Customer-facing businesses are expected to expand their use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help staff respond to clients more rapidly and accurately. This will have a profound impact on both.
AI changes everything, said Oracle founder and chair Larry Ellison in his keynote address at the Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, setting the tone for the biggest shift in strategy for the software business since the arrival of the personal computer.
“Generative AI is a revolution, a breakthrough, fundamentally changing things at Oracle,” he said.
“This makes AI central to almost everything we’re doing and fundamentally changes how we build applications, run applications.
“Is generative AI the most important new computer technology ever? Probably. One thing is for certain, we will find out, because countless billions of dollars are being invested in generative AI and language models.”
The second-biggest software company in the world after Microsoft, Oracle is market leader in database systems, processing more business and customer data than any other organisation. This gives it a first-hand view of change as it happens.
The company unveiled new AI capabilities across most of its products and services, detailing the impact these will have on day-to-day activity.
The Oracle Fusion suite of cloud-based applications includes a range of new AI capabilities for improving customer experience, such as:
• “Assisted authoring”, which will help customer service staff write responses to clients faster and more accurately;
• “Assisted knowledge”, which will help document standard operating procedures for complex problems more quickly and accurately;
• “Search augmentation”, which will help employees rapidly find the best solution to a customer's question;
• Customer engagement summaries, which will precis the communications history with a client for customer service representatives who are new to the case; and
• AI-suggested troubleshooting content, which will help technicians in the field to rapidly resolve problems.
There are several fundamental differences in the way AI is being embraced in Western markets compared with countries like South Africa, Richard Smith, Oracle executive vice-president for technology across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Business Times.
I don't think there's an industry that is not affected. There's an application or use cases across every industry
— Mike Sicilia, EVP, Oracle Global Industries
“If you look across some of the larger regions in North America right now, there are significant funding levels and companies making significant and major commercial AI bets. In African countries and the Middle East, the governments are driving AI agendas or looking to strongly support them in a spirit of innovation for the country. Some of those are quite mature and some of them not so much.
“A lot of the time when I'm visiting a region or making a call on a public sector customer I'm asked how I can help in terms of providing capacity and providing intelligence and support in that space. A lot of customers are asking: ‘What do I do with it? What should I do with it? Do I need to touch it at all?’ The winners are going to be the people who ask the best questions.”
Smith said he talks to many banks, including those in South Africa, at a very senior level.
“What they tell me is: ‘I'm a good bank. Ninety percent of what I do is consistent with what my competition does. How can I use AI to define and innovate against that remaining 10% that creates a better set of services vs my competition, and can grow my organisation?’
“How they can be better and be more efficient is the type of question starting to emerge industry by industry. That will start to morph into things that are very, very good for the world, from a commercial standpoint, from a personal and from a social welfare standpoint.”
The most intensive activity, however, is not coming from large organisations, said Smith.
“We see across your region a very high propensity of start-ups, small groups of companies, small groups of people, experimenting with AI. That is often industry-driven, whether it's a health-care question, whether it's around government or digital services.
“Right now, there is massive activity, but the overwhelming focus is where you just get a group of very smart people who sa:, 'Look, we have this capability, we have this learning model, what can we do?' That, to me, is where the excitement starts to come up.”
In many cases the impact of AI will not be obvious to the person in the street, but the benefits will be dramatic, especially in health care.
Oracle is heavily focused on the sector and last year made its biggest acquisition yet, buying electronic health records firm Cerner for $28bn (about R530bn).
“The question was: ‘Hang on, you're a cloud technology provider, why are you buying a health-care company? Why is that important?’ Larry's view is that you can use data, AI and machine learning to identify, for example, the next pathogen before it occurs, and do so at speed. If you can use AI to identify oncology patterns, you can individualise cancer treatments for individuals based on genomic sequencing.”
During a panel discussion, Mike Sicilia, EVP of Oracle Global Industries, said other sectors, such as retail, hospitality and food and beverage, will also see dramatic advances, with greater personalisation based on customers' buying patterns,
“I don't think there's an industry that is not affected. There's an application or use cases across every industry.”
Ellison neatly summed up the significance of generative AI: “ChatGPT has captured our imagination. Most new technology does not capture the attention of heads of state. This is like the Sputnik moment.”
Goldstuck was a guest of Oracle in Las Vegas
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.