Tag: Generative AI

Oracle ERP Cloud Financials 26B

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Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the world of HCM for ERP just yet. My enthusiasm for Oracle AI is very much alive, and with four new AI agents landing in Financials this release, I simply couldn’t ignore it. I’d never claim to be a Financials expert, but I do know how long ERP users have been asking for meaningful AI capabilities, and this release feels like a real response to that demand. Oracle has clearly leaned in, and there’s plenty here worth getting excited about.

The long awaited Ledger Agent brings an intelligent, AI‑powered experience to General Ledger, helping finance teams work more efficiently and proactively. It continuously monitors balances, journals, and transactions using configurable prompts, surfacing clear, contextual insights only when attention is needed. Accountants can ask natural language questions about balances, variances, journals, and process statuses, and receive precise, easy‑to‑understand explanations backed by correlated ledger and subledger data. By combining proactive monitoring, root‑cause insight, and seamless access to related ledger actions in a single guided experience, the Ledger Agent reduces time spent navigating multiple screens or compiling information manually, supports earlier detection and resolution of issues, and helps teams maintain accurate, up‑to‑date financial positions while respecting existing security and access controls.

The Payables Agent delivers a modern, AI‑driven approach to invoice processing, helping organisations move towards a truly touchless Payables experience. It automates invoice ingestion, compliance, and control across multiple sources and formats, using GenAI to reduce manual effort, improve data accuracy, and surface only the exceptions that need attention. With unified capture, automated attribute defaulting, intelligent anomaly detection, and a single, streamlined view for managing invoices, teams gain full visibility and control across the invoice‑to‑pay lifecycle. The result is faster processing, stronger compliance, reduced risk of errors or fraud, and improved supplier satisfaction, allowing Payables to shift from a reactive cost centre to a value‑generating function that supports better financial outcomes.

The Payments Agent introduces a smarter, more strategic approach to supplier payments by helping organisations optimise how and when they pay, rather than simply executing scheduled runs. Using AI‑driven insights and conversational guidance, it supports users across the full payment lifecycle, from evaluating payment options such as dynamic discounting and virtual cards, through creating and managing supplier offers, to executing and monitoring payments securely. By assessing the financial impact of different payment programmes in real time and translating decisions seamlessly into action, the Payments Agent improves cash flow, generates incremental financial benefits, and strengthens operational control. The result is a more proactive, insight‑led Payables function that reduces manual effort, highlights exceptions early, and enables finance teams to focus on working capital optimisation and stronger supplier relationships.

The Expenses Agent simplifies expense reporting by allowing employees to complete and submit expenses entirely through email, using natural language. Employees can forward receipts directly to the agent, which automatically creates the expense and prompts for any missing details, such as justifications, attendee information, or cost centres, via a simple email reply. Once all required information is captured, the expense is ready for submission or can be auto‑submitted in line with company policy. This conversational, email‑based approach reduces manual data entry, minimises errors, and cuts down on back‑and‑forth, accelerating reimbursements while improving compliance and delivering a far more intuitive experience for both employees and finance teams.

To wrap up, this has been my first step into writing about ERP Cloud Financials, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed exploring what Oracle is doing in this space, particularly around AI. I’d really welcome your feedback on this post, whether it’s what resonated, what you’d like to see more of, or where I could go deeper. If there’s interest, I’d be more than happy to write further blogs on Financials and continue sharing my perspective as these capabilities evolve.

Oracle HCM Cloud Learn 26B

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Release 26B is now here and we’re edging closer to the final Redwood deadline for Learn in 26D. This final deadline incorporates the remainder of the Learning Admin tasks, but the key one is Assignment Management. This is going to be a key focus for Oracle in the next couple of releases.

The first feature is one that came from the Customer Idea Lab, which means a customer logged it and other customers voted for it. The enhanced Instructor Activity Center brings all instructor‑led event management into a single, intuitive calendar‑based workspace. Instructors can view and manage sessions in multiple calendar views, access event details and materials directly from the calendar, create or join sessions quickly, and easily manage learners, attendance and enrolments. By centralising scheduling, session management and learner engagement, the experience reduces administration and allows instructors to focus more on delivering high‑quality learning.

