Tag: Redwood

Oracle Learning Paths, Offerings and Redwood: What’s Actually Changing?

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

Before we get started, a quick thank you to one of my blog readers. This article came about following a direct request from a customer who asked if I could explain what is happening with Oracle Learning Offerings and the new Learning Paths functionality. It’s the first time I’ve been specifically asked to write a blog on a particular Oracle Fusion topic, and after looking into it I realised they’re probably not alone in being confused.

If you’ve recently seen references to Learning Paths, heard that Offerings are going away, or wondered what Redwood means for Oracle Learning, you’re not the only one. Oracle is changing terminology, introducing new Redwood-native learning objects and modernising Learning administration at the same time. That makes it difficult to understand exactly what is changing and, more importantly, what it means for customers who have spent years building and managing learning content in Oracle Learning. So let’s unpack it.

One of the biggest sources of confusion is that two separate changes are happening at the same time. In Oracle Fusion Learning 26B, Oracle rebranded Specialisations as Learning Paths. Oracle states that the self-service learning experience now consistently presents Specialisations as Learning Paths, although administrators may still see the old terminology in some classic administration pages for the time being.

Learning Paths are therefore the new name for what many Learning administrators have known as Specialisations. They are designed to provide a structured learning journey containing multiple learning items, helping organisations create role-based, compliance-based or career-development learning programmes. They are not a direct replacement for a single Offering.

For many years, Oracle Learning followed a fairly structured hierarchy. A typical eLearning item might look something like this: Course → Offering → Activity. This provided flexibility but often resulted in multiple objects needing to be created and maintained for even relatively simple learning content. If you wanted to publish a straightforward self-paced training course, you typically found yourself creating several related objects before learners could access the content. It worked, but it wasn’t always intuitive.

Oracle has been redesigning Learning as part of its broader Redwood strategy. One of the most significant developments arrived in 24D with the introduction of the new Redwood Self-Paced Learning experience. Oracle describes this as a redesigned process that combines what were previously separate activities into a single workflow, bringing together content, activities and learning publication within one experience.

The goal is simple: reduce complexity; simplify administration; improve usability and create a more modern learner experience. Rather than forcing administrators through multiple setup steps, Oracle is moving towards a more streamlined content creation model.

So are Offerings being removed? This is where things get interesting. There is a lot of discussion within the Oracle Learning community about Offerings becoming less central to the Learning architecture. Industry commentators have suggested Oracle’s long-term direction is towards Redwood-native learning objects rather than the traditional Offering-centred model. However, what is important is separating community interpretation from Oracle’s documented position.

What Oracle has clearly documented is:

  • Specialisations are becoming Learning Paths.
  • Redwood Self-Paced Learning introduces a simplified approach to managing self-paced learning content.
  • Oracle continues to invest heavily in Redwood Learning experiences.

What I have not yet found in Oracle readiness documentation is a statement saying: “Learning Paths replace Offerings.” In fact, these are different concepts serving different purposes. Think of a Learning Path as a curriculum rather than an individual training item. A Learning Path might include: multiple self-paced learning items; instructor-led training; assessments; recommended learning sequences or mandatory prerequisites. In other words, Learning Paths help define what learners should complete and in what order. They are ideal for: new starter onboarding; leadership programmes; compliance journeys; certification pathways and role-based development programmes. This is broadly the same purpose that Specialisations have always served, just under a new name.

For most organisations, I don’t think there is a need to panic. My advice would be: first, start becoming familiar with Redwood Learning administration if you haven’t already. Second, review how much you rely on traditional Course and Offering structures for new content creation. Third, start thinking about Learning Paths from a learner journey perspective rather than viewing them as a replacement for individual training content. Most importantly, don’t assume that every mention of Learning Paths is related to Offerings. In many cases Oracle is simply referring to the rebranding of Specialisations rather than introducing a direct replacement for existing Offerings.

Having worked with Oracle Learning for many years, I can understand why customers are asking questions. The terminology changes are significant, and because they are arriving alongside the wider Redwood transformation it’s easy to assume everything is changing at once. What I find encouraging is Oracle’s clear focus on simplifying Learning administration. The historic Course, Offering and Activity model could be powerful, but it could also feel overly complex for straightforward learning scenarios. Redwood Self-Paced Learning is a good example of Oracle reducing that complexity and making content easier to create and maintain.

