Oracle Recruiting 26D: From Reactive Hiring to Proactive Recruiting

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time again, quarterly release time, and Oracle Recruiting 26D is shaping up to be one of the more interesting releases we’ve seen for a while. At first glance, it’s easy to assume this is simply another AI-heavy update. After all, almost every major enhancement includes some form of advisor, agent or generative capability. But looking a little deeper, I think there’s a more interesting story here.

For years, recruiting technology has largely focused on helping recruiters process candidates more efficiently once a vacancy exists. A requisition opens, recruiters search for candidates, screening begins, interviews are arranged and eventually an offer is made. Release 26D starts to challenge that model.

Many of the new capabilities are focused on helping organisations anticipate hiring demand, build pipelines earlier, make more informed decisions and reduce administrative effort throughout the recruitment lifecycle. In other words, moving from reactive hiring towards proactive recruiting.

The feature that caught my attention most is Candidate Sourcing Workspace. Most recruitment teams know the pressure that comes with a new vacancy. As soon as a requisition is approved, the clock starts ticking. Recruiters begin searching, hiring managers want candidate shortlists immediately, and the race is on to identify suitable people. Oracle is trying to change that.

The new Candidate Sourcing Workspace allows recruiters to build and maintain talent pipelines before a requisition even exists. Using previous hiring patterns and anticipated demand, Oracle can help recruiters identify and nurture potential candidates in advance, creating a pool of talent ready to engage when opportunities arise.

Rather than starting every search from scratch, recruiters can draw from existing talent pools, review AI-generated candidate summaries and quickly identify the strongest matches for anticipated hiring needs. For organisations that regularly recruit into similar roles, this could have a significant impact on time-to-hire. More importantly, it allows recruiters to spend less time hunting for candidates and more time building relationships with them. That’s a much more strategic use of everyone’s time.

Supporting the new sourcing workspace is an enhanced outreach experience that brings together all candidate engagement activity into a single view. That might not sound particularly exciting on paper, but anyone who has ever managed a large recruitment campaign knows how easy it is for conversations to lose momentum. Candidates don’t respond immediately, follow-ups are forgotten, and promising prospects gradually disappear from the process. Oracle is addressing that problem with automated reminders, consolidated outreach tracking and AI-generated summaries of candidate responses. The result is a much clearer picture of who has been contacted, where conversations stand and what action should happen next.

Another interesting addition is the new Hiring Workspace for Store Manager. Although initially aimed at retail organisations, the broader theme here is relevant to any organisation managing high-volume recruitment. The workspace allows managers to ask natural-language questions such as: “What requires my attention today?” or “Where is hiring off track?” and receive a structured response that highlights issues, priorities and recommended actions.

What I like about this feature is that Oracle isn’t simply presenting data differently. The platform is actively helping managers understand what requires attention and what they should do next. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one. Most recruitment systems already provide dashboards and reports. The challenge isn’t usually accessing information. It’s understanding what action should be taken based on that information. This workspace starts to bridge that gap.

Probably the most practical AI enhancement in the release is the new Compensation Recommendation and Job Offer Creation Advisor. Creating a competitive offer has traditionally involved a mixture of salary benchmarking, internal comparisons and professional judgement. It can also be surprisingly time-consuming. Oracle’s new advisor pulls together relevant information from the requisition, candidate assessments and internal salary data to provide a recommended salary range before helping create the draft offer itself.

What particularly stood out to me is Oracle’s emphasis on explainability and guardrails. The recommendations are based on defined business criteria and Oracle explicitly states that protected characteristics such as age, gender, race and disability are not used when generating recommendations. In a world where organisations are rightly paying more attention to AI governance and pay equity, that’s an important message. Will recruiters still want human oversight? Absolutely. But reducing the administrative effort involved in preparing offers while supporting consistency of decision-making feels like a genuinely useful application of AI.

Not every valuable enhancement in 26D relies on AI. Oracle has also simplified how candidates access and respond to job offers by making offers available directly through candidate-facing experiences. External candidates can access offers through career sites, while internal candidates can access them through Opportunity Marketplace. They can review offer documentation, accept or decline offers and access completed documentation after acceptance.

It’s a relatively simple change, but one that removes a common point of friction. Offer emails can be missed, filtered or buried in busy inboxes. Giving candidates a consistent place to access offer information feels like a sensible improvement that should help remove avoidable delays from the process.

While most of the release focuses on new innovation, there is one update that deserves immediate attention. Oracle has confirmed that Digital Assistant (ODA) Fusion Apps templates for Recruiting will no longer be supported from November 2026. If your career site currently relies on Oracle Digital Assistant, now is the time to begin planning your transition. Oracle’s recommended path forward is Career Coach, which becomes the strategic candidate assistance experience going forward. This isn’t something I’d leave until the last minute. November 2026 will arrive much faster than many organisations expect, and early planning will help avoid unnecessary disruption.

What stands out to me about Recruiting in 26D is that Oracle appears to be focusing on the right problems. The most valuable features aren’t necessarily the ones generating content faster. They’re the ones helping organisations build stronger talent pipelines, make more consistent hiring decisions and remove friction from the recruitment process.

That’s why Candidate Sourcing Workspace was the feature that caught my eye. If organisations can move from scrambling to find candidates every time a requisition opens to maintaining an always-on pipeline of talent, that has the potential to transform recruitment performance far more than any chatbot ever could. There are still plenty of AI announcements in this release, but for once they feel connected to genuine business outcomes rather than being technology in search of a problem. And if you’re still relying on Oracle Digital Assistant on your career site, don’t overlook the deprecation announcement. November 2026 will arrive faster than you think.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Oracle Fusion Absence Management 26D: Small Changes That Fix Real Problems

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It’s quarterly release time again, and Oracle Fusion Absence Management 26D is one of those releases that probably won’t grab headlines. There’s no shiny new AI capability. No major redesign of the absence process. No feature that’s going to fundamentally change how organisations manage leave. What there is, however, is a collection of enhancements that solve genuine problems.

Some of these updates close long-standing gaps between Absence Management, Time and Labor, Payroll and Project Costing. Others make life easier for administrators. There’s even a small but welcome improvement that makes organisational events much more visible to employees. Individually, none of these features are ground breaking. Collectively, they make the product noticeably better.

If I had to pick the feature that will have the biggest day-to-day impact, it’s probably Organisation Calendar Events in Calendar and Calendar Synchronisation. Many organisations maintain company shutdowns, public holidays, site closures, special events, or other important dates within organisation calendars. The problem has always been visibility. Unless employees actively looked in Oracle, those events were easy to miss.

With 26D, employees can now synchronise organisation calendar events alongside their absences and shifts using Oracle’s existing calendar integration. That means important organisation events can appear directly in the calendar applications people already use every day. For employees, it’s a small change that removes a surprising amount of friction. Instead of checking multiple systems to understand what’s happening, everything becomes visible in one place.

Oracle has also improved the Redwood calendar experience itself by allowing users to open calendar events and immediately see additional details such as descriptions, categories and timings without having to search elsewhere for information. It’s a simple enhancement, but one that’s likely to improve awareness and reduce confusion around organisation-wide events.

Oracle continues its journey towards a fully Redwood-based HCM experience, and in 26D the Leave Agreements administration page receives the Redwood treatment. While this might sound like another routine Redwood migration, it’s actually a worthwhile improvement for absence administrators. The previous experience wasn’t particularly intuitive and often required moving between different screens to manage agreements and related information. The new Redwood page brings everything together in a single location, making it much easier to search, filter, review and maintain leave agreements.

For organisations that manage complex collective agreements, union arrangements or other entitlement frameworks, reducing administrative effort is always welcome. This won’t fundamentally change how leave agreements work, but it does make them significantly easier to manage. And that’s often what good Redwood design should do.

