ISG Software Research’s expertise examines the software provider landscape through two lenses: business applications (including office of finance, human capital management (HCM) and customer experience) and IT and technology (including digital business, digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics and data). Most software providers fall into one of these two high-level expertise areas. One of the reasons that agentic AI is so potentially impactful on the software sector is that it has the potential to revolutionize all these areas of focus. As such, software providers that address both business applications and IT and technology, such as Oracle, have reason to believe that they are in an advantageous position that will enable them to both deliver and derive significant benefits from agentic AI.
Founded in 1977, Oracle was a dominant force in the early years of database management systems before expanding its focus through a combination of research and development and acquisitions to address applications and infrastructure,
The scope of Oracle’s ambitions in relation to agentic AI is illustrated by recent analyst perspectives written by my colleagues from across the ISG Software Research team. David Menninger discussed the company’s intention to address the underlying data platform requirements for AI, while Matthew Brown, Stephen Hurrell and Robert Kugel discussed Oracle’s agentic AI plans in relation to HCM, business applications and finance, respectively. Each of the latter three perspectives touched on Oracle AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, but it is worth taking a closer look at the platform for developing and managing AI agents, as well as placing it in the context of the company’s overall data and AI strategy.
Oracle AI Agent Studio was launched at Oracle Cloud World London in March and is designed to enable users to create, deploy and manage AI agents, as well as modify the more than 50 agents already delivered within Oracle Fusion Applications. AI Agent Studio provides an environment for customizing those Oracle-built agents, with the ability for users and partners to add documents, tools, prompts or APIs relevant to their individual industry or business requirements, as well as prebuilt templates for users to create their own agents. Customers and partners can take advantage of multiple large language models (LLMs), including those pre-approved by Oracle and provided by the likes of Cohere and Meta, as well as industry-specific LLMs. Oracle AI Agent Studio also provides capabilities for orchestrating teams of multiple agents to address more complex business processes, including the ability to add checkpoints and approvals to address multi-step processes.
Beyond Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle also recently made a series of announcements strengthening its relationship with NVIDIA to enhance the development and operationalization of AI applications, including integration between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
Oracle’s software is so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible that agentic applications will not interact with Oracle data, AI or application software. Currently Oracle offers two separate approaches to agentic AI, with OCI AI Agent Platform providing capabilities for building, deploying and managing AI agents generally, and Oracle AI Agent Studio providing an environment for extending and developing agents for customers invested in Oracle Fusion Applications. While there may be two different end user camps for these offerings, there is also the potential for closer integration. Either way, I recommend that enterprises assessing requirements for agentic AI include Oracle in their evaluations.
Regards,
Matt Aslett