Oracle CloudWorld London Surprise: Oracle Unveils Its Own "Agentforce"

Oracle CloudWorld London always presents an excellent opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and friends from the Oracle (Siebel) ecosystem. Currently, ninety percent of my time is dedicated to implementing Agentforce and Magnet AI solutions for our Salesforce and Siebel CRM clients. Naturally, I was interested to hear an update on Oracle's Fusion Applications' journey with Generative AI, expecting confirmation that they continue building  "hard-coded" Gen AI features and agents. 🛠️

You can imagine my surprise when Chris Leone announced Oracle AI Agent Studio - a solution essentially comparable to Salesforce's Agentforce, but specifically tailored for Oracle Fusion Applications. Oracle's product isn't generally available yet and couldn't be fully demonstrated at Oracle booths - they still have work to do to reach Agentforce’s level of maturity. That said, AI Agent Studio appears to include key components needed for full-scale, production-grade deployment of AI agents: no-code agent configuration, integration of external API/ tools, choice of LLMs, testing and evaluation capabilities, and monitoring tools. Importantly, it comes at no extra cost for Fusion Applications customers, similar to other currently available Fusion Gen AI features. 🆓

This "no extra cost" feature is particularly intriguing. Could Oracle be positioning this as a strategic advantage to attract new CRM customers in these "agentic" times as many Salesforce customers are not excited about Agentforce's "two dollars per conversation" pricing? Salesforce relies on AWS infrastructure and primarily uses external LLM providers, whereas Oracle owns the entire technology stack - from hardware and NVIDIA GPUs to databases, middleware, and Gen AI/LLM services, and further up to business applications, which translates into lower operational costs. Yet, the question remains: can Oracle's cost advantage realistically cover all associated LLM costs for its customers? I believe that eventually Oracle will introduce additional charges for LLM usage. Still, even so, the pure LLM costs will be relatively low, ranging from just a few cents for short FAQ/RAG-based interactions to twenty-fifty cents for more sophisticated agent-driven flows invoking system APIs and other tools. (These are the numbers we've observed with our Magnet AI clients running LLMs on Azure OpenAI Service) 💰

Although Ideaport doesn't offer Fusion CX application services, I'm happy for my friends at Boxfusion Consulting and Magia Consulting, who do operate in this space. They're about to gain a powerful card to play in the competitive CRM game 🂡

A major question for me is whether Oracle AI Agent Studio can operate independently of Fusion Applications - similar to how a stand-alone Magnet AI integrate with Salesforce, Siebel CRM, and other platforms? If this is the case, Siebel CRM and Oracle DBE customers open to OCI could greatly benefit from this innovation. And why limit integration to Oracle products? Imagine cost-efficient Oracle AI Agents running within Salesforce! 😊

For more details on Oracle AI Agent Studio, watch the full announcement in Oracle's YouTube video. Additionally, Cloud Wars' Bob Evans has published a detailed interview with Steve Miranda, providing further insights into this announcement. 🎥