One of the quieter additions in 26D is also one of the most sensible. Oracle has introduced a dedicated security role that provides access to the Absences and Entitlements page without requiring organisations to rely on broader HR Specialist access. That may not sound exciting, but it addresses a challenge many customers face when trying to align Oracle security with real-world operating models.

Not every organisation wants absence administrators to have the wider access typically associated with HR roles. Until now, customers often had to make compromises or develop workarounds. The new role provides much more flexibility when designing security models and supports the principle of providing users with only the access they actually need. For organisations with dedicated absence administration teams, that’s a genuinely useful addition.

This next enhancement will be particularly valuable for organisations using Oracle Project Costing. Historically, absence entries captured through Time and Labor didn’t always flow cleanly into Project Costing, creating gaps when organisations were trying to understand the true cost of project resources.

That might not sound significant initially, but when you’re managing project budgets or analysing resource utilisation, missing absence costs can distort the picture. With 26D, eligible absence entries can now be transferred to Project Costing while retaining the relevant project information. The result is more complete project cost data and fewer manual workarounds to reconcile information across systems. This is one of those features that many organisations may never notice directly, but finance teams and project managers will certainly appreciate the improved accuracy behind the scenes.

In my view, this is probably the most important update in the release: Transfer Calculated Time Entries for Absences to Payroll, Many organisations use Time and Labor calculations to generate additional payments such as overtime, shift premiums and other pay-related adjustments. The problem was that when those calculations were associated with absences rather than worked time, Payroll didn’t always receive the complete picture. That could create reconciliation challenges and introduce additional administrative effort during payroll processing. 26D closes that gap.

Calculated entries associated with absences can now be transferred through to Payroll alongside the underlying absence information. What sounds like a technical integration enhancement actually delivers a very practical benefit: payroll calculations become more complete, more accurate and require less manual intervention. For organisations with complex shift patterns, premium payments or heavily unionised environments, this could remove a long-standing source of frustration. And honestly, it feels like one of those features that should always have worked this way.

Absence Management 26D isn’t a release built around a single headline feature. Instead, Oracle has focused on improving existing processes, tightening integrations and making administration easier. The calendar enhancements make absence-related information more visible to employees. The new Redwood Leave Agreements experience provides a cleaner administration experience. Security becomes more flexible. Project costing becomes more accurate. Payroll receives more complete absence-related calculations.

The interesting thing about this release is that Oracle has focused on the areas customers typically only notice when something isn’t working properly. Whether it’s absence-related payments not reaching Payroll, project costing not reflecting employee leave, or staff struggling to find important organisation calendar events, these aren’t glamorous problems, but they’re the sort of issues that create extra administration, reconciliation work and user frustration. 26D won’t transform the way you manage absence, but it does remove a number of small pain points that many organisations have simply learned to live with. For me, that’s what makes this a stronger release than it first appears.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Oracle Fusion Talent Management 26D: Less Administration, Better Talent Conversations

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s quarterly release time again and, while Talent Management doesn’t have quite the same headline-grabbing AI announcements we’ve seen elsewhere in Oracle Fusion Cloud, Release 26D delivers something arguably more valuable. It removes friction.

Across performance management, succession planning and skills, Oracle continues to focus on helping managers and HR teams spend less time navigating processes and more time focusing on their people. There is a clear theme running through many of the enhancements in this release: making the information you already have easier to access and turning time-consuming tasks into something much simpler.

Oracle introduced the Team Talent Calibration and Review Workspace in 26C, but Release 26D feels like the point where it starts delivering real value. Managers can now see AI recommendations suggesting whether an employee’s overall performance rating should be adjusted or remain unchanged. What makes this more interesting than a simple AI-generated recommendation is the amount of information Oracle is now evaluating behind the scenes.

Rather than looking at a narrow set of data, Oracle is drawing on feedback, check-ins, goals, questionnaire responses and other performance information to build a richer picture of an employee’s contribution throughout the year. Let’s be clear, AI should never replace managerial judgement, particularly when it comes to performance discussions. However, it can help surface information that might otherwise be forgotten or overlooked during calibration sessions, especially in larger teams where managers are balancing multiple priorities.

One feature I particularly like is the new Talent Summary presentation. Oracle can now generate a ready-made presentation covering each employee’s performance and talent indicators, along with AI-generated strengths and development opportunities. Anyone who has ever spent hours building calibration packs before a talent review meeting will immediately understand the value of that enhancement.

Check-ins have quietly become one of the strongest parts of Oracle Performance Management and 26D continues that steady evolution. Several enhancements have been introduced that make the experience more structured and, perhaps more importantly, easier for managers to prepare for.

Organisations can now define default templates for check-ins, helping to drive consistency while reducing the amount of setup required when creating new conversations. Oracle has also introduced the ability to include questionnaires directly within check-ins and surface recent employee feedback alongside the discussion. What I like about these changes is that they help managers come into conversations with context already available.

One of the biggest challenges with performance management isn’t collecting information. It’s getting the right information in front of managers at the point they need it. By bringing feedback, discussion points and supporting information together in one place, Oracle is helping make those conversations more meaningful.

The AI-generated summaries introduced in earlier releases have also been enhanced, allowing Oracle to use a broader range of information when generating check-in notes and conversation summaries. Individually, these enhancements may seem relatively small. Together, they make the entire check-in process feel much more mature.

One of my favourite enhancements in this release is also one of the least complicated. Managers can now assign performance and development goals to multiple employees at the same time from the Team Activity Centre This isn’t an exciting AI announcement. It isn’t revolutionary. It’s simply practical.

Many organisations establish common goals across teams or departments, yet managers have traditionally had to assign those goals employee by employee. It’s not difficult, but it is repetitive and time-consuming. Release 26D removes that unnecessary administrative effort and allows managers to assign goals to multiple team members in a single action. Features like this don’t usually make marketing headlines, but they’re often the ones users appreciate the most because they save time every single day.

Most organisations recognise the importance of succession planning. The challenge is often finding the right information when you need it. Even organisations with well-maintained talent profiles and strong skills data can struggle to identify suitable successors quickly and consistently. Release 26D aims to simplify that process through enhancements to the Succession Planning Agent. HR teams can now describe the type of candidate they’re looking for using natural language and receive recommendations based on available workforce, talent and skills information.

What stands out to me is not necessarily the AI itself, but the accessibility it creates. For years, organisations have invested significant effort building richer talent profiles, managing skills data and maintaining employee information. Features like this finally make that data easier to use during real-life talent decisions. That’s where the true value lies.

Skills continue to be a major focus area across Oracle HCM, with many organisations looking beyond traditional job-based workforce planning and moving towards a more skills-driven approach. For customers using Techwolf, Oracle has introduced a new integration that synchronises Techwolf skills directly into Oracle Fusion HCM.

Now, I appreciate this won’t apply to every organisation. However, for those already using Techwolf as part of their skills strategy, this could remove a significant amount of ongoing administration. Maintaining multiple skills repositories is rarely a sustainable long-term approach. Automating the movement of skills data between systems helps improve consistency and gives organisations greater confidence in the information they’re using to support talent decisions. As skills initiatives continue to mature, integrations like this become increasingly important.

A smaller enhancement that shouldn’t be overlooked is the additional flexibility Oracle has introduced within All-in-One Evaluations. HR teams can now make greater use of star-based ratings, define read-only sections within evaluation documents and customise some of the terminology displayed to managers and employees. None of these changes are transformational on their own, but they provide welcome flexibility for organisations that have invested time tailoring performance processes around their own ways of working.

The ability to lock down completed sections is particularly useful for organisations that want tighter control over different stages of the evaluation process while still maintaining visibility for managers and employees. Sometimes success isn’t about introducing entirely new functionality. It’s about giving organisations more control over the tools they already use.

