Oracle adds agentic AI to Fusion Cloud CX

Aiming to deliver end-to-end service automation, Oracle on Wednesday unveiled new agentic AI capabilities for Oracle Fusion Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion Field Service. Oracle said the new AI-driven workflows will help service teams increase service efficiency, reduce time-to-resolution, and improve customer experience.

“We’re striving at Oracle for total end-to-end service automation, not enhancements, not spot efficiency gains in service,” Jeff Wartgow, vice president of Oracle Service, told CIO.com. “We believe you can start to automate the whole thing.”

Wartgow noted that service teams are now expected to deliver consistent, on-demand, around-the clock customer care. Wages for service agents and technicians are up 30%, he said, but companies are still struggling to staff their call centers.

“People still don’t want the job,” he said. “You can’t throw money at this problem anymore.”

Oracle is taking a multi-phase approach to delivering end-to-end automation for service. The first phase was leveraging generative AI and conversational AI to power chatbots and help them retrieve information from the knowledge base. The second phase is enhancing the ability of automated agents to assist the work of human service agents, streamlining processes and reducing friction — gathering and summarizing information before handing it off to a human agent, for example. Phase three, Wartgow said, is where things start to get “uniquely Oracle.”

“When you’re looking at automating the complete service process, it’s more than just looking at the customer engagement and having thousands of agents around customer engagement,” he said. “You are going to have to bust out of CRM. You’re going to have to include supply chain, finance, all these other back-end processes. This is where Oracle becomes Oracle. Since we have that complete suite, we’re looking at improving the full process, automating everything.”

Oracle Service and Oracle Field Service fall under the umbrella of Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), a connected suite of applications that support organizations in creating, managing, and serving customer relationships. The new capabilities announced Wednesday include:

• Automated service agent. This capability is intended to help service teams more quickly understand customer service requests and reduce time-to-resolution. The agent can review service-related tasks based on relevant context and customer history to deliver an actionable plan with recommended next steps for service reps.
• Call and chat summarization. This capability uses gen AI to transcribe customer conversations and produce an accurate summary that can be shared with other service team members or supervisors.
• Field service knowledge search augmentation. This capability for Oracle Field Service uses LLMs and semantic search capabilities to provide field service agents guidance using knowledge-based articles and other resources. Wartgow noted that many field technicians today are independent contractors that might work for multiple companies — the technician might be fixing a copy machine one day and reading a gas meter the next. That makes the provision of detailed guidance essential.

“The mission of our service organization is we believe automated processes are going to solve all the customer problems,” Wartgow said. “They’re going to build the trust. It’ll solve the complex problems, not just the low-hanging fruit like password reset. It’ll do it all. There will still be a service organization, but that service organization is going to change.”

The new service organization, Wartgow said, will be focused on designing flows, curating knowledge processes, and jumping in when automation fails.

Wartgow noted that the new agentic capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud CX are now standard features in the software, available at no additional cost.

“If you buy a license to Oracle Fusion Service and you want to start activating these types of features, which is included in your license,” he said. “There are still the calories you burn on setting it up and various things like that, but that’s all your own IT staff or your partner. There’s going to be a lot of tuning you’re going to want to do to make it do what you want, but there’s no calling out to ChatGPT. We’re not doing any of these transactional things. We’re not trying to monetize it that way.”