Oracle Digital Assistant for SaaS / Fusion Applications — an overview
In their Q2 FY24 Earnings Call on 11th December, Oracle is reporting a significant growth in demand for AI services; a lot of this in the context of their Generative AI offerings (i.e. producing text and images according to models defined by customers).
I’ve previously discussed the ‘broader’ offerings Oracle has in the AI space here, however this blog will look specifically at ‘Oracle Digital Assistant Platform for Oracle SaaS’ (ODAP4SAAS). This is a different (but very similarly named) offering from their Oracle Digital Assistant platform (a PaaS service offering, based on request/hour and intended for other applications).
There are a couple of terms we should define first:
· Digital Assistant: a ‘chatbot’ which contains specialised skills (see below) and which can be interacted with using natural language. The Digital Assistant will decide which ‘skill’ will handle submitted queries, as well as managing the ‘workflow’ of the conversation. These can be delivered either as a ‘native’ chatbot or via web, apps or Teams.
· Skills: custom chatbots with specific and customised abilities related to particular modules.
By way of an overview, ODAP4SAAS is an extension of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud SaaS offerings (ERP, HCM, etc). The ‘ready to use’ digital assistant (aka FADigitalAssistant) which enables ‘out of the box’ skills. There’s a really good overview of the skills provided here; if we take HCM as an example, one of the skills is used to “initiate manager or employee self-service transactions and to clarify your employment-related questions”. These ‘skills’ are presented as a chat-bot interface to the application and are intended to reduce time spent by HR staff on ‘standard’ queries.
You will have Digital Assistant already available as part of your Oracle Fusion subscription
With this type of functionality, it is understandable why so many Fusion SaaS customers are interested in seeing how they can use AI to extend the functionality of the applications.
Customers with subscriptions for a ‘pillar’ SKU for an Oracle Fusion application can use the ‘out of the box’ digital assistant (FADigitalAssistant) and can then;
· configure channel access (e.g. web, Teams) — a list is available here.
· choose which skills to enable — this will allow common requests to be serviced.
You can use basic, ‘out of the box’ functionality as part of your Fusion SaaS application — any extension / customisation is likely to require the subscription
As with many Oracle products, the ‘out of the box’ functionality is limited, and many customers will seek to extend this functionality and customise it to their business needs. This requires purchase of a relevant SKU to enable; there are five such SKUs available on the pricelist, each called ‘Oracle Digital Assistant Platform’ — the difference between them is the metric. You need to match this metric to the metric of the pillar product against which you want to use Digital Assistant. For example, if you have subscriptions for HCM based on Hosted Employee, you would choose the corresponding SKU.
Once you have the SKU as part of your subscription, you then have access to the following features (not an exhaustive list). There are some features here which I would expect any ‘serious’ enterprise adopting Digital Assistant to want to implement:
· Adding intents — allowing a ‘skill’ to understand the user’s request.
· Adding utterances — groupings of requests associated with a given intent.
· Adding entities — associating intents to fields in the system, e.g. date, currency, enabling specific actions to be taken to underlying data.
· Changing the flow of dialogue between a user and the digital assistant.
· Adding additional channels.
· Adding integration or customising Common Responses; which validate responses from the user and evaluate against the expected type of value.
· Adding Resource Bundles — these represent a single set of messages and prompts used by the Digital assistant — in having a single ‘repository’, the overall ‘feel’ of the dialogue can be maintained.
· Viewing and analysing diagnostics, transaction logs and analytical reports.
I think it will be hard for organisations to stay within the boundaries of the included ‘out of the box’ Digital Assistant given some of the basic features which form part of the costed subscription.
Pricing-wise, as mentioned above, you need to match to your corresponding ‘pillar’ SKU based on metric; if we take HCM as an example, the cost of ODAP4SAAS is 20% of the Hosted Employee cost, and you will have to pay for every Hosted Employee.
We have several customers already evaluating and using Oracle Digital Assistant for Fusion SaaS. Please contact us if you would like further information or to talk to our Oracle Fusion experts.
Additionally, should you have any questions about the ‘licensing’ or subscriptions related to Digital Assistant, please do not hesitate to contact me.
About the author
Paul Bullen has worked for Version 1 since 2009 and works in a team of recognised independent experts who help customers understand their use of Oracle products and services, as well as providing benchmarking and price comparison services.
About Version 1
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