Talent Management 26D isn’t a release packed with revolutionary new capabilities, and honestly, I think that’s perfectly fine. Instead, Oracle has focused on making existing processes easier, smarter and less time-consuming. Calibration becomes more informed, check-ins become more effective, goal management becomes simpler, succession planning becomes more accessible and skills information becomes better connected.

What links all these enhancements together is a common objective: helping managers and HR teams spend less time administering talent processes and more time focusing on the people behind them. Sometimes those are the releases that deliver the biggest impact. As always, Oracle may add additional functionality to the release over the coming weeks. If any significant talent features appear, I’ll be sure to cover them in a future update.

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Oracle Help Desk 26D: AI Gets More Practical and the Redwood Clock Keeps Ticking

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It’s quarterly release season again and Oracle has already revealed a healthy batch of new features for Help Desk in 26D. What struck me most this quarter wasn’t necessarily the number of new features, but how much Oracle continues to invest in making support part of the wider employee experience. The latest updates are less about helping agents work faster and more about helping employees find answers, complete actions and stay on top of requests without having to navigate multiple areas of HCM.

There’s also an important reminder for anyone still running Classic HR Help Desk. Oracle has reconfirmed that the Redwood migration deadline is fast approaching and, if you haven’t started planning yet, now is the time. As always, Oracle may add further features as the release progresses, but let’s take a look at the highlights from the first wave of 26D announcements.

The standout feature in 26D for me is the new My Help Workspace for Employees. If you’ve ever watched employees navigate Oracle HCM, you’ll know one of the biggest frustrations isn’t necessarily finding information. It’s remembering where everything lives. Help requests sit in one place, learning assignments in another, expenses somewhere else, and absence requests somewhere else again. Oracle is clearly trying to tackle that problem.

The new workspace gives employees a single place to see the activities and requests that need their attention. Whether that’s a Help Desk request waiting for a response, an outstanding task, or useful knowledge content, employees can quickly see what requires action without having to navigate around multiple parts of Oracle HCM.

What I particularly like is that it isn’t just a reporting page. Employees can take action directly from the workspace. If a Help Desk analyst is waiting for additional information, the employee can respond immediately. If a request seems to have gone quiet, they can follow up without having to navigate elsewhere.

Oracle has also made it easier to get support when employees need it. The Ask Oracle search capability is available directly within the workspace, with access to a full AI-powered chat experience without taking users away from what they’re doing. This feels very much like the direction Oracle is heading with many of its AI investments. Rather than forcing users to jump between modules, Oracle is bringing information and actions together in a single experience and letting AI help guide employees to the next thing they should do.

For organisations exploring Oracle’s Agentic AI strategy, this is probably one of the clearest real-world examples we’ve seen so far. It’s practical, employee-facing and solves a genuine problem rather than introducing technology for technology’s sake.

The Employee Help Desk Self Service Assistant continues to mature with every release, and 26D includes a collection of smaller enhancements that together make a significant difference. The most interesting addition is the use of the Classification Agent when requests are created through the assistant. Instead of employees having to work out categories, priorities and classifications themselves, the AI can now determine much of that information automatically. That might not sound particularly exciting on the surface, but anyone who has spent time reviewing Help Desk data will immediately recognise the value. Better categorisation means better reporting, more consistent routing and less manual effort for support teams.

Oracle has also improved how knowledge content is surfaced by filtering results based on Business Unit. In practice, that means employees are more likely to see information that is relevant to their part of the organisation rather than scrolling through articles that may not apply to them.

One enhancement that I think many customers will appreciate is the ability to identify requests created through the AI assistant using a dedicated source code. Until now, measuring AI adoption has often been surprisingly difficult. Organisations can now report on how many requests originated through the assistant, making it far easier to understand whether employees are actually using the capability and whether it is delivering value. For me, that’s an important step. AI shouldn’t just be implemented. It should be measurable.

Oracle has also continued its push to make AI Agent Studio the centre of AI configuration by allowing the assistant to be run and customised directly from the platform. That gives organisations more flexibility to tailor the experience as their AI strategy evolves.

One of the more practical additions in 26D is the ability to associate external links directly with Help Desk requests. Whether your teams work with Jira, SharePoint, Confluence, Google Workspace or other business systems, agents can now link relevant records directly from within a service request.

This isn’t a headline-grabbing feature, but it’s exactly the sort of improvement that saves people time every day. Instead of searching through emails, chat messages or separate applications to find supporting information, agents can access everything they need from the Help Desk request itself. For organisations where support processes span multiple systems and teams, small improvements like this can have a surprisingly positive impact on efficiency and collaboration.

Another area receiving attention in 26D is administration. A number of Help Desk configuration pages have now been brought into the Redwood experience, including Categories, Severities, Channels and Visibilities, Message Types and SmartText. On the surface, this might not feel like a particularly exciting enhancement. However, administrators who regularly manage Help Desk configurations will probably appreciate it more than most.

One of the frustrations during Oracle’s Redwood journey has been moving backwards and forwards between Redwood pages and older administration screens. Every additional configuration page that moves to Redwood helps create a more consistent experience. It’s not transformational, but it is another sign that Oracle’s commitment to Redwood remains firmly on track.

Normally I finish these blogs by talking about what’s coming next. This quarter, I want to finish with a warning. Oracle has reconfirmed that Classic HR Help Desk will no longer be available from 27B. If you’re already running Help Desk in Redwood, that’s not a problem. If you’re still using Classic HR Help Desk, however, this deadline should be firmly on your radar. The reason isn’t simply that Oracle is retiring the old experience. Increasingly, the innovation is happening exclusively in Redwood.

Many of the capabilities organisations are looking at today, including AI-powered self-service, modern employee experiences, enhanced case management capabilities and the new My Help Workspace for Employees, are only available in the Redwood experience. As each quarterly update arrives, that gap is becoming more noticeable. That’s becoming a recurring theme across Oracle HCM as a whole. The question is no longer whether organisations should move to Redwood. The question is whether they’re leaving themselves enough time to get there.

Migration isn’t something I’d recommend leaving until the final few months before an update. There are prerequisites to review, validation activities to complete, testing cycles to run and potentially business processes that need to be reviewed along the way. Starting early gives you time to resolve issues before they become critical path activities. Oracle has provided migration guidance, workbooks and checklists to support the transition, but the key message remains the same: if you’re still on Classic HR Help Desk, this should be a priority for the remainder of 2026.

Overall, this isn’t a release packed with dozens of transformational features, but it does show a very clear direction of travel. Oracle continues to invest heavily in AI-assisted support, employee self-service and Redwood-first experiences, while gradually bringing together information and actions that have traditionally been scattered across multiple areas of HCM.

For most organisations, the new My Help Workspace for Employees and the continued evolution of the Self Service Assistant will be the features worth paying closest attention to. They demonstrate how Oracle is moving beyond simply answering questions and towards helping employees complete tasks, resolve issues and manage their work through AI-assisted experiences. And if you’re still running Classic HR Help Desk, the Redwood migration deadline should probably be the feature getting the most attention of all.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Payroll 26D: Small Changes, Real Benefits

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s quarterly release time again, and while Payroll 26D doesn’t contain the sort of headline-grabbing feature that will completely transform how payroll teams work, it does include a collection of enhancements that solve real-world problems. There’s continued progress on Oracle’s Redwood journey, some useful legislative updates for UK and Irish payroll, stronger visibility into tax calculations for US payroll teams, and a handful of practical improvements that should reduce administration effort and simplify troubleshooting.

What stood out to me this quarter is that many of the enhancements focus on making payroll easier to manage rather than simply adding new functionality. Several address common frustrations that payroll teams have been dealing with for years, while others provide much-needed transparency into processes that have traditionally felt like a black box. As always, Oracle may introduce additional features over the coming weeks, but here’s what has caught my attention so far.

