Agentic AI is the new buzzword in tech innovation and Oracle is betting big on this trend to drive growth and momentum for its cloud applications business in India and globally. The company recently announced a slew of AI agents across its applications suite – HCM, supply chain, logistics and customer experience – to help businesses tap new levels of productivity and growth. In this interview, Miranda Nash, Group Vice President, Oracle AI, speaks to Sudhir Chowdhary on how AI agents will boost productivity and help employees take on more strategic roles. Excerpts:
How is the growth in the SaaS market taking place?
Artificial intelligence is proving to be a massive driver for our on-premise customers transitioning to cloud. After years of supporting these on-premise applications, we’re now observing a tangible shift in motivation towards cloud adoption, largely driven by the benefits of AI. We’re seeing AI-driven moves across all sectors, with regulated industries demonstrating rapid adoption, leveraging their existing robust governance frameworks. Also, the trend is witnessed in sectors like oil & gas and communications. Therefore, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single industry as the primary driver.
How will the collaboration between AI agents and human workers benefit enterprises?
This year the collaboration will radically transform, driven by agents shifting from LLMs to creativity and bring true automation. Automation in business is our core focus, and agents unlock that potential. We’re in the early rollout phase; our first agents hit the market recently.
Agents will automate more role activities, particularly those that require human input and interaction with multiple systems. These tasks are ideally suited for automation through agents. We all know the chatbots and their familiar patterns and limitations. Agents unlock a human-like chat experience combined with 24/7 background operations.
In fact, we’re bringing AI agents to our own operations, using them to automate payroll rule setup, low-level tasks etc.
What is the roadmap for Fusion Cloud Applications Suite?
For us, it’s an evolution, not a sudden shift. We’ve embedded AI within our Fusion Cloud Applications for about eight years, starting with predictive AI. Generative AI, unlocked from foundational large language models, is now leading to agents. We’re seeing a proliferation of AI agents. The ways of accessing and interacting with these systems are changing significantly this year. We’re moving away from traditional screens and user interfaces toward a more agent-oriented interaction model.
How do you plan to grow your applications business in 2025?
For us, it’s about continuing to accelerate what we were doing earlier. In 2025, we’ll maintain some major differentiators that are fundamental to our approach. It starts with data. The best AI comes from the best data and by utilising a single data model, we have a solid foundation.
Our ability to provide this stems from our business structure, which includes a robust applications division and a cloud hyperscale business. As an applications provider, offering agents and GenAI built into our applications is essentially a cross-charge; we see no reason to pass those costs on to our customers.
What new advancements do you foresee for cloud applications?
AI agents truly extend beyond the use cases associated with chatbots. Everything started with the concept of chatbots, we now deploy agents. We’re automating a wide range of processes, including maintenance, onboarding, and offboarding. These are aspects of every company’s operation that we hadn’t previously attempted to automate.