For now, my advice is simple: treat Learning Paths as the evolution of Specialisations, keep an eye on Oracle’s Redwood Learning roadmap, and avoid assuming that Learning Paths are a direct one-for-one replacement for Offerings. The reality is a little more nuanced than that.

And finally, thank you again to the customer who suggested this topic. If there are other areas of Oracle Fusion you’d like me to explore in a future blog, feel free to get in touch. It seems I’ve accidentally opened the suggestions box.

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

Could AI Be the Missing Piece in the Redwood Migration Puzzle?

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

I’ll admit it. This is probably the first time I’ve written a blog focused on Oracle CX. Most of my content tends to centre around HCM, ERP, SCM, AI Agent Studio, or the wider Oracle Fusion platform. However, over the last few months I’ve been spending a lot more time working with Oracle Helpdesk. As Helpdesk sits within the Oracle CX product suite, that has naturally led me to take a closer look at some of the innovation happening within CX.

When I discovered that Oracle had developed an AI-powered assistant specifically designed to help organisations accelerate their move from the Classic user experience to Redwood, I was intrigued. Redwood migrations are a challenge that many Oracle customers are facing, and the idea of using AI not just to answer questions, but to actively guide and support that journey, felt like an interesting glimpse into where enterprise AI is heading.

It’s worth calling out an important caveat before I go any further. This particular capability is currently designed for Oracle CX Service and its associated extensibility framework. It is not available for HCM, ERP or SCM. However, what interested me as much as the solution itself was the fact that the CX product team is actively exploring and proving patterns that could potentially influence future AI-assisted implementation and configuration experiences across other Oracle product areas.

One of the biggest challenges with Redwood adoption is not usually understanding why you should move. Oracle has been clear about the benefits for some time. Redwood provides a more modern user experience, improved efficiency, greater flexibility through Visual Builder Studio, intelligent recommendations, and access to functionality that is only available within the Redwood user interface.

The real challenge is often understanding how to get there. Customers frequently ask questions such as: How do I recreate an existing extension in Redwood? Is a particular extensibility option available in my target release? What is the supported way to add custom functionality to a specific page? How do I avoid building something that won’t survive the next quarterly update? These are exactly the types of questions implementation teams spend significant amounts of time researching.

What caught my attention was that Oracle’s approach isn’t simply to place a large language model in front of documentation and hope for the best. Instead, the assistant is designed to provide grounded guidance using curated, release-aware sources that are specific to Fusion Service extensibility. The aim is to help users understand supported approaches, identify limitations, and surface any missing information required to answer the question accurately. That distinction is important.

One of the biggest misconceptions about enterprise AI is that the value comes from the model itself. In reality, the value often comes from the quality of the information that sits behind it. A generic AI model may be incredibly capable, but if it doesn’t understand the specific product, release, extensibility framework, or support boundaries involved, its answers can quickly become unreliable.

The CX team appears to have recognised this. The assistant routes questions to curated repositories of release-specific information and clearly highlights uncertainty or gaps where additional context is needed. Rather than positioning AI as an infallible expert, it is positioned as an accelerator for research and decision making. I also liked the emphasis on human judgement.

The guidance repeatedly reinforces that users should provide context, review the recommendations, and validate the proposed approach before implementation. In other words, AI helps you get to an answer faster, but it doesn’t remove the responsibility to apply experience and critical thinking. That’s a message I’ve been repeating in many of my recent AI-focused blogs, regardless of whether we’re talking about Agentic Apps, generative AI, or implementation accelerators.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is where this could lead. Today, the capability focuses on Fusion Service extensibility and Redwood migration activities. It can help users understand new release functionality, identify supported implementation patterns, and even assist with Visual Builder Studio-related work.

Tomorrow, could we see similar experiences helping HCM administrators understand Redwood customisations? Could ERP teams receive guided support when adapting role-based pages? Could SCM implementation consultants get release-aware recommendations about supported configuration options?

Those are questions only Oracle can answer. But what seems clear is that the CX team is exploring a practical application of AI that goes beyond simply generating content. Instead, it aims to reduce implementation effort, improve confidence, and help customers reach the right outcome more quickly. For me, that’s where enterprise AI becomes genuinely interesting. Not when it replaces expertise, but when it helps organisations make better use of it.