The enhanced Learning Creation Assistant now allows learning content to be created directly from email, making it faster and easier for instructors and learning teams to contribute new content. By simply sending instructions in the email body or as an attachment, users can generate a range of learning formats and receive a confirmation with a direct link to the draft item. This streamlined approach reduces administrative effort, removes reliance on complex workflows, and helps organisations accelerate knowledge sharing across the business.

The updated Redwood Record and Request Learning experience makes it easier to record, request and track learning activity across the organisation, whether it sits inside or outside the learning catalogue. Teams can record completions, request external learning, and manage assignments more flexibly, including setting initial statuses and creating profiles with past start dates. Together, these enhancements provide a more complete and accurate view of workforce learning, supporting compliance, personalised development and better‑informed decision‑making.

The enhanced support for online learning events makes it easier to deliver engaging, well‑managed virtual classrooms, including richer integration with Microsoft Teams. Instructors can use automated meeting creation, breakout rooms, attendance tracking and completion rules, while learners benefit from seamless access via notifications and calendar invites. Together, these improvements reduce manual effort for learning teams and create a smoother, more connected experience for both instructors and participants.

The final enhancements I want to highlight focus on third‑party learning content, specifically integrations with OpenSesame and Udemy. The OpenSesame integration makes it simple to bring high‑quality, third‑party content into Oracle Learning as self‑paced courses, with automated refreshes keeping the catalogue up to date and learner progress tracked seamlessly in a single transcript. Alongside this, the Udemy Business integration allows curated learning paths to be automatically imported and managed within Oracle Learning, giving learning teams clear visibility through xAPI tracking while providing learners with uninterrupted access to Udemy content. Together, these integrations reduce administration, improve catalogue visibility and broaden access to valuable learning resources real‑time tracking of learning outcomes.

Oracle often introduces a few additional features as the month progresses, so it’s always worth keeping an eye out. If anything particularly exciting appears, I’ll share a follow‑up blog to make sure you’re fully up to date. In the meantime, you can read my latest write‑up on the new Core HR features in Release 26B here.

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Oracle HCM Cloud Recruit 26B

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The final deadline to move to Recruit Redwood is the 26B release, so if you haven’t made the move yet, I’d strongly recommend doing so as soon as possible. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what’s coming up for Recruiting in 26B. As is often the case, Oracle may introduce additional features as the quarter progresses, and if any of those are particularly noteworthy, I’ll share a follow‑up update.

The Job Application Overview in the Redwood experience introduces an AI‑generated summary to help recruiters review applications more efficiently. When a candidate uploads a CV or adds further information after applying, the Overview tab automatically presents a concise summary across three key areas. This includes screening and interview highlights, showing the status of questionnaires, assessments and feedback; an AI‑driven candidate summary covering recent experience, education, skills, achievements and work preferences, with clear call‑outs where these align to the requisition; and a dedicated section for candidate attachments, bringing all supporting documents into one place.

The next feature will not surprise you to hear, is another AI one. The generative AI search capability in the Redwood Candidate Experience makes it quicker and easier to find the right candidates using natural language. By simply describing the type of candidate you’re looking for, the AI automatically translates your input into relevant search filters and values. The search intelligently matches your wording to structured candidate data, applying keywords and related synonyms, and can also include CV content if required. Clear aggregation counts show how many candidates match each filter, while synonym‑based suggestions highlight potential matches found within resumes. All filters remain fully editable, allowing you to refine or adjust the results further and quickly narrow down to the most relevant candidates.

The Interview Schedule Templates list has been rebuilt in the Redwood experience using Visual Builder Studio, making it quicker and easier for recruiters to manage interview scheduling at scale. When the relevant profile options are enabled, the list is accessed via My Client Groups > Hiring. The redesigned page is built to reduce clicks and save time, with intuitive search and filtering, the ability to save searches, flexible sorting, and customisable columns so recruiters can see the information that matters most to them. Templates can be opened, reviewed and actioned directly from the list, and new interview schedule templates can be created just as easily. By aligning interview schedule management with other Redwood list pages, this update delivers a more consistent and efficient experience, helping recruiters spend less time on administration and more time focusing on candidates.

