Oracle Corp. customers can expect to hear a lot about intelligent digital assistants and machine-driven insights as the company kicks off the first full day of its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this morning.

Major updates to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management Cloud center on streamlining tasks through artificial intelligence while making it possible for users to get more done by speaking to their machines.

“The goal is for pretty much all processes to be conversational,” Juergen Lindner (pictured), senior vice president of software-as-a-service with Oracle’s Cloud Business Group, said in a pre-briefing with press and analysts last week.

One of the principal vehicles for doing so will be new digital assistants that are now available across the entire suite of Oracle cloud applications. In enterprise resource planning, for example, people will be able to use their voice assistant for tasks such as submitting and reviewing time sheets, tracking project status and identifying problems. “This is not just a question that gets an answer but an actual conversation,” Lindner said.

New digital assistants specifically designed for customer service can retrieve answers to questions stored in a knowledge repository and can be combined with the Oracle Intelligent Advisor to enable representatives to offer advice interactively over chat channels. Marketing teams can use the intelligent features to create promotional campaigns as well as to interact with customers via Oracle Responsys, the advertising platform Oracle purchased in 2013, to redeem or gather additional information on a promotion.

Digital assistants are also coming to Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud initially for use in logistics cases such as checking shipping status, tracking deviations from plans and reporting incidents. As in the case of ERP and EPM, applications of voice are expected to expand broadly in the future. “The plan is to be pervasive across all aspects of supply chain,” Lindner said.

Oracle first demonstrated the digital assistant functionality 18 months ago and formally announced it last October. The software, which is part of the company’s broader “self-driving” initiative for its cloud applications, uses machine learning and natural language processing to understand context and adapt to each user’s behavior. Interactive bots can be customized to automate routine tasks or take actions based on a set of conditions, such as scheduling a meeting. Digital assistants work with most popular voice assistants as well as messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack.

“Wikibon is impressed with the breadth and sophistication of the new enterprise digital assistant capabilities,” wrote James Kobielus, lead analyst at Wikibon, the sister market research firm of SiliconANGLE, when the feature was announced last year.

Unlocking PDFs

Another theme in today’s announcements is intelligent document recognition that enables ingestion of financial information from PDF and other popular financial document formats to reduce manual entry and errors. The self-learning feature recognizes and processes such documents as supplier invoices and adapts to changes within invoice formats over time.

For example, it can extract invoice number, purchase order number, tax and amount due from supplier invoices using machine learning algorithms. “We intend to drive [these features] with the goal of eliminating manual interaction with the system as much as possible,” Lindner said.

A third new capability is what Oracle calls “predictive planning,” or the ability to help users identify and leverage trends and patterns in financial and operational data. Automatic predictions “improve the quality and timeliness of planning decisions by enabling customers to access predictions at data load time, see prediction and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make plan revisions on the fly,” Lindner said.

For example, regression algorithms can be run immediately on new point-in-time data to immediately compare forecasts to predictions and display the results in common office applications such as Microsoft Corp.’s Excel using Oracle Smart View. The result is a dramatic reduction in effort needed for variance reporting, the company said.

Networks links businesses

Furthering its push into supply chain management, a market that Gartner Inc. expects will exceed $19 billion by 2021, Oracle is also introducing the business-to-business trading network. It enables participants to find, engage with and conduct secure transactions through the Oracle Cloud as well as over third-party networks such as those from Transcepta LLC for e-invoicing, Justransform LLC for logistics and Global Healthcare Exchange LLC for healthcare.

The Oracle Business Network is intended to simplify the process of searching for and connecting to registered trading partners directly from within Oracle Cloud applications at no additional charge. The platform supports task ranging from procurement to payment and enables businesses to issue and change purchase orders, as well as to send purchase order acknowledgements, request changes to purchase orders, and issue shipping notifications and invoices.

It also integrates with Oracle DataFox, the sales intelligence database software that Oracle acquired with the purchase of DataFox Intelligence Inc. last year. That integration enables real-time insights into trading partners to reduce risk and speed decisions, Oracle said.

Oracle plans to enable coverage for almost all buy and sell-side business transactions “as well as to include other supply chain management business documents such as production forecasts and production orders for third-party contract manufacturers,” a spokesman said.

On the human resources side, Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud has new integrations with LinkedIn, the business social network owned by Microsoft Corp. Customers can now import skills, credentials and work history information from LinkedIn profiles directly into Oracle HCM Cloud, a feature the company said enables employees to spot internal growth opportunities more easily. Oracle’s recruiting software can now also be tied in with LinkedIn Recruiter, a platform for finding, contacting and managing job candidates.

A new social network-style feature called Oracle Connections makes it easier for employees to connect with each other using a consumer-oriented interface build on profile pages where people can share skills, interests, projects and the like, as well as collaborate on projects.

Photo: SiliconANGLE