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

Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement 26D: Making Procurement Easier for Everyone

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

It’s quarterly release time again and Oracle has delivered a surprisingly practical set of updates for Procurement in 26D. There’s plenty of AI in this release, which won’t come as a surprise given Oracle’s recent direction. What I found interesting, though, is that many of these features aren’t about replacing procurement professionals or automating entire processes. Instead, they’re focused on removing friction. Making it easier to buy something. Easier to raise a request. Easier to manage contracts. Easier for suppliers to work with you. And honestly, that’s where I think the biggest value often comes from.

Most employees aren’t procurement experts. They don’t know the difference between a catalogue requisition, a non-catalogue request or an intake process. They simply need a laptop, a contractor, some software or a piece of equipment. The more effort they spend working out how to navigate procurement processes, the less time they’re spending on their actual job. That’s the theme that runs through Oracle Procurement 26D.

One of my favourite additions in this release is the new Procurement Request Concierge. If you’ve followed Oracle’s investment in AI across HCM, you’ll probably recognise the concept straight away. Rather than expecting users to understand which process they need, Oracle lets them start with a simple conversation.

An employee can describe what they’re trying to achieve and the Concierge works out the most appropriate route. Behind the scenes it might direct them to a catalogue purchase, an intake request, a procurement policy adviser or another specialised procurement assistant. I think this is an important shift.

For years, organisations have invested significant effort in training employees how to use procurement systems. Oracle is increasingly turning that around and teaching the system how to understand employees instead. That may seem like a subtle difference, but it has the potential to improve adoption, reduce incorrect requests and make procurement feel far less intimidating for occasional users.

Oracle has also continued enhancing the Intake Request Creation Assistant. The individual improvements are relatively small, but together they make the experience significantly more natural. The assistant can now understand units of measure, handle currencies more intelligently, capture supporting documents and retain information that doesn’t neatly fit into predefined fields. Oracle has also introduced AI-generated request summaries to help reviewers quickly understand what’s being requested.

What I like about these enhancements is that they’re focused on a real problem: people don’t speak in structured procurement forms. Users naturally describe what they need in their own words. Historically, procurement systems expected employees to translate those requirements into a format the system could understand. Increasingly, Oracle is teaching the system to do the translation instead. That’s exactly how AI should be used. The best AI isn’t always the most visible AI. Sometimes it’s simply the technology that quietly removes the annoying bits of a process.

Two enhancements to the Purchase Requisition Creation Guide stood out for me because they address challenges many organisations face every day. The first is multilingual support. For global organisations, English often becomes the default language for business systems, even when it isn’t the first language of many employees. Allowing employees to interact with procurement assistants in their preferred language reduces barriers and makes the technology accessible to a much wider audience.

The second enhancement improves visibility into internal material sourcing. If stock isn’t available from a preferred internal source, requesters can now see alternative sourcing options immediately, rather than discovering availability issues later in the process. Neither feature is particularly flashy. Both are likely to save users frustration. And that’s often a much better measure of success.

One of the updates that caught my attention has nothing to do with AI. Oracle has improved the way approval errors are communicated to users. Historically, requisitions could sometimes appear stuck with little indication of what had gone wrong. That inevitably leads to support calls, emails and frustration as users try to work out what happened. In 26D, error messages are clearer, more informative and provide better diagnostic information when something goes wrong. Whilst this isn’t ground breaking, improvements like this often have a disproportionate impact on user satisfaction because they address genuine everyday frustrations.

The biggest enhancements in 26D arguably sit within Enterprise Contracts. Both features focus on tasks that have traditionally required substantial manual effort. The first is AI-powered contract ingestion. Many organisations have large collections of contracts sitting in shared drives, document repositories and archive systems. Bringing those contracts into a structured contract management solution has often required significant manual effort and review. Oracle can now use AI to help classify those documents, extract key information and create contract records. If you’re undertaking a contract transformation programme, consolidating legacy systems or simply trying to improve contract visibility, this could significantly reduce the effort involved.

The second enhancement builds on Contract Expert. Rather than relying solely on traditional rules, Oracle can now evaluate contracts against policy guidance and recommend or automatically apply appropriate clauses. For me, the real value isn’t the AI itself. It’s consistency. As organisations grow, maintaining consistent contractual terms becomes increasingly difficult. Features that help ensure the right clauses are included at the right time can improve governance and reduce risk without creating additional work for contract authors. That’s the sort of practical AI adoption I like to see.