One theme that won’t surprise anyone by now is Redwood. Oracle continues to replace classic payroll pages with their modern Redwood equivalents, and 26D brings another significant batch of payroll administration pages across. At this stage, most payroll customers understand that the question is no longer whether Redwood is coming, but when they’re going to adopt it. Releases like 26D continue to chip away at the remaining classic pages and make that transition increasingly inevitable. While not every Redwood page introduces brand new functionality, many do improve usability and create a more consistent experience across HCM Cloud.

The Legal Entity Calculation Card and Legal Reporting Unit Calculation Card have now moved to Redwood. These cards hold payroll statutory unit and tax reporting unit defaults, making them some of the more important configuration pages within Payroll. For customers already using Redwood profile options, the new experience is enabled automatically. Functionally, very little changes, but it continues Oracle’s journey towards a consistent user experience across the application.

The Fast Formula migration is probably the Redwood enhancement that will attract the most attention from payroll specialists. The new page introduces a genuinely modern code editor experience, including syntax highlighting and quicker access to database items and functions. Anyone who spends their day building or troubleshooting formulas will likely find it easier to navigate than the classic version. That said, there is one notable omission. Expression Builder isn’t available in the Redwood experience yet, which may influence how quickly some organisations choose to move over. It’s not a blocker for everyone, but it’s definitely something worth testing before making the switch.

Oracle has also moved a further six payroll setup pages into Redwood: Balance Exceptions, Balance Exceptions and Reports, Element Security Profiles, Features by Country or Territory, Organisation Payment Methods and Run Types. It should be noted that these pages are enabled by default. One point worth highlighting relates to Organisation Payment Methods. If you’ve previously granted access through custom job roles, you’ll need to review those roles and ensure they include both the Organisation Payment Method Management Duty role and the Manage Organisation Payment Method function privilege.

One Redwood enhancement I’m particularly pleased to see is the update to Balance Adjustments. Historically, making multiple balance corrections could be a fairly manual process, particularly when trying to understand the wider impact of those changes. The new experience allows administrators to work with multiple adjustments in a single transaction while immediately seeing the before and after effect across affected balances.

The ability to apply separate costing to individual adjustments and navigate directly from Balance Results into Balance Adjustment creates a much smoother experience than before. It’s the sort of enhancement that won’t generate much excitement in release announcements, but for payroll teams dealing with corrections and reconciliations it could save a significant amount of time.

The Retropay enhancement is another feature that feels small on paper but addresses an issue that has caught a number of organisations out in practice. Where employees are processed through multiple payroll runs within the same period, for example a bonus run followed by the regular payroll run, previous behaviour could sometimes create duplicate retro entries or unnecessary offset adjustments. Those situations could take time to understand and even longer to explain.

The new logic helps Oracle determine whether the entry has already been processed within a later payroll run before generating retrospective adjustments, creating a cleaner and more predictable outcome. This feature is disabled by default and requires the Set Late Recurring Retro Entry Earliest Date process to be run, so customers will want to carefully consider when to enable it.

There are a number of UK-specific enhancements in 26D and, I’ve called out three that address genuine operational scenarios rather than simply introducing administrative changes. The first on is Process Results Enhancements. Anyone who regularly analyses payroll results will appreciate this one. The Run Pension Automatic Enrolment Letters process now displays the employee name and payroll relationship number. Send HMRC XML results show the flow name instead of the payroll action ID, and Pension Assessor Updates include employee details alongside a direct link to the pension component within Earnings and Deductions. These aren’t transformational changes, but they’re exactly the sort of usability improvements that reduce investigation time when payroll teams are trying to locate information quickly.

This Enhanced Statutory Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay for Northern Ireland Employees enhancement delivers support for legislative changes effective from 6 April 2026. Oracle now supports the expanded eligibility requirements for Northern Ireland employees, including miscarriage-related absences and day-one eligibility. The system also records and reports qualifying payments separately from existing statutory parental bereavement pay arrangements. The enhancement is automatically enabled and requires no customer action.

The next one is the Use Published Schedules to Determine UK Statutory Sick Pay Qualifying Days. Customers using Workforce Management alongside UK Statutory Sick Pay should pay close attention to this enhancement. Where a published schedule exists before the absence begins, Oracle can now use that published schedule to determine SSP qualifying days rather than relying solely on the employee’s work pattern. For organisations with complex scheduling arrangements, this should help ensure SSP calculations more accurately reflect planned working patterns. Customers planning to use this functionality should review the Schedule Hierarchy Starting Point configuration within relevant sickness absence types.

The US payroll enhancements arguably provide the strongest collection of updates this quarter, combining compliance improvements, increased transparency, and continued investment in AI-assisted payroll analysis. Managing SECURE 603 eligibility has often required manual effort, particularly for organisations with large employee populations. Oracle now automates the determination of catch-up eligibility outcomes through the Start-of-Year process, evaluating high-earner status based on payroll statutory units, tax reporting units, or tax groups depending on configuration. The inclusion of a draft mode is particularly welcome, allowing payroll teams to review outcomes before committing them in final mode. Some complex organisational structures will still require manual intervention, but for many employers this should significantly reduce annual administration effort.

The next feature is the Tax Calculation Statement Page: Federal Income Tax. This is probably my favourite enhancement in the US payroll release. Payroll teams are regularly asked why a particular tax deduction was calculated in a certain way, yet historically obtaining that answer often meant navigating several screens or performing manual calculations. Oracle has introduced a new Tax Calculation Statement view that provides complete visibility into Federal Income Tax calculations. Administrators can either review the calculation components directly or work through a step-by-step breakdown showing intermediate values and calculation logic. For troubleshooting and employee query resolution alone, this has the potential to save a huge amount of time.

Oracle continues to expand the capabilities of its Payroll Run Analyst AI Agent. The agent can now answer natural language questions relating to Federal Income Tax calculations, allowing administrators to ask questions such as why a calculation was performed a particular way or which attributes contributed to the result. This is one of the more practical examples of AI within payroll. Rather than trying to automate the payroll process itself, Oracle is using AI to make it easier for payroll professionals to understand and investigate payroll outcomes.

Oracle has added a new Tax Enforcement Level field within the Federal component of the employee Tax Withholding card. This allows administrators to determine whether annual limit tax tracking should occur at the PSU, TRU, or tax group level. Because the setting exists at employee level, it can also override organisation-level defaults when required. For organisations with more complex employment structures, the additional flexibility will be welcome.

Oracle has also improved how USOPTE statutory tax rule overrides are managed. Payroll administrators can now create, update, delete, and end-date override records directly from the Statutory Rules interface, while also reviewing override history over previous years. It brings what has sometimes been tracked externally back into Oracle in a much more controlled and auditable way.

Oracle continues to invest heavily in Irish payroll, and that’s entirely understandable. Irish Payroll is still relatively new within Oracle Fusion compared to some of the more mature localisations, and Oracle have been steadily expanding both functionality and legislative coverage release after release. The pace of delivery remains impressive, with large number of enhancements arriving in 26D alone. While some of these changes are legislative in nature, others help bring Irish Payroll into line with capabilities that customers in longer-established payroll localisations have already been benefiting from.

The Payroll Activity Centre is now available for Irish payroll customers. This provides administrators with a consolidated view of payroll activity, balances, and exceptions, including Irish-specific values such as PAYE, PRSI, USC, and My Future Fund deductions. The real value isn’t the visibility itself, but the ability to identify and resolve issues earlier in the payroll cycle before they become employee-facing problems.

Oracle has updated eligibility calculations for SSP and Illness Benefit so that they now use recorded sickness absence dates rather than medical certificate dates. It’s a relatively straightforward change, but one that better reflects how absences are typically managed in practice.