I love an Activity Centre, they’re a one stop shop for all transactions relating to that area. The new Sourcing Activity Centre provides recruiters with a single place to manage all sourcing‑related activities across campaigns, candidates and events, helping them stay on top of priorities and reduce manual tracking. Users with the appropriate access can reach the Sourcing Activity Centre directly from Candidate Sourcing or via a Quick Action. The activity list gives clear visibility of everything requiring attention, with the ability to filter by activity type and quickly identify high‑priority items. Recruiters can open activities to view more detail and take action directly from the list, making it easier to keep sourcing work moving without switching between pages. Activities span campaigns, candidates and events, including follow‑up tasks, campaign status updates and event‑related actions such as registrations and capacity management. By bringing these into one central view, the Sourcing Activity Centre helps recruiters work more efficiently, respond faster, and maintain momentum across their sourcing activities.

Oracle often introduce additional features as the quarter progresses, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for further updates. If anything particularly impactful appears, I’ll share a follow‑up blog to make sure you’re fully up to date. In the meantime, you may also be interested in my latest write‑up on the new Core HR features in Release 26B, which you can find here.

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Oracle Fusion Common Features 26B

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It’s my favourite time of the quarter, Oracle has just shared what’s coming in release 26B. I don’t usually write about the Common Features releases, but this is where the really exciting developments for AI Agent Studio tend to appear, and this update is no exception. As ever, more features may follow later in the month, but for now let’s take a look at what’s been announced so far.

AI Agent Studio now supports the creation of agentic apps, bringing together multiple specialised AI agents to deliver a single, seamless user experience. Rather than relying on one general‑purpose agent, organisations can combine task‑focused agents such as Sales, Inventory or Finance, each with its own context and reasoning, to provide deeper insights and more relevant actions. This modular approach makes it easy to scale and evolve apps over time, while enabling them to analyse information, prioritise activities and recommend actions that help drive the business forward.

The new Playground capability in AI Agent Studio makes it much quicker, and safer, to refine and validate custom AI Agents by letting you edit and test individual parts of an agent team directly in the studio, rather than running the entire end‑to‑end flow each time. You can isolate specific nodes (including supervisor, agent and LLM nodes), tune prompts and parameters, and see results immediately using Save and Run, with dynamic prompt insertion to add expressions on the fly and Run History to track changes. In practice, this shortens the build–test cycle, improves quality control, and gives teams far more confidence when creating and evolving custom AI Agents because they can verify behaviour in real time before publishing. I’m really looking forward to this one!

AI Agent Studio now includes a set of Oracle‑managed, predefined topics that can be applied across agents and agent teams to help deliver more consistent and professional interactions. These topics support areas such as professional voice and tone, age‑neutral language and gender‑neutral responses, automatically shaping outputs to be appropriate, inclusive and business‑ready. By applying these topics directly within agents and nodes, organisations can accelerate agent design while increasing confidence that responses align with expected standards and organisational values.

The final feature isn’t an AI one, but a integration change. This Redwood enhancement enables faster and more reliable data extraction by shifting reporting and integration workloads away from the transactional system and onto a read‑optimised replica, synchronised in near real time. By extracting data from a replicated Autonomous Data Warehouse, organisations can reduce load on live Fusion applications while benefiting from a modern architecture that abstracts business objects from the underlying data model. To support this, specific security changes are required, including enabling the external application integration profile option, assigning new extract and scheduling privileges, and granting roles to allow users to manage extracts and securely view or download files, ensuring controlled access to this high‑performance data extraction capability.

As noted earlier, Oracle may introduce further Common Features later this month. If any of these updates stand out, I’ll share a follow‑up blog covering the highlights. In the meantime, you might like to read my latest post exploring the new Core HR features in Release 26B, which you can find here.

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

Oracle HCM Cloud Core HR 26B

~ K8 Mead ~ 4 Comments

It’s my favourite point in the quarter: Oracle has just announced what’s coming in Release 26B. As you’d expect, this update brings a strong focus on AI‑led enhancements, with plenty to be excited about. While Oracle may add further features as the month goes on, let’s start by exploring what’s been announced so far.