Several of the 26D enhancements focus on suppliers rather than internal users. Supplier contacts can now manage multiple supplier relationships using a single account, reducing the need for multiple logins and simplifying administration. Oracle has also introduced a new Redwood experience for supplier invoicing and payment management, creating a more modern and streamlined interface for suppliers submitting invoices and tracking payments. It’s easy to focus entirely on employee experience when reviewing release notes, but supplier experience matters too. The easier you make it for suppliers to do business with you, the smoother your procurement processes become overall.

Like almost every Oracle release at the moment, 26D also continues the wider Redwood journey. Additional Supplier Management setup pages are now available in Redwood, reducing the need for administrators to move between classic and Redwood experiences. It’s not the biggest story of the release, but it reflects Oracle’s continued progress towards delivering a more consistent user experience across the entire procurement suite.

What I like about Procurement 26D is that Oracle hasn’t tried to solve procurement with a single headline-grabbing feature. Instead, we’re seeing dozens of improvements that make procurement easier for everyone involved. Employees get a simpler starting point. Requesters receive more intelligent guidance. Contract managers gain tools that improve consistency. Suppliers benefit from a more streamlined experience.

Yes, AI is everywhere in this release. But the most valuable features aren’t necessarily the ones shouting about AI. They’re the ones quietly helping people complete tasks faster, make better decisions and spend less time fighting the system. That’s not always the most exciting story. For most procurement teams, though, it’s probably exactly the right one.

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

Oracle Fusion Cloud 26D: Common Features Gets More Practical

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

When Oracle publishes its quarterly updates, most people head straight for HCM, ERP, Payroll or Learning. Common Features is usually the section that gets less attention. That’s understandable. Historically, it’s often been home to the more technical platform updates that only administrators and implementation teams get excited about. But every now and then a release comes along where the Common Features updates deserve a closer look. 26D is one of those releases.

This quarter brings a mixture of Redwood enhancements and AI Agent Studio improvements that focus less on flashy new functionality and more on solving some of the challenges organisations face when running Oracle Fusion at scale. Supportability, governance, testing, deployment, cost control and communication may not sound particularly exciting, but they’re often the difference between a successful implementation and a frustrating one.

Redwood has been Oracle’s strategic user experience for several years now, and most customers are either well into their migration journey or actively planning it. What caught my attention in 26D is that Oracle is continuing to address some of the operational gaps customers have identified along the way.

Organisations spend a lot of time trying to communicate important information to employees and managers. The problem is that emails get ignored, intranet posts go unread, and people rarely look in the places you’d like them to. Oracle’s answer in 26D is the introduction of contextual announcement banners for Redwood pages. Rather than displaying generic messages everywhere, organisations can now surface targeted information directly within specific business processes. Think payroll cut-off reminders, compliance notices, legislative updates, planned maintenance notifications or guidance for a particular transaction.

The real value here isn’t the banner itself. It’s the fact that the message can be contextual. You can display information when and where it’s actually relevant, rather than hoping users remember something they read in an email three weeks ago. For organisations operating across multiple countries or regulatory environments, this could become a simple but effective way to ensure users see the right information at the right time.

This is probably my favourite Redwood update in 26D: Built-In Issue Recording For Redwood Pages. Anyone who has ever raised a Service Request with Oracle knows the conversation often starts with exactly the same question: “Can you provide a recording of the issue?” Until now, that has usually meant reaching for external screen recording software, capturing screenshots, writing detailed reproduction steps and then trying to explain what the problem actually looks like. 26D makes that process much simpler.

Users can now record issues directly from Redwood pages and generate a recording identifier that can be attached to support requests. It isn’t a flashy feature. But it is exactly the sort of practical improvement that customers appreciate because it makes everyday support processes easier. Faster evidence gathering means faster diagnosis. Faster diagnosis means faster resolution. If you’re currently rolling out Redwood or supporting a large user community, this is one of those features you’ll probably start using immediately. It’s also worth noting that access is controlled through specific security privileges, so administrators will need to review role assignments before making the capability available to broader user groups.