The Periodic Foreign Tax Credit enhancement allows payroll teams to apply periodic or annual foreign tax credits through the employee’s PAYE Additional Information card. Rather than waiting for relief to be claimed after year end, payroll can now reduce tax liability during payroll processing itself. For employees with cross-border tax obligations, that has the potential to improve cash flow and reduce the impact of dual taxation while relief is being processed.

Oracle now automatically applies the Department of Social Protection’s 15% net-pay deduction cap for applicable Notice of Attachment deductions. Whenever statutory limits apply, the payroll calculation automatically uses the lower of the requested deduction amount or the permitted cap.

The final enhancement supports deletion requests for previously submitted My Future Fund contribution records. The Send File Submission process can now determine whether an earlier submission exists and automatically generate either an initial submission or a deletion request as appropriate. Additional audit reporting has also been introduced to maintain visibility of deleted contribution records.

Overall, I wouldn’t describe 26D as a blockbuster Payroll release, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. Some of the most valuable payroll enhancements aren’t the flashy ones. They’re the improvements that make investigations quicker, reduce administration effort, improve compliance, or remove manual work that payroll teams have quietly accepted as part of daily life.

For me, the stand-out areas this quarter are the continued maturity of the Redwood payroll experience, the Retropay processing enhancement, and the new transparency around US Federal Income Tax calculations. Together they show Oracle continuing to focus on usability and operational efficiency rather than simply adding more functionality.

If you’re planning your 26D review, I’d recommend paying particular attention to the Redwood changes and checking whether there are opportunities to simplify payroll administration processes as part of your wider upgrade planning. And as always, keep an eye on the What’s New documentation throughout the release cycle. Oracle occasionally slips in additional gems after the initial announcement, and payroll is no exception.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Oracle Learning 26D: Smarter Learning Through Practical AI

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s quarterly release season again and Oracle Learning has delivered a surprisingly strong set of updates in 26D. What stood out to me wasn’t any individual feature. It was the direction of travel. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen Oracle talk extensively about AI, skills intelligence, digital assistants and, more recently, Agentic Apps. For many customers, the question has been whether these capabilities would genuinely change the way people work or simply provide another layer of technology to navigate. With 26D, Oracle Learning starts to answer that question.

Several of the headline updates focus on something far more practical than flashy AI demonstrations. They help managers understand whether learning is driving development, reduce administrative effort for learning teams, and make it easier for employees to manage their own learning journeys.

What’s particularly noticeable is that Oracle is investing across the entire learning ecosystem. Managers gain better visibility into skill development, learning specialists receive more powerful AI-assisted administration tools, and learners benefit from a significantly upgraded self-service experience. As always, Oracle may add additional functionality as the quarter progresses, but let’s take a look at the highlights announced so far.

If you’ve been following Oracle’s Agentic Apps journey, the Team Learning and Development Workspace for Managers is perhaps the most interesting Learning enhancement in 26D. One of the challenges managers often face is connecting learning activity with actual employee development. Completion rates and learning hours tell part of the story, but they rarely answer the question that really matters: is this learning helping people develop the skills they need? Oracle is clearly trying to bridge that gap.

The previous Skills Development by Skill and Skills Development by Direct panels have been replaced with two new views: Directs’ Progress on Development Objectives and Directs’ Learning Alignment with Development Objectives. Rather than simply showing learning activity, managers can now see whether development goals are progressing and whether completed learning is contributing towards those goals.

The Directs’ Progress on Development Objectives panel highlights which team members are making progress against assigned development skills during a 90-day evaluation period. Managers can take action directly from the workspace through delivered email actions, either nudging employees who haven’t started progressing or recognising those who have. The Directs’ Learning Alignment with Development Objectives panel provides a different perspective. It helps managers understand whether completed non-compliance learning aligns with an employee’s development objectives, using completion outcomes and learning context to make those connections visible.

One of the concerns I often hear when discussing AI in HR is whether we’re removing too much human judgement from people processes. Oracle has struck a sensible balance here. The agent analyses learning activity, identifies who may need support and drafts appropriate communications, but managers remain firmly in control. Nothing is sent automatically. The manager decides whether intervention is needed and whether the suggested communication is appropriate. To me, that’s where enterprise AI delivers the most value. Not by replacing managers, but by helping them spend less time finding issues and more time acting on them.

You may remember the Learning Creation Assistant, first introduced in 25D and enhanced further in 26B. In 26D, it has been renamed the Learning Catalog Management Assistant, and Oracle continues to expand what it can do. The main enhancement is support for questionnaire-based self-paced learning.

Learning specialists can now provide a questionnaire title or code and instruct the assistant to create the associated learning item. The assistant validates the questionnaire, determines whether it should be implemented as an assessment or observation checklist, and creates the learning in draft status ready for review and activation.

At first glance this might feel like a relatively small enhancement. In reality, it’s another step towards natural language administration. Learning specialists can focus on what they’re trying to achieve rather than remembering every configuration step required to get there. By allowing administrators to describe the learning experience they want to create and letting the assistant build the underlying structure, Oracle continues to remove friction from content administration. It’s exactly the type of repetitive setup activity that AI should be helping with. The assistant can also capture additional details such as mastery scores, attempt limits and visibility settings as part of the prompt, reducing the amount of manual configuration required.

Customers who already implemented the earlier Learning Creation Assistant should note that the property on the agent must be updated to reference the new delivered runnable agent. Any customisations made against copied templates will also need to be reapplied.

One of my favourite enhancements in 26D is also one of the simplest. Learning specialists can now create task-based self-paced learning directly from rich text instructions, removing the need for a supporting content asset. That may not sound revolutionary, but anyone who has implemented Learning Cloud will recognise the problem it solves.

Many organisations need to track activities that happen outside the platform. Reading a policy, completing an offline activity, attending an external event or carrying out a workplace task are all valid learning experiences, yet administrators have often needed to create workaround content simply to make those activities available in Learning Cloud. 26D removes that complexity entirely.

Learning specialists can simply enter instructions directly within the Redwood learning experience. Learners see those instructions as part of the enrolment details page and complete the activity according to the configured completion rules. Where learner confirmation is enabled, employees can mark the activity as completed themselves. Where administrator verification is required, that option is hidden and completion remains under administrative control.

It’s not necessarily the most exciting feature in the release, but I suspect it will become one of the most useful. The feature is enabled automatically and requires no additional configuration.

This enhancement originated in Oracle Ideas Lab, which is always encouraging to see. Learning specialists can now add self-paced learning directly into a course structure, allowing learners to access online content through courses in the same way they access instructor-led or virtual offerings. From the course details page, administrators can either attach an existing self-paced learning item or create a new one directly within the workflow.

The standout capability, however, is the new Replace with Self-Paced Learning action. I particularly like the inclusion of the replacement capability. Replacing learning content in large catalogues can be surprisingly challenging. Organisations need to modernise content without losing visibility of historical completions, compliance records and in-progress learning.

Oracle has clearly thought beyond simply enabling a new feature and considered the operational reality of managing learning catalogues over time. When a legacy offering is replaced, completed and in-progress learning records are preserved for reporting and audit purposes. Learners already progressing through an offering can still complete it, while future assignments are redirected towards the new self-paced learning. Deprecated offerings become read-only and are no longer available for enrolment, assignment or discovery within the catalogue.

The final enhancement that caught my attention is the continued evolution of My Learning Assistant. We’ve moved well beyond the stage where conversational assistants simply answer questions. Oracle is increasingly positioning learning assistants as task-oriented experiences, helping users complete actions rather than just retrieve information. In 26D, learners can review assignments, explore recommendations, enrol onto learning and access key learning processes from a single conversation. That moves the assistant much closer to becoming a genuine learning companion rather than simply a search tool.