The first thing I want to call out actually relates to Release 26C, but it’s important enough to flag now. For organisations that are a little behind in their move to Redwood, Oracle will be automatically enabling a number of pages in 26C. These include the Team Activity Center, Personal Details, Contact Information, Family and Emergency Contacts, Identification Information, Additional Person Information, Person Identifiers for External Applications, Grades, Grade Rates, Legal Entity HCM Information, Legal Reporting HCM Information and Reporting Establishments. While not all of these pages are end‑user facing, if you haven’t already enabled them, I’d strongly recommend completing your testing and switching them on as soon as possible. That way, you can be confident everything works as required for your organisation before Oracle enables them automatically.

Now let’s turn to AI, which is probably why you’re here. The Personal Information Assistant has been enhanced to go well beyond simply retrieving data, allowing users to create, update and delete selected personal information directly within the chat experience, all in line with existing role‑based access controls and approval rules. It supports key personal details such as demographic and biographical information, email addresses and phone numbers, validates entries where lists of values apply, and guides users through any required choices. The assistant can still view information for the user or others, search by name, email address or person number, and provide direct links to the relevant pages where a change needs to be completed in the application. Importantly, it fully respects your existing Fusion security configuration, so users will only ever see data they’re entitled to access, and where fields have been hidden using VBS, the agent prompt can be adjusted to ensure those fields remain restricted.

There are two new, closely related features in this release, both focused on Journeys. AI can now be used to trigger a workflow agent when a Journey task is completed or even when it’s saved, enabling key business actions to run automatically without manual follow‑up. As soon as a task is marked complete, the associated workflow agent executes the required logic, such as sending notifications or integrating with external systems, ensuring downstream processes are triggered immediately and consistently. For example, when a manager approves a badge request, the agent can notify the badging system, confirm approval to the employee and kick off badge creation straight away. The same applies when a Journey task is saved as a draft, allowing certain processes to start earlier, improving responsiveness and reducing unnecessary delays.

The Document Records Management Assistant has been further enhanced in Release 26B with the introduction of Document Records Management Assistant V2, extending the capabilities introduced in 26A beyond employee self‑service to support line managers and HR specialists. This new workflow agent uses natural‑language interaction and advanced language models to help users quickly find, create and manage document records across their teams, while the original 26A agent remains available for employee self‑service without disruption. By bringing document management into a single conversational experience, the assistant simplifies access to records, automatically understands user intent, guides users through record creation with the right metadata, and provides clear, policy‑aligned responses and direct links where needed, reducing training effort and making document management faster and more intuitive for everyone involved.

The final AI capability worth highlighting is the new AI Assistant for Managing Jobs. This AI‑powered companion for Oracle Cloud HCM Jobs enables HR teams to create, view, update and manage job data through a single conversational experience. Using natural‑language interaction and Oracle’s AI Agent framework, it provides clear, policy‑aligned responses, making it quicker and safer to work with job records without navigating multiple screens. The assistant highlights changes across job versions, generates helpful summaries and insights, guides users step by step through updates and validations, identifies missing or outdated information, and can also edit or delete jobs where appropriate. By reducing manual administration and minimising the risk of errors, it helps HR teams maintain accurate, compliant job data while freeing up time to focus on more strategic priorities.

I’d also like to highlight a number of updates in Release 26B that will be particularly relevant for UK public sector organisations. Enhancements to the HCM UK TPS Generic Setup Diagnostics report introduce more robust checks, making it easier to identify and resolve Teachers’ Pension setup issues, with additional validation highlighting mismatches in Annual Full‑Time Equivalent salary rate definitions and expanded balance feeds helping administrators spot missing or incorrect inputs that impact pension calculations. Updates have also been made to the Civil Service Pension Scheme interface to reflect new and revised validation rules introduced by Capita as scheme administrator, with many of these changes already supported within the existing extract logic, helping ensure submissions continue to meet current scheme requirements and removing remaining references to MyCSP from user‑facing text. Finally, support has been added for proportional TLR1 and TLR2 payments within the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, enabling awards to be calculated, reported and pensioned in line with updated guidance effective from September 2025, and ensuring full‑time and part‑time arrangements are treated accurately based on contract type.