I’ve written quite a few blogs about Oracle AI Agent Studio over the last year, and one thing has become increasingly clear. Oracle is moving beyond the “look what AI can do” phase and focusing on what organisations actually need to deploy AI responsibly and at scale. That’s exactly what we see in 26D. Rather than introducing lots of new AI capabilities, Oracle has concentrated on governance, testing, deployment controls and operational management. Frankly, that’s where the focus should be.

One of the biggest concerns organisations have when introducing AI is maintaining control over responses. Oracle has introduced prebuilt guardrails that can be applied to large language model workflow nodes within AI Agent Studio. The purpose is straightforward. Help keep responses grounded in approved enterprise content and reduce the risk of agents wandering into irrelevant, unsafe or inappropriate territory.

Let’s be clear: guardrails are not a silver bullet. They won’t eliminate every AI risk and they don’t replace broader governance controls. What they do provide is an additional layer of protection inside the workflow itself. For organisations looking at production AI deployments, that’s an important step forward. It is also encouraging to see Oracle making the guardrail instructions visible within debugging tools. Transparency is becoming increasingly important as organisations seek confidence in how AI agents are making decisions and generating responses.

Another welcome enhancement is greater control over model selection. Different models excel at different tasks. Some prioritise speed and efficiency, while others deliver stronger reasoning capabilities but at a higher cost. Until recently, model selection was often treated as a platform decision. Oracle is now giving organisations more flexibility to choose the model that best fits each use case. What I particularly like is the introduction of model lifecycle visibility.

The platform now flags deprecated models, helping organisations identify affected workflows before support is withdrawn. That might sound like a small change, but it removes the risk of discovering a model retirement after it’s already impacted a production process. Anyone responsible for AI governance will appreciate that level of visibility.

One of the challenges many organisations face with AI is that it often sits outside their established development lifecycle. Applications have deployment processes. Integrations have deployment processes. Reports have deployment processes. AI solutions frequently end up managed separately. 26D begins to change that.

Oracle has introduced CI/CD integration for AI Agent Studio workflows and applications, allowing organisations to incorporate AI artefacts into the same controlled release processes they already use elsewhere. For enterprise customers, this matters far more than a shiny new AI feature. It means AI development can follow the same approval processes, audit controls and change management practices as every other critical component within the Oracle landscape. That is exactly what many governance teams have been asking for.

If you’ve spoken to colleagues about AI over the last year, you’ll know that the conversation quickly moves beyond capabilities. Eventually someone asks: “How much is this going to cost?” That’s why I think AI budget management could prove to be one of the most important additions in this release.

Organisations can now allocate AI unit budgets, monitor consumption, set warning thresholds and automatically stop activity when budgets are exhausted. What this really delivers is visibility. Finance teams gain insight into usage patterns. IT teams gain operational control. Business leaders gain confidence that AI spending won’t suddenly spiral beyond expectations. As organisations move from pilot projects into large-scale adoption, this kind of governance capability becomes essential.

If I had to choose the single most important AI Agent Studio enhancement in 26D, it would be ATLAS. Traditional software testing is relatively straightforward. Given the same input, you expect the same output every time. AI doesn’t work like that. Testing AI systems has always been significantly more complex because quality can’t always be measured through traditional pass-or-fail criteria.

ATLAS gives organisations a structured framework for testing, validating and comparing AI workflows before they reach production. Teams can replay scenarios, validate expected workflow routes, measure quality, compare models and identify issues before users ever see them. That may not sound exciting. For organisations deploying AI into business-critical processes, it’s huge.

Good governance isn’t just about controlling access or managing budgets. It’s about ensuring solutions perform consistently and predictably. ATLAS helps bring that discipline to AI Agent Studio. Honestly, this feels like one of the strongest signals yet that Oracle is serious about supporting enterprise-grade AI adoption rather than simply delivering AI features.

Common Features may not be the first section of the release notes you read, but there is a surprising amount of value packed into 26D. The Redwood updates focus on solving real-world operational challenges. Contextual communications help organisations reach users more effectively, while built-in issue recording should make support processes noticeably smoother.

The AI Agent Studio enhancements are arguably even more significant. Oracle is investing heavily in the less glamorous side of AI; governance, testing, cost management, lifecycle control and deployment processes. Those capabilities might not generate headlines, but they’re exactly what organisations need before they can confidently scale AI across the business. None of these updates are likely to be described as revolutionary. But together they make Oracle Fusion easier to govern, easier to support and easier to scale. And in many organisations, that’s exactly the kind of innovation that delivers the greatest value.

