Oracle adds GenAI to Fusion with a whopping 50 use cases
But is there one that can sort out failing ERP projects? Well Larry, is there?
Oracle has unleashed 50 use cases for gen AI on its Fusion Applications suite, letting vector-based statistical models provide financial report "narratives," help filter job candidates, and provide product descriptions.
Through Big Red's agreement with LLM biz Cohere, the gen AI features are to be embedded in existing business workflows across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service.
However, Oracle admits that human "intervention" is a necessary link in the chain before the output of GenAI is used in business.
"There should be user intervention so nothing can get released until a user or a manager has interfered with the output… to judge whether it is valid. There are controls in there to mitigate the risks because we were very alive to that challenge," a spokesman told The Register.
The spokesperson refused to be drawn on whether Oracle would take responsibility for the output of its LLMs or be held liable if a user were to suffer from the risks he referred to. He said it would increase productivity but Oracle had yet to measure these effects with customers.
In September last year, ServiceNow introduced similar LLM agents to its HR stack but said it would not be held liable for their output.
In any case, customers looking to buy Oracle Fusion might want assurance about how to adopt the software rather than worry about the sprinkling of AI add-ons.
The past year has seen a couple of Oracle Fusion deployment disasters. Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, saw its implementation costs for Fusion ERP and HR climb from £20 million ($25 million) to an estimated £131 million, ($167 million) after the delayed rollout left it unable to file auditable accounts and incur millions in costs of bank reconciliation for manual workarounds to support tasks performed by its previous SAP software.
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Similarly, an Oracle Fusion implementation at Edinburgh University saw the council unable to pay staff members and suppliers after the educational institution went live with HR, payroll, and finance system, with the final stage implemented in August 2022.
While responsibility for deployment may well lie with users and third-party systems integrators, Oracle should address questions about why, in reality, customers are derailed by unexpected complexity and other gremlins.
Oracle refused to answer questions about the Birmingham or Edinburgh implementations on a call with us today but said there were many examples of successful Fusion rollouts in the public sector. ®