As mentioned earlier, Oracle will be rolling out additional Core HR features later this month. If any of these updates prove particularly noteworthy, I’ll share a follow‑up blog with the details. In the meantime, keep an eye out for upcoming posts where we’ll take a closer look at other Fusion modules as part of Release 26B.

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Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud: Where AI Readiness Actually Starts

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If you’ve been working in Oracle Cloud for any length of time, you’ll know that data governance quality determines the quality of everything downstream. Reports, forecasts, consolidations, AI outputs: they’re all only as good as the master data behind them. Following the EDM London Spotlight I attended, here’s where the product stands and where it’s heading.

What EDM is (and isn’t)

The naming matters. EDM is “Enterprise Data” Management, not Enterprise “Data Management.” It’s not a database tool or storage layer. It’s a governed system of reference for managing the data that describes your enterprise: hierarchies, dimensions, master data, reference data, data maps, taxonomies, reporting structures.

The problem it solves is one most Oracle customers will recognise. Without EDM, a chart of accounts change request starts with an email to IT, fans out to half a dozen application admins, and ends somewhere between a hierarchy mismatch in Planning and a data kickout in Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC). No audit trail, no systematic workflow, no single point of control. EDM replaces that with a governed, collaborative process where changes are requested, validated, approved, and propagated in a controlled sequence.

EDM versus Oracle DRM

DRM was built for waterfall implementation: gather requirements, build the model, deliver, train, repeat. EDM is designed for an agile, incremental approach. Turn it on, start using it, add rules and policies as they become evident. The traditional MDM big-bang approach has a well-documented failure rate, and EDM’s application-centric model sidesteps it. You start with one application, demonstrate value, and grow from there. New applications are onboarded incrementally without disrupting what’s already in place. For organisations still on DRM, the migration path is practical: users continue in DRM while it’s registered inside EDM as an application, and the legacy system is archived once the transition is complete.

Implementation design patterns

The London session was clear on which pattern works best. Nominate an originating application rather than using a master application as the front door to all changes. The originating application pattern keeps data, objects, and validations scoped to the application that owns them. Downstream applications subscribe to changes. This avoids the problem where a single undifferentiated data model makes it impossible to isolate which rules belong to which application. The master application pattern can work if you reduce it to canonical properties only, but it adds complexity and makes onboarding new applications more disruptive.

EDM and AI

Oracle’s AI approach in EDM operates at two levels.

Internal assistants work within EDM’s existing request and approval model. The Registration Assistant (25.12) generates application metadata and configuration artefacts from a sample data file, accelerating new application setup considerably. The Conversational Request Assistant lets users query master data in natural language, ask questions about existing requests, and generate bulk update actions, all within normal governance controls. Future internal assistants on the roadmap include a Data Profiling Assistant and a Data Matching Assistant using hybrid string, fuzzy, and semantic match rules.

Foundational data governance for AI is arguably the most consequential angle. When enterprise data objects lack clear intent in their descriptions, AI models infer incorrectly. Conflicting hierarchies across ERP, EPM, SCM, and HCM produce inconsistent answers. EDM’s governed descriptions, properties, hierarchies, and cross-application mappings become the ground truth that AI models rely on, reducing hallucination risk and making outputs auditable. If your organisation is investing in enterprise AI, getting master data governance right isn’t optional preparation: it’s what determines whether your AI outputs are trustworthy.

Multi-domain MDM and the roadmap

EDM was built domain-agnostic from day one, which is a genuine competitive differentiator. Competitors largely started in a single domain and expanded. EDM covers Party, Product, Location, Finance, and other domains natively. For Fusion ERP customers, CDM (Customer Data Management) remains the right starting point for mastering customer party records. EDM enriches those with alternate hierarchies, data maps, and cross-application alignment before distributing to EPM and Analytics. For heterogeneous environments with multiple Salesforce instances across regions, EDM can act as the central master customer data hub.