The assistant can now answer questions about active, overdue, mandatory, upcoming, self-enrolled and completed learning. It can recommend content from the catalogue, support enrolment directly where eligibility allows, and launch processes such as Record External Learning and Request Noncatalog Learning. Recommendation cards are also richer, displaying details including learning type, effort, pricing information, AI-generated reasoning and links to catalogue information.

Just as importantly, Oracle continues to ground responses in actual Learning data and workflows. If information doesn’t exist, the assistant won’t invent it. That may sound obvious, but trust is one of the most important factors in successful enterprise AI adoption. Users need confidence that recommendations and answers are based on real information, particularly when they’re making decisions about compliance or professional development.

Customers who deployed My Learning Assistant using the original 25D template should take note. Oracle recommends replacing the existing template with the updated delivered version to avoid inconsistent behaviour. Depending on your deployment approach, guided journeys used to surface the assistant through the Ask Oracle banner may also require updates.

If I had to summarise Oracle Learning 26D in a single phrase, it would be practical AI. There are no headline-grabbing announcements or futuristic concepts here. Instead, Oracle continues to focus on helping managers, learning specialists and learners spend less time navigating systems and more time focusing on development.

What I find particularly interesting is that Learning is becoming one of the strongest showcases for Oracle’s broader AI strategy. Across multiple features, Oracle isn’t attempting to remove people from the process. The technology is being used to surface insights, reduce administration and support decision-making while keeping humans firmly in control. That’s where I believe enterprise AI creates the greatest value. Not by replacing expertise, but by helping people apply it more effectively. And if Oracle continues along this path, Learning could become one of the strongest examples of AI delivering measurable business value within Oracle Fusion Applications.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

What’s New in Core HR: Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Release 26D

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time again, quarterly release time, and 26D brings a solid set of updates for Core HR teams. There’s a meaningful enhancement to the Assignment Change Assistant, a quiet but important fix for position synchronisation via HCM Data Loader (HDL), continued evolution of the Activity Centre experience, and a deprecation notice that anyone who built agents in the last couple of releases needs to act on. As usual, Oracle may add further features throughout the month, so let’s take a look at what’s been introduced so far.

First introduced in 26C, the Assignment Change Assistant, now referred to as the Employment Updates Agent, has been extended considerably in 26D. The original release allowed managers and HR specialists to initiate assignment changes conversationally through the AI agent framework. In 26D, Oracle has addressed one of the natural limitations of that first version: users can now ask the agent for information before deciding what to change.

So rather than jumping straight into a transaction, a manager can open a conversation and ask something like “Who is David’s current manager?” or “What job is this person assigned to?” and get a direct answer from the agent before initiating any update. That’s a genuinely useful shift in how the assistant works. It moves from being a transaction tool to being a decision-support tool as well.

Beyond information retrieval, the supported transaction scope has grown. Change Working Hours and Change Manager are now supported processes alongside the original capabilities. Salary updates are also now handled directly through the agent: managers or HR specialists can specify either a new salary amount or a percentage increase , which covers the majority of straightforward salary adjustment scenarios without needing to exit to a quick action. For anything more complex, Oracle’s guidance is to use the standard quick actions, which is sensible.

Two other additions worth noting: Business Title can now be derived automatically from the selected Job or Position and presented in the review summary before submission, and on the review page, users can now click Request Change to modify any supported assignment attribute before submitting, not just the manager notes as was the case in 26C.

One thing to note: salary update access through the agent requires the user to already hold the privilege and data access needed to create a salary change through the standard application. The agent doesn’t grant any additional access beyond what the user already has.

The next feature I want to highlight is Blank Position Values Now Synchronise Correctly via HDL. This one might look small on paper, but if you’ve ever had to unpick mismatched position and assignment data after a bulk load, you’ll appreciate exactly why it matters.

Prior to 26D, when a position attribute configured for synchronisation was cleared, running an HCM Data Loader (HDL) load would not propagate that blank value down to the assignment. The result was that the assignment retained a old value even though the corresponding position attribute had been removed. For organisations that rely on position synchronisation to keep assignment data consistent, this created a category of data discrepancy that was difficult to detect and time-consuming to resolve.

From 26D, blank values are synchronised to the assignment provided the attribute is configured for position synchronisation. The logic is straightforward: if Grade Ladder is a synchronised attribute and it’s removed from a position, the next HDL load can now clear that value on the corresponding assignments. In addition, Position Name can now be configured to synchronise with Assignment Name through HDL, so the Assignment Name is derived from the Position Name as part of the synchronisation process.

If your organisation built agents in 26A or 26B using either the Personal Information Assistant or the Person Legislative Information supervisor agent templates, this is the announcement you need to pay attention to. Both templates are deprecated in 26D. Agents already created from these templates will continue to function for now, but Oracle has confirmed these templates will no longer be enhanced. The replacement is the Person Data Assistant, introduced in 26C as a workflow agent that extends person data management with workflow-based child agents for selected data areas.

The practical implication is clear: any new development should be on Person Data Assistant, and existing agents built on the deprecated templates should be migrated. If your organisation has already deployed either of the old agents in production, now is the right time to start your migration planning. The agents won’t break overnight, but you’ll be building on a foundation that Oracle is no longer investing in, and the gap between the deprecated templates and Person Data Assistant will only widen with each subsequent release.

Start by reviewing what data areas your existing agents cover, map those to the Person Data Assistant’s workflow-based child agent structure, and assess the configuration effort involved. There’s no need to rush into a weekend migration, but equally don’t leave this until the deprecated templates stop functioning without warning.

The HCM Professional Activity Centre was introduced in 26C and is already a firm favourite. 26D brings a couple of enhancements that make it meaningfully easier to use for both HR professionals and the administrators who configure it. Applications and quick actions are now consolidated into a single list under the Quick Actions section. Previously these were presented separately, which added navigation steps for users looking to get to a specific action or application. Now, selecting View More in the Quick Actions section shows pinned quick actions first, followed by other quick actions, and then the list of applications in one continuous view.

The second enhancement is organisation-level default pinning. Administrators can now define a default set of pinned quick actions for all users via the Structure tool. If a user hasn’t set their own pins, they’ll see the organisation defaults. If they have already personalised their pins, those personal choices remain and aren’t overridden. This gives administrators a sensible way to surface the most commonly needed actions for their user population without forcing any individual into a rigid layout.

One thing to note: navigation to a future hire’s person activity centre from search results has been disabled in this release.

The Team Activity Centre enhancements in 26D follow a similar pattern to the Professional Activity Centre improvements above, with the addition of a genuinely useful capability for managers around goal assignment. Managers can now assign a performance or development goal to multiple direct and indirect reports selected through Team Activity Centre filters, all in a single action. Previously, assigning the same goal to a group of employees meant repeating the process person by person. For managers cascading goals across a team or department, that was a real time cost. This feature removes it.

The same quick actions and applications consolidation available in the Professional Activity Centre applies here too. Quick actions and applications are now in a single list under View More, with pinned actions appearing first. Organisation-level default pins work the same way.

Overall, 26D is another incremental but worthwhile update for Core HR. The headline change is the deprecation of the older personal information templates, so if you’ve built agents using those templates it’s worth starting your migration planning sooner rather than later. Beyond that, Oracle continues to refine both the AI and user experience story, with improvements that should make everyday HR processes a little smoother. As always, keep an eye on the readiness materials throughout the quarter, as Oracle sometimes introduces additional enhancements after the initial announcement.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used according to their Copyright Guidelines

GPT-5.6 Luna Is Here: What Oracle’s Latest LLM Change Means for AI Agent Studio Customers

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

One of the questions I’m asked most often about Oracle AI Agent Studio is simple: “Which model should we be using?” Until recently, many customers were selecting GPT-4.1 Mini or GPT-5 Mini for their AI Agents. That option is now changing.

