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Oracle drops a truckload of CX-centric generative AI agents

Oracle's tactical deployment of AI boosts Fusion Cloud Applications for sales, service and marketing.

Oracle released a bevy of AI agents for CX users in marketing, sales and service.

Adding to a slew the company released last fall, the latest agents include marketing agents such as Program Planning Agent, which defines the goals, audience, and core narratives for a campaign. The Program Brief Agent summarizes a potential campaign's objectives, target audiences, messages, content requirements and recommended tactics. The Buying Group Agent helps marketers more efficiently target buying groups, a common scenario in B2B settings -- where coordinated sales teams sell to a customer's buying team.

On the sales side, the Contact Insights Agent simplifies outreach planning by surfacing insights on people and their importance within an account. The Quote Generation Agent analyzes information from documents fed into it -- examples might include emails, drawings, and other specified requirements -- and speeds the process of recommending products and configurations reflecting current price schedules. The Renewal Agent creates briefs that analyze product usage, offer profitability insights and contain upsell recommendations for customers when it's time to re-up subscriptions or orders.

For contact center-based service teams, the Customer Self-Service Agent enables customers to answer their own questions, create tickets, and escalate queries to a human service representative when needed. The Attachment Processing Agent extracts and summarizes data from file attachments to resolve service requests faster.

For field service teams, the Start-of-Day Agent summarizes technician assignments, and the Work Order Scheduling Agent creates a day plan with an eye toward efficiency in service delivery.

This is a partial list of the agents Oracle released. A more comprehensive rundown is available here. Customers and partners can also create, test, deploy and manage their own custom AI agents with Oracle's AI Agent Studio for Fusion Cloud Applications platform.

Task-oriented agents are king

Oracle chose which tasks to tackle with its AI agents through analysis of customer behavior -- uncovering their pain points -- and also through inspiration of internal hackathons, said Rob Pinkerton, senior vice president for Oracle's CX product business.

While Oracle has a long tradition of hackathons, generative AI has injected new energy into the proceedings.

"These agentic hackathons are different," Pinkerton said. "They get more submissions, they get more competitive, and they seem to be producing more real product in a much shorter period of time. If you win the hackathon, you're getting shipped. The development cycles just feel faster … they're able to innovate faster."

Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research company Valoir, said that Oracle is well-positioned to drive efficiencies for its customers because they typically already have their data in order on the Oracle cloud. That allows Oracle to create task-based agents that solve last-mile problems for its users -- especially time-consuming work such as content creation for marketers and quote generation for salespeople.

"We've automated so many other things in the workflow, but content generation is something where [users] really have to have generative AI, and it really has to work," Wettemann said. "The big cost problem in marketing is: How do I create 30 blog posts from a marketing brief, pages of web content, LinkedIn posts, long-form posts, e-books and all those things? [Generative AI is] not going to take away the creative part, but it will enable the creative people to focus on polishing drafts and not churning through content creation."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.

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