Oracle generative AI drumbeat continues with new customer experience features

Continuing its strategy of embellishing its enterprise applications incrementally with generative artificial intelligence capabilities, Oracle Corp. today announced new features in its Fusion Cloud Customer Experience application.

They provide more precise responses to customer questions, improve sales force productivity and enable marketing organizations to assess lead quality in account-based marketing scenarios more effectively, the software giant said.

The announcements come less than two months after the previous round of generative AI enhancements, which were aimed mostly at summarizing data and discovering key metrics. The company is gradually adding more challenging and complex capabilities as the quality of technology and its own internal development practices improves, said Katrina Gosek (pictured), vice president of CX product strategy and marketing.

“From a research and development standpoint, you tackle the quick use cases first and then move toward the more complex ones,” she said. “Customers get more sophisticated in adopting and implementing these features across the enterprise.”

Four new uses

The new capabilities cover four general areas.

Gen AI-assisted answer generation helps customer service pros automatically create contextually aware responses to customer questions by typing them as prompts.

Assisted Scheduling for Field Service automatically recommends schedules for field service professionals based on location, skills and billing status. Technicians can use a mobile app to gain access “to all the customer data they need, the parts that they need to reorder, a configurator and the billing system,” Gosek said.

Opportunity Qualification Scoring for sales organizations helps marketers and sellers find the right members of business-to-business buying groups for targeting and sales engagement. The feature is expected to be particularly useful in account-based marketing, a discipline that has been adopted by 96% of enterprise marketers, according to a 2023 study by Foundry, the business name of IDG Communications, Inc. Analytics and generative AI are combined to identify the best contacts at target accounts.

Seller Engagement Recommendations help sellers identify the best products and services to recommend to customers and prospects based on the buyers’ roles and engagement levels.

Oracle said its generative AI services share no customer data with large language model providers or other customers. An individual customer is the only entity allowed to use custom models trained on its data and role-based security controls regulate access.

Incentive to upgrade

The company sees generative AI as an incentive for customers to subscribe to other components of its software suite, such as enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer relationship management and supply chain management. In some cases, the functionality isn’t new but is being made more accessible through natural language chat.

For example, field service scheduling combines data across the Fusion Cloud suite. The generative AI-assisted capability “draws on not just our field service application, but also digital customer service, analytics, knowledge management, supply chain, depot repair, logistics, internet of things and order management,” Gosek said. “We basically built a solution across all of these applications that ties the processes and the data across them. We’re always thinking across the suite.”

Similarly, the answer generation function for customer service agents and Opportunity Qualification Scoring for marketers is based on the analysis of documents and knowledge bases already indexed by Oracle. Previously, Gosek said, “that would have to be configured by the customer, but now these out-of-the-box capabilities automate the mapping, schema and data models.”

Photo: Oracle