Oracle has introduced a new model, GPT-5.6 Luna, as the recommended Large Language Model (LLM) for Fusion AI Agent Studio workloads. At the same time, Oracle has announced the planned deprecation and retirement of GPT-4.1 Mini and GPT-5 Mini, with both models scheduled to be fully retired in Oracle Fusion Cloud Update 27B in April 2027.

The good news is that there is no immediate action required. The important thing is understanding what is changing, who is affected, and what you should be planning for over the next few releases.

With Update 26C, GPT-5.6 Luna becomes Oracle’s recommended model for new AI Agent Studio configurations. Oracle states that Luna delivers improved response quality, lower latency and better cost efficiency for most Fusion AI workloads compared to the models it replaces. As a result, GPT-4.1 Mini and GPT-5 Mini are entering a phased retirement process:

  • 26C (available now): Luna becomes available and recommended for new configurations.
  • 26D (October 2026): GPT-4.1 Mini and GPT-5 Mini can no longer be selected for new configurations.
  • 27A (January 2027): Existing configurations continue to run unchanged.
  • 27B (April 2027): GPT-4.1 Mini and GPT-5 Mini are fully retired and any remaining configurations are automatically migrated to a supported replacement model.

If you’ve already built agents using either of these models, nothing stops working tomorrow. Oracle is giving customers a clear migration window.

The key point here is that this only impacts customers using AI Agent Studio workloads built on GPT-4.1 Mini or GPT-5 Mini. If you’re using the free OSS model, you’re not affected by this announcement and no action is required. Likewise, organisations using Bring Your Own LLM (BYOLLM) configurations are unaffected. That’s an important distinction because I’ve already seen some confusion online from customers assuming every AI Agent Studio implementation needs immediate remediation. That simply isn’t the case.

Model retirement is a normal part of the AI lifecycle. Unlike traditional software components that may remain unchanged for years, AI models evolve rapidly. Newer models typically deliver better accuracy, lower operating costs and improved performance.

Oracle’s position is that GPT-5.6 Luna provides the best balance of response quality, performance, latency and cost efficiency for the majority of Fusion AI workloads. Rather than continuing to support multiple generations of similar models indefinitely, Oracle is concentrating investment, testing and support around a newer foundation. From a customer perspective, that’s generally positive. The challenge is making sure your agents continue to behave the way you expect after migration.

The Real Question: Will My Agent Behave Differently? Possibly. This is the part of the announcement that deserves the most attention. Oracle is very clear that customers should re-test prompts when moving to Luna because model behaviour can vary. Even when two models are performing the same business task, the outputs may not be identical. If you’ve spent time fine-tuning prompts for question answering agents, planning agents, tool-calling workflows or process automation scenarios then you should assume validation testing is required before moving to production.

In my experience, this is often where organisations underestimate the effort involved in AI lifecycle management. The migration itself may take minutes. Proving that the business outcome remains acceptable often takes significantly longer.

For existing implementations, my advice is straightforward. Don’t panic, but don’t ignore it either. There is no immediate requirement to migrate. Existing configurations continue running through Update 27A. However, I would recommend that organisations start planning their testing approach well before 27B arrives.

A practical approach would be:

  1. Identify any agents currently using GPT-4.1 Mini or GPT-5 Mini.
  2. Create a test environment if one does not already exist.
  3. Switch the agent to GPT-5.6 Luna.
  4. Run representative business scenarios.
  5. Compare outputs.
  6. Adjust prompts if required.
  7. Schedule production migration before Update 27B.

Oracle’s own migration guidance suggests making expected outputs more explicit, clearly separating user-facing responses from internal processing logic, and testing thoroughly before deployment.

What About Licensing and Cost? Fortunately, this is one area where customers are unlikely to see much change. Oracle classifies GPT-4.1 Mini, GPT-5 Mini and GPT-5.6 Luna within the same Balanced (previously Premium) model category, consuming AI Units under the existing Fusion AI pricing model. Oracle states that the overall impact should be cost neutral.

That’s welcome news given the number of conversations currently taking place around AI costs and maintaining business value from AI investments. I actually see this announcement as a sign that Oracle’s Fusion AI platform is maturing. We’re moving beyond a world where organisations simply “pick an LLM” and hope for the best. Instead, we’re seeing proper lifecycle management, defined retirement schedules, migration paths and testing guidance.

The important message is this: If you’re using GPT-4.1 Mini or GPT-5 Mini today, you have time. Nothing requires immediate action. But if you want to remain in control of your model selection and ensure your agents continue to behave as expected, now is the right time to start planning your migration and testing strategy. And if you’re creating new AI Agents in Oracle Fusion AI Agent Studio today, Oracle’s recommendation is clear: start with GPT-5.6 Luna.

Oracle Has Moved the SCM Redwood Deadline. Here’s Why You Still Need to Act Now

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

For many Oracle Fusion SCM customers, Tuesday’s announcement will have come as welcome news. The mandatory Redwood adoption deadline has moved from before 27A to before 27B, giving organisations approximately another three months to complete their transition. Oracle’s latest guidance now places mandatory adoption before 27B for most SCM products, rather than before 27A.

If you’ve been worried about fitting testing, change management, personalisation reviews and training into an already busy roadmap, that extra quarter will undoubtedly help. But if you’re interpreting this as an opportunity to pause your Redwood programme, I think that would be a mistake. The deadline has moved. The amount of work required has not.

The reality is that many customers have been asking for more time. Across Procurement, Inventory, Manufacturing, Order Management and other SCM modules, Redwood adoption isn’t simply a technical upgrade. It requires organisations to review processes, retrain users, validate extensions, revisit personalisations and test end-to-end business flows.

The additional quarter gives customers breathing space to do those activities properly rather than rushing to meet an arbitrary date. That’s a positive outcome. It also allows Oracle to continue delivering the final Redwood experiences and setup pages that are still being completed across parts of the SCM portfolio. Oracle’s recent communications highlight continued delivery of Redwood functionality alongside a growing catalogue of Redwood-only features and AI capabilities.

What the extension does not change is Oracle’s strategic direction. Classic remains on the retirement path. Redwood remains the future. A year ago, many conversations about Redwood in Supply Chain focused on colours, layouts and navigation. Today that feels increasingly outdated.

Almost every release introduces new capabilities that are built specifically for Redwood pages. Across Procurement and SCM, Oracle is investing heavily in AI Agents, Agentic Apps, enhanced analytics, intelligent search experiences and workflow automation that simply do not exist in classic pages.

Examples include:

  • Autonomous supplier research
  • Purchase order advisory agents
  • Sourcing Command Centre Agentic Apps
  • AI-assisted contract capabilities
  • Redwood-only procurement administration pages
  • Enhanced receiving approvals and workflows

These aren’t cosmetic improvements. They fundamentally change how users interact with Oracle Fusion SCM. The risk of delaying Redwood adoption is no longer just missing a compliance deadline. It’s falling behind on innovation.

Whenever I talk to customers about Redwood, I often hear concerns about profile options, configuration settings or deployment approaches. Those things matter. But they are rarely the hardest part. The bigger challenge is behavioural change.

Many organisations successfully enable Redwood but continue allowing users to navigate through familiar legacy pathways. Users naturally revert to what they know, training materials remain based on old screenshots, and business processes continue reflecting classic ways of working. The result is that Redwood becomes technically deployed but operationally underused. That’s important because many new capabilities assume users are operating within Redwood experiences. If users never fully transition, organisations struggle to realise the value Oracle is delivering.

One of the reasons Redwood projects are frequently underestimated is because the technical enablement is usually only a small part of the overall effort. The work that catches organisations out tends to include:

  • Reviewing existing Page Composer personalisations
  • Assessing extensions and integrations
  • Updating training materials
  • Revising support documentation
  • Testing business-critical scenarios
  • Running end-to-end process validation across multiple modules
  • Preparing suppliers and external users for interface changes
  • Supporting adoption after go-live

These activities take time. More importantly, they require availability from business users who are typically balancing day jobs alongside project responsibilities. An additional quarter definitely helps. It should not be wasted.

