Oracle today announced that it is rolling out a range of generative AI tools across both front and back office applications in its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. In addition to new solutions for ERP, supply chain management and HR, it announced specific enhancements to its customer experience capabilities.
The CX announcements included new support for marketing, sales and service. Katrina Gosek, VP of Oracle CX product strategy and marketing gave us some background on the news.
Back to the customer
“A lot of our customers are incredibly complex, large, global organizations who sell hundreds of thousand of products to millions of customers, ” said Gosek. “The one thing they’re all rallying around is the idea that marketing and sales activities, although not meaningless, are hard to get ROI from. Building campaigns and having campaigns link to specific field opportunities and linking to revenue — it seems like in a lot of larger organizations, marketing has become more about the branding and the messaging rather than serving customers. I think we’re seeing a shift back to a laser focus on customers.”
That shift implies a need to give marketing (and sales and service) tools that help them communicate better with customers, put the right products forward, position the right offers and make the right recommendations. “Now we’re focusing on the content piece of that. We’re assisting with the authoring of content and how marketers position that content to customers.”
Three new genAI capabilities
Oracle had news today for its customers’ marketing, sales and service teams.
Marketing: Assisted authoring and recommendations
The aim is to improve marketing productivity by generating subject line recommendations, email and landing page copy, and design ideas. With the assets being generated and developed within Oracle Marketing Cloud, the outcomes should be faster time-to-market with campaigns and improved customer engagement.
Sales: Assisted content authoring
GenAI will create customer success stories from closed-won deals, as well as other relevant content for sales reps within Oracle Sales Cloud.
Service: Webchat summaries
GenAI will support the creation of concise, clear summaries of customer chat sessions based on the raw transcripts within Oracle Service Cloud. This should reduce manual tasks for service agents, help track problematic issues and improve CX for both customers and employees.
Oracle joins the genAI party
It would be fair to say that Oracle was slower than its most obvious competitors to loudly tout the generative AI revolution (it has never, for example, given its AI a cute name). Part of the reason is that AI had long been a familiar part of its product strategy.
“We think of AI as something core to our entire, vertically-integrated architecture,” Gosek agreed. “Everything from the bare metal, up through the database, through the services, all the way up to the application level is fully integrated and geared for data collection and optimization — all of which we can leverage for generative AI capabilities.”
Gosek observed that these capabilities aren’t just focused on the dataset for, say, marketing or sales. “You’re looking at the entire enterprise dataset. We’ve had all these AI capabilities, but the new frontier is generative AI. There are some immense advantages that Oracle’s vertically integrated approach brings, allowing us to run specialized workloads and automation across the enterprise.”
Gosek indentified three key advantages to Oracle’s approach:
- First, data is all in one place (“That’s huge, it’s not jumping from cloud to cloud”).
- Second, AI-powered deep learning is continuously engaged with the data as it comes in.
- Third, AI tools, chatbots and other services are all working from the same dataset, allowing genAI capabilities to be offered natively within Oracle applications.
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