LAS VEGAS -- Oracle advanced the AI football a few more yards downfield with new agentic AI applications, user-friendly front ends and an AI tool meant to automate ERP implementation itself.
The announcements came at the Oracle AI World annual conference co-located this year with the SuiteWorld conference for users of Oracle NetSuite midmarket SaaS ERP.
The similarity between Oracle and NetSuite's AI pitches was hard to miss -- not because Oracle will have owned NetSuite for 10 years as of Nov. 7, but because ERP vendors appear to be following the same script in their AI strategies.
"If you're trying to find the real differentiation, good luck, because I keep looking for it too, and they all are singing from the same hymnal," said Brian Sommer, analyst and president of TechVentive. "It's so bad, I actually wrote a piece called the new SaaS: sameness as a service."
Déjà vu all over again
In a repeat of a pattern familiar from recent SAP and Infor conferences, Oracle didn't bombard attendees with new product announcements like in previous years. Instead, the company mostly touted the availability of recently introduced products, especially its Fusion Claw agentic AI runtime platform, and applications and showcased early adopters of its Fusion AI products.
Nevertheless, Oracle had a few notable announcements, including the following:
- Fusion Companion, an "intelligent layer" for users of popular tools such as ChatGPT that translates business objectives and chooses the applications, transactions, agents, workflows and other steps needed to achieve outcomes.
- Fusion Agentic Home, a similar UX for people working in Oracle Fusion Applications.
- Fusion Setup and Configuration Registry, software that translates Oracle documentation so AI agents can learn from it and take over those time-consuming steps in ERP implementation.
- Fusion Claw applications for supply chain and customer experience management.
The emphasis on customer cases and dialing back of product rollouts is perhaps a tacit admission by ERP vendors that they're getting too far ahead of customers.
"Most of our existing customers are still deploying the agents that we wrote six, nine months ago," said Rondy Ng, Oracle's executive vice president of applications development, in an interview. "It's not that we have a huge number of existing customers yet. Most of the customers are at least six months behind."
Ng said he expects the most popular AI apps to initially be ones that involve less change management and better time to value.
"Those that require customers to put a lot of standard operational procedures, policies and control around the AI will come after they have built up enough confidence in the solution," Ng said.
Jon Reed, analyst and co-founder of Diginomica, said Oracle is staking its application future on an aggressive, two-pronged strategy that gives customers flexibility in how they use AI.
One involves fully or largely autonomous agents that work continuously in the background to execute transactions within the ERP system. The other is what Oracle calls "research mode," where humans supervise agents.
"The challenge, of course, is that the typical customer isn't ready for that yet. They're not in that mindset," Reed said. "So, Oracle is kind of saying, 'We've got your future covered.'"
Now, customers are asking what's in it for them.
"I believe that's why the keynote was very much about talking with customers about brass tacks problems," Reed said. "I give them some credit for realizing that their customers aren't quite there yet."
Playbook of common prayer
Major ERP vendors, including SAP, Infor, Oracle and NetSuite, have spent the year following the same strategy, albeit with varying degrees of completeness:
- An AI-driven UX layer that insulates users from the underlying ERP.
- A runtime environment that handles governance and security.
- Teams of agents that can take over common workflows like invoice matching and purchasing.
- Industry-specific agentic apps.
- Using AI to automate ERP implementation.
To wit, NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg used his SuiteWorld keynote to announce the availability of NetSuite Next, the vendor's new ERP platform introduced at last year's SuiteWorld, and to show new AI workspaces, industry-specific agents, an agent-building studio and access to new data sources. These are all strong echoes of ERP competitors' product lineups from this year.
Are vendors making a big deal out of small steps?
Sommer, who sometimes plays the spoiler at these conferences, said the AI automation examples of ERP vendors are, in fact, mostly incremental and not as transformative as they make them out to be.
"You don't get to count all the ROI all over again when you implement a new generation of technology," he said. "The incremental savings by introducing these new AI apps are minuscule compared to where the real money was, which happened the first time something got automated."
Furthermore, customers could have trouble selling AI investments to their C-suites.
"I've spent eternities in executive committee meetings and talking to board members and CEOs," Sommer said. "I know how they think, and the first thing they would ask when an initiative is coming up is, 'What else did you consider? What's the ROI? How many heads are we going to save?' And they want a plan where they can hold somebody's feet to the fire."
Rob Dombkowski, senior director of business technology at Grupo Bimbo, a $23 billion baking and snack foods company, expressed little doubt about the value of AI. He said he attended a session on the new Fusion Claw SCM product and was impressed by a demo of an app that optimizes trucking capacity.
"It really started giving me something tangible quickly that the business can get a benefit from," Dombkowski said. "Right now, the guy has to go and mine that data across 30 days to figure out why we were short on fulfillments."
AI can give users quick answers to those kinds of questions instead of making them wait days or weeks for data to be processed.
"Those are big bangs for the buck for me," he said.
David Essex is a senior editor who creates in-depth content on enterprise applications, emerging technology and market trends for TechTarget's CIO group.
