Oracle CloudWorld Tour: new GenAI capabilities and Microsoft partnership

the stage at Oracle CloudWorld Tour conference in London

Key Takeaways

Oracle has introduced new generative AI capabilities in its Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, enhancing decision-making and improving employee and customer experiences across various business functions.

The generative AI features respect customer data privacy and security, ensuring that no customer data is shared with external providers and that role-based security is integrated into workflows.

Oracle and Microsoft are expanding their partnership to increase the availability of Oracle Database@Azure, providing customers with more regions globally and facilitating easier migration of workloads to the cloud.

Announced at the Oracle CloudWorld Tour conference in London, Oracle has added new generative AI capabilities within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite to help organizations improve decision-making and enhance the employee and customer experience. 

The latest AI additions include new GenAI capabilities embedded in existing business workflows across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing and service, as well as an expansion of the Oracle Guided Journeys’ extensibility framework. This aims to allow customers and partners to incorporate more GenAI capabilities to support their industry and individual competitive needs. 

During the opening keynote, Steve Miranda, EVP of applications development at Oracle, said: “When I was given the same keynote session here last year, I talked a little bit about AI and today, brand-new technology innovations have fundamentally changed the way our applications work, the way technology works and the way most of us do our jobs. 

“And frankly, they’re still at the very inception. So the key message here is that combining our investment years ago and the movement of customers to the cloud has enabled our customers to react quickly to change.” 

Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and leveraging its leading AI services, Oracle is said to support over 50 GenAI use cases embedded within Oracle Fusion Applications and designed to respect customers’ enterprise data, privacy and security. 

This means that when using OCI Generative AI Service, no customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers. In addition, individual customers are the only entities allowed to use custom models trained on their data. 

To further protect sensitive information, role-based security is embedded directly into Oracle Fusion Applications workflows that only recommend content that end users are entitled to view. 

Newly embedded generative AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP include insight narratives, management reporting narratives, predictive forecast explanations, project program status summary generation and project plan and proposal generation – designed to help finance professionals with variances and trends impacting the business, help program managers generate executive summaries and help project managers generate tailored project plans, among other uses.

Additions to Oracle Fusion SCM include new item description generation, supplier recommendations and negotiation summaries to help procurement professionals generate customized written descriptions and content based on their specific needs.

The new additions come several days after Oracle announced its fiscal 2024 Q3 results, demonstrating a strong performance, mainly driven by the company reinforcing its AI offering to customers.

For the quarter ending February 29, Oracle reported a seven percent year-on-year revenue increase – to $13.28bn – beating Wall Street’s estimates.

Microsoft and Oracle expand partnership in response to global demand for Oracle Database@Azure

Microsoft and Oracle also announced the expansion of their collaboration to meet growing customer demand for Oracle Database@Azure by adding more regions in Europe, which brings the total planned multicloud availability footprint to 15 regions globally.

To meet the growing customer demand this year, the service will now run in the cloud regions: France Central, Central India, Italy North, Australia East, Brazil South, Canada Central, Japan East, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, United Kingdom South, Central United States, South Central United States and United Arab Emirates North.

“Bringing Oracle Database@Azure to Europe will enable customers in the region to locally employ Oracle database services running on OCI hardware deployed in Azure datacenters for the first time,” said Erin Chapple, CVP Azure Infrastructure product and design at Microsoft.

“The expansion of our collaboration with Oracle demonstrates our mutual commitment to help customers streamline the migration of workloads to the cloud so they can combine the best of Oracle with the breadth of Microsoft cloud services, like Azure AI, to empower business innovation.”