If your Oracle Cloud implementation hasn’t included an EDM conversation yet, it probably should. And if you’re planning an AI initiative on top of Oracle Fusion, EDM is where the trusted data foundation that makes AI outputs reliable actually gets built.

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What’s New in Oracle HR Help Desk 26A: A Smarter, More Connected Experience

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Oracle’s 26A release marks an important step forward for HR Help Desk, with a clear focus on improving the experience for employees, HR teams and service managers alike. Built entirely on the Redwood user experience, this release reinforces Oracle’s direction of travel: HR Help Desk is evolving from a traditional case management tool into a smarter, more responsive service platform that blends self‑service, automation and AI‑assisted support.

A key message is that Redwood is now the standard. The Classic HR Help Desk experience has been deprecated and will not receive further feature enhancements, with customers expected to complete their move to Redwood ahead of the 27A release. Any new HR Help Desk implementations must use Redwood from the outset. For organisations that have not yet made the transition, this release is a clear signal that now is the right time to plan and prepare.

From an employee perspective, 26A introduces a more intuitive and conversational way to get help. A new AI agent within My Help allows employees to ask questions in plain language and receive answers based on published HR knowledge, with the option to raise a request or be guided to the right support when needed. At the same time, Oracle has strengthened how requests are presented to employees by ensuring that primary contacts only see information intended for them, keeping internal notes and agent‑only details out of view by default.

HR agents and supervisors also benefit from more control and visibility. Enhancements to the omnichannel supervisor dashboard make it easier to see agent availability, workload and queue performance, with new metrics supporting better day‑to‑day decision‑making. Case handling has been refined too, with smarter assignment options, improved search, and the ability to upload case documents directly into employee document records. AI‑assisted case analysis is available throughout the case lifecycle, helping agents identify next steps or similar cases, particularly in more complex situations.

Knowledge management continues to play a central role in HR Help Desk, with 26A introducing new tools to create, structure and reuse content more effectively. Oracle has expanded its AI Agent Studio, added richer attributes for knowledge content, and enabled the use of generative AI to create articles for custom content types. Knowledge events can now be surfaced to support wider integration and automation. Taken together, these changes show Oracle’s continued investment in making HR Help Desk more intelligent, scalable and ready to support modern HR service delivery.

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Unlocking Real‑World Value with Oracle’s AI Factory

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AI is moving at an incredible pace, and it can feel hard to know where to start, or how to get real results quickly. That’s exactly where Oracle’s AI Factory comes in. It gives organisations a clear, practical way forward, with step‑by‑step guidance, useful tools, and expert support to help you adopt, scale, and make the most of AI across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Database, the Fusion Applications Suite, and industry solutions.

Instead of trying to figure everything out on your own, you can tap into prebuilt use cases, clear guidance, and tried‑and‑tested patterns that cut down on both effort and risk. The framework is all about driving real, measurable improvements, whether that means modernising legacy systems, unlocking real‑time insights, or making the most of the embedded AI already available across Oracle’s application suite.

Many organisations don’t realise just how deeply AI is already built into Oracle’s technology stack. Once they see what’s possible, the same questions usually come up: Where do we begin? What does success look like? How do we make sure we see real value? Oracle’s AI Factory is designed to answer exactly those questions and guide customers through every step of the journey. With support from Oracle’s experts and the AI Customer Excellence Centres, you can validate ideas, shape use cases, and run pilots with confidence, all while keeping innovation moving without taking on unnecessary risk.

The first tool in the new AI Factory toolkit is one I already use, and genuinely love. Oracle’s Cloud Success Navigator is an AI‑powered platform that supports customers through every stage of their Oracle Cloud journey, from best‑practice guidance to migration support, feature updates, and resources that help speed up adoption. It brings everything together in one place: useful tools, expert insights, and clear, structured guidance to help organisations get implementations right, stay up to date with new capabilities, and get more value from their investments. By cutting through the complexity that often comes with cloud decisions, it helps teams move faster, reduce risk, and take full advantage of Oracle’s latest innovations across infrastructure and applications.