Interestingly, the organisations that benefit most from this timeline change probably won’t be the ones that slow down. They will be the ones that use the additional time strategically. Instead of rushing towards a deadline, they can:

  • Perform more comprehensive testing
  • Complete personalisation assessments properly
  • Validate role-based access thoroughly
  • Deliver stronger training and communications
  • Run pilots with business users
  • Resolve adoption challenges before they impact operations

Those activities reduce risk significantly more than simply delaying action for another three months.

Although Oracle has moved the mandatory deadline to before 27B, my recommendation remains largely unchanged. Plan for 27A. Deliver by 27A if possible. Use the additional quarter as contingency rather than scheduling your entire programme around it. Projects rarely run exactly to plan. Key resources become unavailable. Testing uncovers unexpected issues. New quarterly updates introduce further considerations. Competing priorities emerge. Organisations that reach readiness by 27A will have flexibility. Organisations that wait until the final possible moment may find themselves under pressure once again.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that Redwood was never supposed to be a simple compliance activity. Oracle’s long-term investment in user experience, automation, AI Agents and Agentic Apps is increasingly centred around Redwood. Every quarterly update widens the gap between what is available in Redwood and what remains available in classic experiences.

Yes, customers have gained another quarter. That is undoubtedly helpful. But the organisations that see the greatest benefit won’t be those that use the time to delay. They will be the ones that use the time to prepare properly, drive adoption effectively and put themselves in the best position to take advantage of everything Oracle is building next. The clock hasn’t stopped. Oracle has simply given you three more months to get it right.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Beyond the Technology: Where Agentic Apps Could Take Oracle Fusion Next

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

Over the course of this series, I’ve explored how Oracle Fusion AI Agent Studio is changing, why the Builder Assistant matters, the building blocks that sit behind Agentic Apps, and some of the design principles that can help organisations create meaningful solutions. Throughout all of those discussions, one theme has consistently emerged. The technology itself is only part of the story. What’s really interesting is where this might lead.

Whenever a new technology appears, there’s a tendency to focus on what it can do today. That’s understandable. Organisations want to understand the practical use cases, the risks, the costs and the potential benefits before investing time and effort. But sometimes it’s worth stepping back and thinking about the broader direction of travel. When I look at Agentic Apps, I don’t see another reporting tool, dashboard framework or application development platform. I see the beginnings of a different way of interacting with enterprise software.

For most of the history of business applications, software has been built around transactions. An employee updates their details. A manager approves a request. A finance team processes an invoice. A procurement specialist creates a purchase order. Applications have traditionally been designed to help users complete specific tasks as efficiently as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. In many cases, it’s highly effective.

However, organisations today are dealing with increasing levels of complexity. Decisions are rarely based on a single transaction. They often require information from multiple systems, multiple teams and multiple business processes. This is where I think Agentic Apps become particularly interesting. Rather than simply helping users complete a transaction, they have the potential to help users navigate an entire business outcome. That’s a very different objective.

One of the ideas I find most compelling is the shift from process-centred thinking to journey-centred thinking. Take something as common as onboarding a new employee. Traditionally, onboarding spans numerous activities across HR, IT, Facilities, Security, Payroll, Learning and line management. Each team plays an important role, but the overall experience is often fragmented because it spans multiple systems and processes. From the employee’s perspective, however, there is only one journey. The same principle applies to customer experiences, supplier management, project delivery and countless other business activities.

We tend to organise systems around organisational structures. People experience them as journeys. Agentic Apps have the potential to bridge that gap by bringing together information, actions and communications from across multiple processes into a single, outcome-focused experience. Instead of asking users to navigate organisational complexity, the technology could increasingly help manage that complexity on their behalf.

Many of today’s business challenges don’t fit neatly within departmental boundaries. Employee retention isn’t just an HR issue. Supplier performance isn’t just a procurement issue. Project success isn’t just a project management issue. The factors influencing those outcomes often span multiple teams, multiple data sources and multiple business processes. This is where traditional applications can sometimes struggle. Each application does its job well, but no individual application has visibility of the complete picture.

Agentic Apps offer the possibility of bringing those perspectives together. Imagine a manager being able to view workforce data, project commitments, learning progress and performance indicators in a single context when making a resourcing decision. Imagine procurement, finance and supply chain teams working from the same set of insights when managing a critical supplier issue. Imagine employees receiving support that reflects their entire journey rather than the individual processes sitting behind it. The technology is still evolving, but the direction feels increasingly clear.

One challenge I hear repeatedly from customers is that the pace of business continues to accelerate whilst organisational complexity continues to increase. There are more systems. More data. More regulations. More stakeholders. More expectations. The result is that people spend an increasing amount of time gathering information and coordinating activities rather than focusing on high-value decision making.

I don’t believe Agentic Apps will eliminate complexity. Business will always be complex. What they can potentially do is make that complexity easier to navigate. Rather than expecting individuals to manually bring together dozens of signals from across the organisation, an Agentic App can help surface what matters, explain why it matters and support the next action. In many ways, that feels like the natural evolution of enterprise software. For years we’ve focused on capturing information. The next phase may be helping organisations make better use of it.

Of course, technology alone isn’t enough. One thing I’ve learned from years of transformation programmes is that successful adoption rarely depends entirely on the software. Culture matters. Leadership matters. Governance matters. Trust matters.

Organisations exploring Agentic Apps should be thinking about these areas now. How much autonomy should agents have? Which decisions require human approval? How will recommendations be reviewed and governed? How will users understand and trust the outputs being generated? These questions are every bit as important as the technical architecture. In fact, I would argue they’re more important.

The organisations that achieve the greatest success with Agentic Apps are unlikely to be those with the most sophisticated technology. They’ll be the organisations with the clearest understanding of where AI can support people whilst maintaining appropriate governance and accountability.

Whenever discussions turn to AI, there is often concern that technology will replace human expertise. Personally, I don’t think that’s where the greatest opportunity lies. The most valuable decisions organisations make often require context, judgement, empathy and experience. These are qualities that remain fundamentally human.

What Agentic Apps can potentially do is reduce the amount of time spent gathering information, navigating systems and managing administrative tasks. That creates more time for the activities people are uniquely good at. Leading teams. Building relationships. Solving problems. Managing change. Making informed decisions. If organisations approach Agentic Apps with that mindset, the conversation becomes much more constructive. It stops being about replacing people and starts being about helping people be more effective.

Perhaps the thing that excites me most about the future of Agentic Apps isn’t a specific feature or capability. It’s the possibility of making enterprise software feel more human. For years, users have adapted to systems. They’ve learned processes, navigated menus, searched for information and worked around organisational boundaries. Agentic Apps have the potential to reverse that relationship. Instead of people adapting to software, software can increasingly adapt to people. It can understand context. It can bring together information. It can help guide users towards better outcomes. That’s a powerful idea. And whilst we’re still in the early stages of that journey, I think we’re beginning to see what that future could look like.

When I started exploring Oracle Fusion AI Agent Studio, I expected to spend most of my time learning about agents, prompts, workflows and integrations. Those things are important, and they will continue to evolve rapidly over the coming years.

But the more time I spend with these capabilities, the more convinced I become that the most important conversation isn’t about the technology itself. It’s about outcomes. It’s about helping organisations deal with increasing complexity. It’s about helping people make better decisions. And ultimately, it’s about creating experiences that feel less like software and more like support.

Whether you’re just starting to explore Agentic Apps or already experimenting with your first use cases, I think that’s the question worth keeping at the centre of the conversation. Not what the technology can do. But what outcomes it can help your organisation achieve.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.