quotes more quickly, while the Renewal Agent minimizes manual effort by monitoring and interpreting contracts, providing alerts and recommendations.
New service agents relieve field technicians of some of their workload while also assisting customers. For instance, the Start-of-Day Agent provides personalized summaries of each technician’s daily assignments, while the Customer Self-Service Agent helps customers find answers to their service inquiries.
Final Thoughts
There is an emerging debate: Is it better to use an out-of-the-box agent or to create your own? Developing your own agent can be beneficial, particularly in highly specialized domains where you need precise control over the agent’s behavior and the data it utilizes, or if there is a bottleneck during the integration phase.
To clarify, Oracle does offer custom agent development and management through its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications. However, I want to outline the merits of using prebuilt agents.
First, there are time considerations. While low-code development platforms make it easy to create new agents, users still need to spend time training and testing them. Pre-built agents eliminate this development time, as they are ready to use right out of the box. Purpose-built agents have been tested at scale, making them incredibly reliable and cost-effective. This is especially true in the case of Oracle, which offers its new agents as part of the Oracle Fusion Applications offering, making them not only reliable but also very cost-efficient.
Prebuilt agents are continuously updated, not only to deliver better performance but also to maintain and improve security. In many cases, depending on the use case, they come with built-in compliance. As we can see with these dedicated agents from Oracle, prebuilt agents often have specialized use cases for specific industries and outcomes integrated. However, perhaps the most important element is speed and accessibility. Prebuilt agents can be adopted quickly and require minimal AI development experience to deploy.
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