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

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

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

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.

Please note 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.

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.

Oracle’s New HCM Professional Activity Centre: The Beginning of the End for Person Management?

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

Oracle continues to reshape the HCM user experience, and one of the most significant innovations arriving in Release 26C might not be getting the attention it deserves. The new HCM Professional Activity Centre brings together worker search, employee information, HR transactions and AI-powered assistance into a single workspace designed specifically for HR professionals.

At first glance, it looks like another Redwood-enhanced page. In reality, it represents something much bigger. For years, Person Management has been the starting point for most HR administration activities within Oracle Fusion HCM. Whether updating assignments, reviewing employment information or managing employee records, HR teams have become accustomed to navigating in and out of multiple pages to get their work done.

The HCM Professional Activity Centre changes that approach completely. More importantly, Oracle has confirmed that Person Management will eventually be decommissioned, with the new Activity Centre becoming the strategic destination moving forward. While the retirement date is not yet immediate, organisations that rely heavily on Person Management should see 26C as an opportunity to start preparing for the future.

One of the biggest frustrations for HR teams is context switching. A typical HR task might involve searching for an employee, reviewing employment details, checking absence history, viewing compensation information and then processing a transaction. Individually these tasks are simple, but moving between multiple pages and menus can quickly become inefficient.

The HCM Professional Activity Centre brings these activities together into a single experience. Users can search for workers, review key information and launch transactions without continually navigating around the application. The result is a more streamlined way of working that keeps HR professionals focused on the employee rather than the system.

The first thing many users will notice is the search experience. Oracle has introduced a flexible worker search capability that supports names, person numbers, business titles and email addresses. It also includes fuzzy search functionality, making it far more forgiving when users do not enter exact values. For organisations with large workforces, this can remove a surprising amount of frustration from everyday HR administration.

Filters can be saved, shared and reused, allowing teams to create views tailored to particular business units, countries or employee populations. Search results are also configurable, ensuring users only see the information most relevant to their role. If required, results can be exported directly to Excel for further analysis or sharing. While these may appear to be small enhancements, they can significantly reduce the time spent performing routine HR activities.

Once a worker has been selected, the real strength of the Activity Centre becomes apparent. Rather than opening separate pages for different areas of employee information, HR professionals are presented with a unified worker profile that consolidates key data in a single location. Employment details, absence information, compensation data, benefits and document records are all readily accessible, alongside a timeline view that helps users understand an employee’s history and changes over time.

Oracle has also introduced configurable insight cards, enabling organisations to surface the information most relevant to their HR processes. This could include salary information, performance ratings, recent promotions or other workforce metrics. The focus is clearly on helping HR teams access information faster and make decisions with greater confidence.

A key theme throughout the Activity Centre is reducing unnecessary navigation. HR users can initiate transactions directly from the worker profile or search results, allowing them to move seamlessly from reviewing information to taking action. Common tasks such as assignment changes, location updates and salary changes can be accessed through configurable quick actions, helping teams complete work more efficiently.

The Activity Centre also provides fast access to related workspaces such as Payroll, Recruiting and Workforce Management, creating a connected experience across Oracle HCM. The ability to open worker records in separate browser tabs may sound like a small enhancement, but anyone managing multiple cases simultaneously will appreciate the flexibility it brings. Taken together, these improvements create a more intuitive and productive way of working for HR teams.

While the redesigned workspace is impressive, the most significant aspect of this announcement is what sits behind it. Oracle has embedded the new HCM Professional Concierge directly into the experience. Rather than searching through reports or navigating to analytics dashboards, HR professionals can ask questions in natural language and receive answers drawn directly from live HCM data.

Need to understand salary distribution within a team? Investigate performance ratings? Review an employee’s employment history? The Concierge can provide answers in seconds while respecting existing security roles and access controls. What makes this particularly interesting is that users can ask follow-up questions and continue the conversation naturally, without needing to start over or navigate elsewhere in the application.

Oracle has also made the Concierge available through Microsoft Teams, allowing HR professionals to access HCM insights from the collaboration tools they already use every day. This feels less like a traditional reporting tool and more like the beginning of a genuinely AI-assisted HR operating model.

