Oracle reworks its suite of cloud software as agentic apps

(March 23 story corrects headline and paragraphs 1, 4, and 6 to reflect that Oracle offers agented applications that run across its software suite rather than through individual AI agents)

SAN FRANCISCO, March 23 (Reuters) – Oracle is revamping the cloud-based software suite used by large companies to work with artificial intelligence agents as “middle applications” to enable people to request business results from the system. The changes, which Oracle plans to announce at an event in London on Tuesday local time, are part of a broader trend in which providers of highly specialized enterprise software are innovating them to be used by artificial intelligence agents that can perform tasks on behalf of human users. Oracle’s shares have lost nearly 40% this year due to investor concerns that the company’s artificial intelligence tools will largely replace complex business software. Oracle executives have argued that the company is adopting artificial intelligence tools to keep its software ahead of these changes.

In the latest case, Oracle is updating its Fusion software suite, which includes core business tasks like scheduling production in factories and collecting money from customers, among other functions such as human resources.

Steve Miranda, Oracle’s vice president of application development, said the company’s goal is to make it easier to focus on business questions like how to make a new product design cheaper and faster while minimizing the risks of supply chain disruptions.

The data needed for these decisions is dispersed among the various applications in the Oracle suite and third-party software that depends on it, Miranda said. Teams of AI agents will take on tasks like entering and collecting data and making recommendations needed to achieve business results, Miranda said, while human employees will put more emphasis on skills like knowing how to negotiate with suppliers and what kind of risk tolerance a company has for supply disruption.

“Writing invoices is not a very valuable skill for your business or the person you know who does that part of their business,” said Miranda.

“The decision-making is still kind of up to the human and weighing the different pros and cons of that situation. But certainly the execution, the writing of the invoices, the writing of the purchase order, is what’s going to be completely changed in AI.” (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Matthew Lewis)