Oracle’s AI Customer Excellence Center gives organisations a practical, low‑risk way to explore and validate advanced AI and multicloud architectures by working directly with Oracle experts. It’s essentially a global hub where customers can try out proof‑of‑concepts, refine complex designs, and make sure their AI solutions perform reliably at scale. With this expert support on hand, teams can move faster, de‑risk big ideas, and make well‑informed decisions as they modernise and adopt AI across cloud, hybrid, or multicloud environments. It’s all about giving customers the confidence to innovate, without the unnecessary guesswork.

Oracle’s Operate services help organisations run their Oracle technology more efficiently by giving them hands‑on expertise across infrastructure, databases, and applications, while also opening the door to AI‑powered capabilities that streamline day‑to‑day work and support better decision‑making. The idea is simple: free up your internal teams to focus on innovation and higher‑value work, while Oracle takes care of the smooth running, optimisation, and ongoing evolution of your cloud environment. It’s a practical way to stay agile, reduce operational risk, and get more from your Oracle investment.

Oracle’s Innovate services are all about helping organisations adopt new Oracle capabilities quickly and confidently. They combine expert guidance, proven best practices, and time‑saving automation to speed up transformation and make the whole process feel far more manageable. Because these services are closely connected with Oracle Product Development, and delivered in collaboration with partners, customers get the support they need to embrace AI‑powered features, modern cloud technologies, and continuous improvement across their Oracle estate. The goal is simple: reduce risk, shorten implementation timelines, and ensure organisations can unlock long‑term value and innovation from their Oracle investments, all while keeping pace with fast‑changing business demands.

I love that Oracle has pulled together a complete toolkit across Applications, Data, and Infrastructure to support organisations on their AI journey. I keep a close eye on what others in the market are doing, and time and again it feels like Oracle is ahead, not just in delivering the technology, but in giving customers the tools and guidance they need to get real value from it. I’m genuinely excited to hear more about AI Factory and see what comes next. If you’re interested in exploring how it could help your organisation, now’s the perfect time to start the conversation.

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Why Embedded AI Is the Real Differentiator in Enterprise Automation

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AI is everywhere at the moment, there’s really no getting away from it, but not all AI is created equal. Plenty of platforms promise co‑pilots, assistants and automation, yet very few can actually take action inside core business systems. That’s why Oracle’s approach with AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications really stands out.

Most enterprise AI tools today act as co‑pilots: brilliant for drafting content or answering questions, but far less capable when it comes to genuine process automation. Oracle has taken a different approach. Its AI agents are embedded directly within Fusion Applications, giving them the power to:

  • Understand business data in real time
  • Make decisions with full context
  • Write back into transactional systems securely
  • Automate tasks end‑to‑end without relying on extra tools

This isn’t AI “bolted on”, it’s AI woven right into the core of the application. And yes, I realise I’m starting to sound like an Oracle salesperson, but the difference between Oracle and other providers is hard to ignore. The image below highlights just how significant that gap is, comparing what Oracle delivers with five other major service providers.

Across the market, vendors are running into the same familiar obstacles:

  1. Added AI costs. Whether it’s Copilot capacity, ServiceNow’s AI tiers or Salesforce Flex Credits, AI is frequently positioned as an optional extra rather than something included as standard.
  2. Co‑pilots, not agents. Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday and others are excellent at generating content and offering recommendations, but they seldom deliver true autonomous action within transactional systems.
  3. Fragmented platforms. Many providers depend on several data models, clouds and integration layers. Their AI often relies on separate analytics environments or copied data, which strips away workflow context and makes automation far more difficult.

You may have already come across Oracle’s One Platform, and this is where Oracle really pulls ahead of the pack. Oracle keeps things refreshingly straightforward: Fusion Applications, data and AI all sit within a single, unified ecosystem. That brings three key advantages:

  • Embedded intelligence — agents work directly inside the applications employees use every day.
  • A unified security and data model — consistent governance and safer, more reliable automation.
  • True write‑back — agents can update transactions natively, without middleware or separate AI clouds getting in the way.

