Oracle Corp. is jumping on the generative artificial intelligence train with the addition of dozens of new capabilities designed to help organizations boost productivity in areas such as customer service, marketing and sales.

The new generative AI capabilities in the Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience platform were announced today at Oracle’s CloudWorld event in Las Vegas. They’re powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s generative AI service, and are embedded directly into Oracle Fusion Cloud CX’s existing processes to help ease adoption.

Oracle Fusion Cloud CX is a cloud-native platform that connects data across marketing, sales and service to improve customer satisfaction, and the first set of features announced by Oracle are expected to help with this in a number of ways.

According to Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Cloud CX, customer service professionals can benefit from faster access to accurate information on each client or customer. “With the ability to summarize, author and recommend content, generative AI has the potential to significantly enhance customer service engagements,” he said.

Generative AI now does this within Oracle Fusion Cloud CX in a number of ways, with assisted agent responses helping customer service reps to generate an instant response to service requests, based on the history of the client’s previous interactions. It also helps generate new knowledge base content with regard to emerging service issues, helping to create standard operating procedures for common problems.

The new search augmentation capabilities will help service agents to search these knowledge bases more rapidly, while the customer engagement summaries will generate an instant summary of each customer’s history of interactions. Agents can quickly understand the nature of each customer’s request or issue, allowing them to get to a resolution faster.

As for actually resolving issues, generative AI authoring will play a key role in helping product and service experts create step-by-step guidance, defining a consistent process agents can follow when attempting to find a solution to customer’s problems. For example, Oracle said, assisted authoring can help a manufacturing or tech company’s service administrator capture a standard set of steps that front-line support representatives must work through with a customer before they escalate the issue to an expert resource.

Aly Pinder, an analyst at International Data Corp., said Oracle’s capabilities look useful because many organizations today are struggling to fill traditional customer services roles. They’re looking to automation and digital assistants to fill these roles instead. “With the latest updates to Oracle Cloud CX, organizations can take advantage of generative AI to rapidly solve issues and enhance the customer experience by increasing service agent, field technician and customer self-service efficiency,” he said.

Boosting revenue

Besides directly aiding customers, generative AI is also being implemented with Oracle Fusion Cloud CX’s marketing, sales and service applications to take advantage of opportunities for revenue growth. The new capabilities here are said to liberate marketers, sellers and service agents from time-consuming, manual tasks by unlocking the most relevant content, recommendations and insights in real time.

For instance, there’s a new feature called Guided Campaigns that Oracle says can deliver “conversation-ready opportunities” in minutes. It works by walking marketing professionals through a step-by-step process for launching personalized and brand-approved campaigns that automatically quality leads. These are then delivered to sellers as conversation-ready opportunities that can be offered at just the right time, Oracle said.

AI-Powered Account Linking is a new feature that gives sellers full visibility into customer accounts to reduce renewal times, expand upsell opportunities and accelerate the closure of deals.

Meanwhile, the enhancements within Oracle Cloud CX’s B2B Customer Data Platform can help reduce the complexity of business-to-business sales, Oracle said. With today’s updates, Oracle’s Unity Customer Data Platform segmentation canvas now supports the targeting of complex buying groups within an account hierarchy, with data enrichment and intent signals improving the targeting aspect of sales campaigns.

In addition, it said Sales people will become more focused, efficiency and effective with new Intelligent Sales Orchestration tools that deliver AI-generated insights and recommendations, including step-by-step guidance in complex sales scenarios

Forrester Research Inc. analyst kate Leggett said the sales and marketing-focused updates will lead to significant gains in both the short and long-term, automating processes that have always far too much time and energy. “This will then positively impact employee experiences, customer outcomes, and the bottom line,” she said.

Data platform and employee recognition enhancements

Oracle’s announcements today weren’t limited to generative AI, as the company also unveiled a new Fusion Data Intelligence Platform within Oracle Fusion Cloud. The new offering is said to be an evolution of the existing Oracle Fusion Analytics Warehouse product, and will deliver business data-as-a-service, with automated data pipelines, 360-degree data models and rich interactive AI analytics to support intelligent and AI-based applications.

Finally, Oracle announced new employee recognition and rewards features in Oracle ME, an employee experience platform within Oracle Human Capital Management offering. Oracle Celebrate is a recognition and rewards platform that organizations can use to enhance employee experiences and encourage them to boost their performance, while improving retention.

With Oracle Celebrate, employees and team leaders can acknowledge their co-workers, creating impactful notes of recognition and congratulating them on key milestones and achievements. It also enables staff to make nominations for employee of the month awards and other events. Employees will earn redeemable points each time they’re acknowledged or nominated for something. Organizations can then set up various rewards for employees once they have accrued enough points, motivating them to increase their performance.

Yvette Cameron, Oracle Cloud HCM’s senior vice president of product strategy, said Oracle Celebrate is about giving companies a way to ensure their staff feel celebrated and appreciated, so they can retain their most talented employees. “These new capabilities make employee recognition easy, meaningful, and inclusive while empowering HR and business leaders to prioritize employee appreciation, boost engagement and motivate their workforce,” she said.

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