What’s particularly interesting is how Oracle has structured the solution behind the scenes. The Concierge does not rely on a single AI assistant. Instead, it orchestrates a collection of specialist agents covering areas such as compensation, absence management, reporting, employment information and HR policies. Users do not need to know which agent is responding. They simply ask a question and Oracle routes the request to the most appropriate specialist automatically.

This architecture mirrors Oracle’s wider strategy for agentic applications, where specialist AI agents collaborate behind the scenes to solve increasingly complex business problems.

The practical outcome is that HR professionals can ask richer, more contextual questions and receive consolidated answers without manually gathering information from multiple sources. For users, the technology behind the scenes matters less than the outcome: faster answers, less effort and easier access to information when it is needed.

The HCM Professional Activity Centre is not simply a replacement for Person Management. It is the foundation for a broader vision where AI does not just answer questions but actively assists HR professionals by identifying risks, surfacing recommendations and helping prioritise actions.

Future experiences such as the HR Specialist Workspace build on this concept by proactively highlighting compliance concerns, attrition risks and organisational changes that may require attention. Rather than spending time searching for information, HR teams can focus on decision-making, employee engagement and strategic workforce planning. That’s a subtle but significant shift.

It also provides a clear indication of Oracle’s direction of travel. Future innovation is increasingly centred around unified workspaces, AI-driven insights and agentic experiences rather than traditional menu-driven administration.

The HCM Professional Activity Centre is far more than a new page in Oracle Fusion HCM. It represents a significant shift in how Oracle is bringing together employee information, HR transactions, analytics and AI into a single, unified experience.

For HR professionals, the immediate benefits are easy to see. Less navigation, faster access to information, more intuitive search capabilities and the ability to complete common tasks without moving between multiple pages all have the potential to make day-to-day administration more efficient.

However, the bigger story is what this tells us about Oracle’s direction of travel. The introduction of the HCM Professional Concierge, the use of specialist AI agents and the roadmap towards proactive, agent-driven workspaces suggest Oracle is moving beyond simply modernising screens. The focus is increasingly on helping HR professionals find information, make decisions and take action more effectively.

The planned retirement of Person Management reinforces that message. While many organisations will continue to use Person Management for some time, the HCM Professional Activity Centre is clearly where Oracle is concentrating future investment and innovation.

If you’re preparing for Release 26C, this is certainly a feature worth exploring. Even if you’re not planning an immediate move away from Person Management, taking the time to understand how the Activity Centre works and how it fits into Oracle’s wider HCM strategy will help you prepare for what’s coming next.

For me, this is one of the most important HCM enhancements in 26C. Not because of any single feature, but because it provides perhaps the clearest view yet of how Oracle expects HR professionals to interact with Fusion HCM in the years ahead.

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

Oracle’s AI-Powered Future for Recruiting: Connecting the Entire Hiring Journey

~ K8 Mead ~ 2 Comments

Recruitment teams are under pressure from every angle. Candidates expect faster responses, personalised interactions and greater transparency throughout the hiring process. At the same time, organisations are increasingly shifting towards skills-based hiring and talent management, often while juggling disconnected systems, inconsistent processes and growing workloads. This is where Oracle’s latest AI-powered recruiting capabilities are aiming to make a real difference. Rather than introducing another standalone AI tool, Oracle is embedding intelligent agents throughout the recruitment lifecycle to help organisations attract, engage, hire and onboard talent more effectively.

Oracle’s AI Agent Framework for Recruiting brings together a collection of specialised AI agents that support different stages of the hiring process. Instead of acting as isolated tools, these agents work together across the recruitment journey, sharing context and information to create a more seamless experience for both candidates and hiring teams. The objective is straightforward: improve candidate experiences, reduce manual effort and help organisations make better hiring decisions more quickly.

One of the most visible innovations is Career Coach, Oracle’s candidate-facing AI assistant. Integrated directly into career sites, Career Coach helps candidates discover relevant opportunities based on their skills, experience and career interests. Rather than searching through dozens of vacancies, candidates receive personalised recommendations and guidance throughout the application process. They can upload CVs, ask questions and complete applications through a conversational experience that feels far more natural than traditional online forms.