So you might be wondering, “That all sounds impressive, but what does it actually mean for me?” At its core, agentic AI is about cutting down manual effort, improving accuracy and boosting operational efficiency. Oracle’s embedded approach ensures that automation is reliable, properly governed and able to scale as your business does. Crucially, it isn’t stitched together from multiple products. With Oracle, AI is built in, a fundamental part of the system that runs your business, not an optional extra layered on top. It marks a shift from AI that simply talks, to AI that genuinely delivers.

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Oracle HCM Cloud Recruit 26A

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Things are really heating up in the world of Recruit as we approach the final deadline to move the remaining Recruiting pages over to Redwood in 26B. This release is your last opportunity to make the switch. With the 25C deadline behind us, you should already be managing requisitions, job applications and candidates in Redwood. The next phase brings exciting updates around offers, interviews, campaigns, events and agency hiring. So, let’s dive in and see what’s new…

The AI Career Coach, first introduced in 25D to help candidates find roles that match their skills, has already been enhanced in 26A. The Career Coach now uses the Supervisor model, which brings all agents together under one umbrella, streamlining information sharing and removing redundancies. The agent is pre-seeded and ready to run, so there’s no need to create agents from templates. You can also choose to display the widget as an overlay, ideal for highly customised sites, rather than the default side panel, ensuring it doesn’t interfere with your design. For one-page application flows, the widget now displays correctly, and when shown as a side panel, the navigation menu is replaced with a horizontal progress bar. The fixer button appears on the page instead of the left-hand side, and a clickable Terms and Conditions link pulls content from the job application legal disclaimer in the Recruiting Content Library. If you’ve enabled CV parsing, candidate CVs will be parsed into the application flow when uploaded via the widget. From this release, any CV uploaded into the recommended jobs widget in the candidate experience will also be available to the agent.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of AI, anything that makes life easier. The next update introduces an AI assistant for job requisition creation, working like a smart, on-page helper that answers both general and field-specific questions as you build a requisition. Because its guidance is driven entirely by the documents you upload and the prompt you configure, it’s easy to tailor to your organisation’s policies and practices. The agent helps users get it right first time, capturing the correct data, minimising downstream issues and boosting overall efficiency without interrupting the flow.

By 26B, the Job Offer process must be fully transitioned to Redwood, and Oracle has introduced a new AI agent to make this easier. Acting as an FAQ-style assistant, the agent helps users by answering both general and field-specific questions during job offer creation. Its guidance is based entirely on the documents you upload and the prompt you configure, making it simple to align with your organisation’s policies and practices. This smart assistant ensures job offers are created smoothly, reduces downstream issues by capturing accurate data, and boosts overall efficiency without disrupting the process.

Another useful Redwood Offer feature is the Initiate Job Offer Creation for Hiring Managers functionality. Hiring managers with the Initiate Job Offer privilege can now start the process and share notes with the recruiting team using the Create Job Offer action from the Redwood job applications list or details page. On the Create Job Offer page, they can add comments in the Notes to Recruiter field to provide context or instructions. Once they click Save and Close, the candidate’s application moves to Offer – Draft status and appears on the Redwood Job Offers list page. The recruiter receives a notification to complete the offer details using the Edit Offer action, with the manager’s notes displayed in a banner above the Details and Offer tabs. When ready, the recruiter can submit the job offer for approval or save it for further editing later.

The final feature worth mentioning is the new Redwood Interview Details page, which brings several improvements over the previous responsive version. A new Basic Info section now displays key interview details at a glance. In the Interviewers section, you can easily resend the Interview Scheduled notification, handy if someone says they haven’t received it. The Scheduled Candidates section allows you to click candidate and job requisition links to open a drawer with more information, and the Actions menu lets you manage candidates scheduled for the interview. Under Interview Resources, you’ll find interviewer guidelines, attachments and candidate notes added to the interview. If you’re an interviewer, you can respond directly to the invitation, accept, tentatively accept, decline or propose a new time. When proposing a new time, the drawer can even display your availability if calendar integration (Microsoft 365 or Google) is enabled.

Oracle often slip in new features during the month, so it’s worth keeping an eye out. If anything truly game-changing appears, I’ll share another blog post to keep you updated and make sure you don’t miss out. In the meantime, why not check out my latest write-up on the new Core HR features in Release 26A? You can find it here.

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