We hear a lot about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. But it’s fair to ask: Will these really change how I do my job every day?
The likely answer is yes. To picture how, take a look at three examples shared by Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development. Kurian offered these February 12 at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. He shared many other examples, but these three offer a starting point for thinking about how emerging tech can be applied to your organization in a practical, real-world way.
“Today, many applications are written to be heavily rules-driven,” Kurian said. “The problem with business rules is they can become extremely elaborate and extremely cumbersome to maintain.”
In a telecom contact center, for example, when a customer call comes in, you need rules that can, within about 30 seconds, identify who the customer is, what product they’re using, what their problem is, and what the best next step should be. And that only starts the cascade of recommendations that follow that initial first step.
“AI can do that way better than any person can figure out,” Kurian said.
That’s why Oracle is embedding AI capabilities in all of its applications. Doing so will let ERP find the best price recommendations, identify maverick procurement, or spot possible inaccurate reconciliations. In HCM, it will help identify job candidates and recommend next career steps for current talent. And in CRM, AI will help identify the next-best action to help a customer or land a prospect, drawing on internal data, and, where appropriate, using third-party data via Oracle Data Cloud.
- Related: Learn more about Oracle Adaptive Intelligent apps
Rather than leaving you on your own to write AI algorithms for these kinds of problems, Oracle is providing a way to quickly get results from AI. “It’s combining data and domain-specific algorithms inside our applications so that you get much better results from your business process,” Kurian said.
Ambient Human Interfaces
The last major advance of user interface technology, Kurian said, was the graphical user interface (GUI) first introduced way back in the 1980s. Smartphones have changed our daily lives, but in terms of interface, they still rely on a variation of the original GUIs.
“If you look at most mobile applications, they really haven’t fundamentally changed,” Kurian said.
The emergence of “ambient human interfaces” will change that. “The interface is always with you, and you can interact with it in a variety of different ways,” Kurian said. Oracle is developing these types of interfaces to connect with all of its applications and platform services through its Oracle Mobile Cloud Service.
For example, with such an interface on a procurement application, when you as a manager are alerted to a purchase order you must review, you could still access it the traditional way, via a web browser or mobile app. Or, you could get help through a “virtual assistant”—asking for the PO, asking questions about its contents, and then giving your okay.
To date, these kinds of virtual assistants have mostly relied on text messaging, where they exist at all. However, Kurian thinks voice will become a much more common interface to “interact with this virtual assistant for our entire platform and applications.” The intelligent bot capability in Oracle Mobile Cloud Service already supports many of the most popular voice and text messaging platforms. Avoiding the whole process of logging into an application console will speed productivity and keep managers focused on their most pressing tasks.
Self-Driving Software: An Autonomous Platform
One of the hardest and most basic technology challenges for companies is getting from tech-powered idea to real-world product ahead of the competition. So sure, it’s essential that Oracle offers a cloud-based infrastructure that lets IT teams spin up high-performance computing resources in minutes. But it’s not enough to solve a company’s speed of development problem.
“The barrier to adoption to technology is the lack of skilled people to build applications,” Kurian said. Yet what are skilled technologists doing in most organizations? “They’re spending their time doing really mundane work—installing and configuring software, patching it, backing it up, setting up disaster recovery.”
To combat that, Oracle is introducing Oracle Cloud Platform autonomous services. These services are aimed at eliminating all the manual labor involved in running and managing software.
The most prominent example is Oracle Autonomous Database. Organizations will be able to ask for a database of a certain size and response performance, and the database cloud service will self-provision the right capacity, and then monitor, optimize, and support the workload. “You don’t have to monitor it, you don’t have to plan capacity expansion, you don’t have to take away capacity if there’s too much,” Kurian said. “You don’t have to back it up, you don’t have to patch it, encrypt it, or set up disaster recovery.”
Oracle will roll out these autonomous services across its cloud platform throughout 2018. Benefits include reduced labor costs, reduced opportunity for human error, and improved security and performance from having continuously patched and updated software. And most importantly, it means having your key talent working on exciting new projects, not on routine and commonplace IT chores.
Kurian dove in on several other areas of Oracle’s emerging tech innovation, from blockchain to the Internet of Things. There is a common need driving this innovation, from core cloud services to the most cutting-edge emerging technology. As industries digitalize, he said, they “need a platform that provides capabilities at much faster rates than they could get with the traditional model of software.”
Chris Murphy is Oracle director of cloud content.
