After nearly a decade of developing AI applications for different business processes, Oracle is homing in on a slew of digital agents that could transform Core ERP functions by pushing the limits of enterprise collaboration.
At a recent briefing, Oracle executives heralded the arrival of hundreds of agents for financial management, supply chain planning, HR administration and customer experience, a sharp increase from its first introduction of predictive AI in 2017.
Steve Miranda, executive vice president of Oracle applications development, said the future of business software and Cloud services could depend on one’s ability to harness the new power of enterprise collaboration through these skills-based agents benefiting from computing on steroids.
Miranda added that another force at work is to let enterprise users run the newly introduced AI Agent Studio – freely available to its Fusion customers – and turn automation into a DIY exercise unleashing creativity, growth and productivity all at once.
| Date | Oracle’s AI Innovation |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Predictive AI for Fusion Applications |
| 2018 | Oracle Digital Agents |
| 2021 | Oracle AI Services |
| 2023 | GenAI for Fusion Apps |
| 2024 | Task-Based AI Agents |
| 2025 | Customized AI for enterprise collaboration |
Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Industries, cites early adoptions of such digital agents have resulted in substantial reduction in documentation time in clinical settings helping reduce physician burnout, hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenues attributable to new guest demand among hotel chains, and sizable customer savings on their energy usage and bills and better customer engagement overall for the utility vertical that Oracle serves.
Rondy Ng, executive vice president of Oracle applications development, said the biggest impact from such digital agents will be felt in Core ERP finance function within each and every company now capable of leveraging AI for paperless and touchless handling of copious amounts of documents from purchase orders to bank statements.
Ng said role-trained agents will come in handy to help predict and boost cash flow, while extending one’s reach through a turnkey trading partner network with just a few clicks. For intelligent B2B payments, Ng added that agents will be able to help companies take advantage of discounts and working capital management automatically. Other use cases include ledger and reconciliation agents for faster close with real-time monitoring and continuous automated reconciliation.
Catherine You, group vice president of applications development at Oracle, said what comes next will streamline a full spectrum of business services that previously would have been costly and time-consuming for its current installed base of over 50,000 SaaS ERP customers.
During the two-day Redwood Shores briefing, Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of NetSuite, said the performance of digital agents will radically improve by making the best use of natural language processing and an elegant and intuitive interface that enables easy input of task-specific questions and returns answers with precision.
The near-term impact is a totally new user experience that will become available to all NetSuite customers in 2026 as shown in a brief demo from Goldberg. He promised that the reimagined delivery of ERP services made possible by the AI breakthrough could amount to the most important change to its ERP offerings since the inception of NetSuite in 1998.
One of the key differentiators of Oracle’s Core ERP transformation may happen before these digital agents can effect change. Instead, the real value may lie in the use of AI for enhanced support and proactive service delivery that ensures smooth ERP go-lives, said Enda Hu, group vice president of applications service excellence at Oracle. Any successful implementation of cloud products now mitigates the capex risks for the end users, but it also increases their dependency on vendors and third-party providers at a time when companies are faced with steep support costs.
That is consistent with the customer sentiments being captured in our Buyer Insight Technographic Database. The top two priorities for IT executives over the next 12 to 24 months are leveraging AI enhancements (63%), and reducing operating and support costs (54%), according to an Apps Run The World survey of 102 IT executives conducted in April 2025.
More than half of the respondents, including 23 chief information officers and IT Heads from some of the biggest organizations such as Grupo Bimbo, Salesforce, and Wells Fargo Bank in nine countries, also cite that support costs (56%) represent the No. 1 challenge that threatens the overall success of technology investments.
Hu added that the use of AI for service delivery has helped Oracle drive a 32% reduction in time to resolution and a 24% decrease in service requests from customers, while raising customer satisfaction by 15%.
In other words, Oracle’s Core ERP transformation may well be able to kill two birds with one stone, lowering support costs while helping companies optimize the use of AI.
