Oracle Doubles AI Agents in Fusion HCM, Revolutionizing HR Automation

Oracle doubles the number of AI agents in Fusion HCM

Oracle yesterday announced more than a dozen AI agents that will be available as part of its Fusion HCM application, complementing the twelve already announced earlier this year, along with many others across the Fusion application family. The new agents provide insights and automations across internal mobility and recruiting, career development and skills, core HR, and employee lifecycle and payroll. The emphasis is on freeing up time so that employees, managers and HR teams can focus on more valuable activities, says Yvette Cameron, SVP, Global HCM Product Strategy. She explains: It's really focused on transforming the way that work gets done. They don't just answer questions, like that first generation of Q&A that generative AI agents were focused on. They're actually automating workflows. They're surfacing information and insights in real time, and they're acting on behalf of users to remove friction from everyday tasks. Oracle is continuing its policy of embedding its AI agents into the familiar Fusion application environment with no additional charge for customers. This, along with the ability to instruct agents using everyday language, removes barriers to adoption, says Cameron: Launching into AI doesn't mean you have to spend weeks training and preparing for it. We make sure it's an entirely intuitive, natural extension of the experiences you've already been having. As the catalog of agents expands, the vendor is looking to AI to perform more extensive actions as customer confidence grows in the technology. She adds: Our vision as we move forward is to have fully autonomous workflows -- not just tasks, but end-to-end workflows -- whether it is managing the talent review process, whether it is sourcing and hiring individuals into the organization, or going from looking at current positions and managing the full end-to-end process of succession management. The end-to-end workflows [are] the next horizon of transforming work with AI. Those actions will typically be configured to require approval from a human before the agent goes ahead and completes a task. But it's also open to organizations and users to take out that human-in-the-loop step if they're confident in the agent's capabilities. She explains: As we look through each one of these [examples], we're bringing insight to the individual users. Here are suggested successors. Do you agree? Yes. Then they add the successor to the succession plan. Here is learning that should be taken. Do you agree? Yes. Then add that. And again, that's human in the loop. If you take that checkpoint out, it can take it automatically, so it's not just recommending, it's taking that action. So that the individual isn't having to navigate to another part of the application and enroll somebody in learning, or add that to the succession plan, or start that approval process. We are taking action with these agents. It's entirely up to organizations how much control their people retain over agent actions. She goes on: In our AI Agent Studio, that element of human-in-the-loop is literally a toggle, which at every step you can say, 'Yes, I want a human in the loop here, yes or no.' That gives our customers complete control. They can turn off that human-in-the-loop checkpoint as they build confidence and scale these capabilities, but it's always in their control. While many of the agents are focused on very specific sets of tasks, such as providing guidance on company policies, or setting and tracking team goals, there are two that go further. These concierge agents, one for managers and one for employees, are able to call on other agents to complete tasks and workflows, rather than leaving it to the user to specifically invoke each action. Cameron explains: Those concierge agents answer the question of, 'Why should I need to know what each and every one of these 100-plus agents does?' You shouldn't. We have done the work to deconstruct and understand how to apply AI to automate intelligently these tasks and workflows, and then under the concierge agent, with one single entry point, I can ask a question, and the agent will determine, 'Oh, is this a benefits question, where I need to apply the benefits advisor, or is this around compensation? Or do I need to invoke the leave of absence advisor?' Individual users shouldn't have to know or care about what's happening under the covers... Today, our concierge agents cover many different topic areas and invoke a series of different agents across compensation, leave, benefits. For managers, it includes employee-related inquiries, employment data, and talent-related inquiries. There are additional areas still to be incorporated in the concierge agents in upcoming releases, but it's a powerful advancement in the ease of use, really taking full advantage of the many agents available in Oracle. As agents take over more routine tasks and free up time for higher level activities, it's inevitable that employee roles will change and staff will have to hone their skills in those more demanding areas. Cameron says: We're not just automating processes and improving productivity, we're enhancing the employee's experience. We're unlocking the the potential of people by freeing them up from having to focus on administrative tasks and freeing them up to focus on other areas. We're bringing new insights that perhaps they hadn't anticipated before. We are evolving our capabilities and what's possible with this new way of working with each release. Here too, agents have a role to play in assessing skill levels, advising on career paths, and guiding employees to relevant learning and development opportunities. She observes: As we step back and think about the skills that we need in this new era of agentic AI, I think some of the biggest skills to focus on, for leaders and managers especially, are things like empathy, collaboration, communication, critical thinking. These are what companies often call the softer skills, but they're the more human-centric skills that are going to make working alongside this new digital workforce successful in the future. As I talk with CHROs this topic of, how do we grow those skills that I just mentioned in our leaders, and how do we develop that, that's an important factor too. This is a big expansion of Oracle's AI agent offering in the HCM space, and no doubt will be replicated in other application areas over the next few weeks running towards its annual AI World conference. (The new name for the event formerly known as CloudWorld gives a clue to the overriding theme this year!) The new concierge agents are of particular interest, and will likely be the preferred starting point for many managers and employees, rather than having to delve into the individual characteristics of each separate agent. While it's important that IT and HR managers have confidence in the detailed processes and actions that each individual agent is responsible for, everyday users don't need to know about that level of detail. As with the discussion of human-in-the-loop approvals, this is all about giving customers the time and space to build confidence as they adopt AI agent technology.