Perhaps most interesting is Career Coach’s ability to provide personalised application feedback. Candidates can receive recommendations on how well their application aligns with the role requirements, highlighting skills, qualifications or experiences that may strengthen their submission. For organisations, this has the potential to improve application quality while creating a more supportive and engaging candidate experience.

Maintaining regular communication throughout recruitment remains a challenge for many organisations, particularly when managing high application volumes. Oracle addresses this through AI-powered messaging capabilities that can answer routine candidate questions and provide updates through channels such as email, SMS and WhatsApp. Candidates can receive information about interview stages, scheduling, timelines and next steps without waiting for a recruiter to respond. The result is a more responsive recruitment process while allowing recruiters to focus their attention on higher-value interactions.

Recruiters are not the only beneficiaries of Oracle’s AI investment. Hiring managers are often required to review large volumes of candidate information, interview feedback and assessment results before making decisions. Oracle’s Hiring Assistant helps simplify this process by generating concise candidate summaries and surfacing key information from across the recruitment lifecycle.

Instead of reviewing multiple documents and feedback forms, hiring managers can quickly understand a candidate’s suitability, relevant experience and alignment with role requirements, helping them make more informed decisions while reducing administrative effort.

Interviews remain one of the most important stages of the recruitment process, yet they can be time-consuming to organise and document. Oracle is introducing new capabilities that help streamline interview management. Interview Companion, arriving across upcoming releases, will assist interviewers before, during and after interviews.

Before the interview, it can generate interview guides tailored to the specific role and candidate. During the interview, it can help interviewers track discussion topics and ensure key areas are covered. Afterwards, it can automatically generate transcripts, summaries, interview notes and suggested follow-up actions.

These capabilities have the potential to improve consistency across interviews while reducing the administrative burden placed on hiring managers and interviewers. Oracle is also expanding its partner ecosystem through integrations with organisations such as Eightfold.ai and Phenom, bringing additional capabilities including AI-driven interviewing and skills assessment.

For organisations operating in sectors such as retail, hospitality and frontline services, recruitment often centres around hiring large numbers of employees quickly. Oracle’s Hiring Workspace for Store Managers has been designed specifically for these environments. The workspace provides managers with a simple, action-focused view of recruitment activity, highlighting vacancies requiring attention, identifying potential pipeline issues and recommending next steps.

Managers can quickly identify strong candidates, progress applications and manage recruitment activity without needing extensive experience with a traditional applicant tracking system. For organisations managing high-volume recruitment, this could significantly improve hiring speed and reduce delays in filling critical roles. It should be noted that this is an Agentic App and as such requires the Agentic Application Platform licence.

Finding talent remains one of the most challenging aspects of recruitment. Oracle is investing heavily in AI-powered sourcing capabilities to make this process more efficient. Recruiters can use natural language search to identify candidates based on skills, experience and other criteria, without relying on complex search strings. AI-powered recommendations help identify suitable candidates from existing talent pools, reducing the risk of overlooking qualified individuals who may already exist within the organisation’s database. Combined with automated outreach and personalised engagement, these capabilities aim to help recruiters build stronger pipelines while reducing manual sourcing effort.

The recruitment experience does not end when an offer is accepted. Oracle is continuing to strengthen the transition between recruitment and onboarding by helping organisations maintain communication with new hires from offer acceptance through to their first day. Automated communications, onboarding updates and personalised engagement help reduce the risk of candidate drop-off while creating a more consistent experience. This continuity can be particularly valuable in competitive talent markets, where maintaining engagement after offer acceptance is just as important as attracting candidates in the first place.

Oracle’s vision for recruiting is becoming increasingly clear. Rather than viewing AI as a collection of disconnected features, Oracle is building an ecosystem of specialised agents that work together across the entire hiring lifecycle. Many of these capabilities are already available today, while others will be introduced through upcoming releases such as 26C and 26D. Together, they represent a significant shift towards more intelligent, proactive and personalised recruitment experiences.

For organisations looking to improve candidate engagement, increase recruiter productivity and support skills-based hiring strategies, these innovations offer a glimpse into how recruitment technology is evolving from process automation to genuinely intelligent talent acquisition.

Please note that some capabilities discussed may require additional Oracle licensing, including Oracle Recruiting Booster. Organisations should confirm availability and licensing requirements with Oracle before implementation.

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