Oracle expands Fusion HCM with 13 new AI agents for HR automation - SiliconANGLE

Oracle expands Fusion HCM with 13 new AI agents for HR automation Oracle Corp. today announced a series of new agentic artificial intelligence extensions to its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management suite, bringing the number of agents in the application to more than 100. The new additions support internal mobility, performance management, learning and development, payroll and staffing processes. Oracle has been steadily adding agents -- a type of autonomous AI software that can take actions independently or with limited human oversight in pursuit of a specific goal -- for approximately a year. It also provides an AI Agent Studio to allow customers to create and customize their own agents. Working within Fusion applications, agents operate within customers' existing workflows, allowing users to automate tasks, gain insights and trigger actions without leaving the application. The latest additions are not just about automating routine queries but "taking action," said Yvette Cameron, Oracle's senior vice president of global HCM product strategy. "They're able to automate entire workflows," she said. "They can surface insights in real time and take action on behalf of users to remove friction from everyday tasks." For example, the Learning Tutor Agent uses metadata and inferred skills to advise employees on which training courses might meet their objectives. "It can help them determine which course to take depending on information available from the course provider," Cameron said. Among the 13 new agents being announced today are the following. In most cases, customers need to customize the agents through a retrieval-augmented generation or fine-tuning process to match internal policies and documents. Cameron said the AI Agent Studio allows for extensive customization and can adapt to a variety of structured and unstructured data types. For example, the Team Goals Assistant "goals can be of any level of structure desired," she said. "Some organizations have very specific policies and requirements around defining quarterly milestones and progress indicators, or they can be simply a goal with an estimated or a required due date." Oracle's agents can work with external systems, leveraging application programming interfaces and AI Agent Studio. The suite supports the Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocols, which are emerging standards for agent interoperability. This capability allows customers to build AI workflows that incorporate data from non-Oracle platforms. "Interactions with external systems, even interactions with other agents, is built into the framework," Cameron said. Security, privacy and data management are provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which hosts the applications. Though Oracle delivers a set of prebuilt agents, the company is also encouraging partners and customers to use AI Agent Studio to build new agents tailored to specific industries or processes. Asked whether Oracle will eventually shift most agentic development to partners, Cameron said, "No, we don't see that at all. The opportunity for transforming how work is getting done today, rethinking traditional workflows, and addressing the new challenges that are coming up almost every day is almost endless." In contrast to competitors that charge extra for agents, "we're embedding at no additional cost our delivered agents," Cameron said. "Customers can use an unlimited amount." The company plans to continue adding new agents across its application suite each quarter.

Oracle Wants Agents AI to Turn HR Hassle into HR Hustle

The new agents can assist employees in exploring internal job opportunities and assessing job fit while providing recommendations for career growth. Oracle has launched new AI agents within its Fusion Cloud Applications to help HR leaders automate workflows, manage talent and improve employee performance across organisations. Embedded within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), the new AI agents help streamline HR processes from hiring to retirement, enabling smarter decisions and greater efficiency for HR teams, managers, recruiters and employees. Embedded AI Agents In an interview with AIM, Yvette Cameron, senior vice president of global HCM product strategy at Oracle, shared insights into the company's new AI Agents and the significant impact they are set to deliver. "These agents are not just answering questions," Cameron explained. Unlike traditional RAG-based systems that only answer questio