On Tuesday, Oracle rolled out a new set of AI agents – virtual assistants – to help salespeople with several tasks. The tool is being offered at no extra cost.
The agents can make plans, perform tasks, and pursue goals based on the training that it received from its human operators.
In a sales context, Oracle’s AI agents can update company records each time a salesperson has met with a person and update the system as to the progress of that deal.
Oracle cites another example of when a customer inquiring about an order asks, “Where’s my stuff?” the agent forms its response by checking with the order processing system, querying the shipping carrier’s tracking system via an API, and gathering information on potential weather or other external factors that could delay delivery.
The AI agent can draw on records from across Oracle’s business software categories and write a report for sales teams, even if those records are in multiple languages.
It could, in theory, give a US-based sales team information about a customer’s repeated delayed shipments in a different country with that report originally being generated in a different language.
“Our customers are oftentimes brands you may not have heard of that run industry. They move rock and produce machinery. They’re usually global,” Rob Pinkerton, a senior vice president at Oracle, said in an interview, according to Reuters.
“To have that assistance to pull (data) all together in all the languages a seller has to care about is pretty useful.”
Oracle’s release of its latest AI agent comes as Oracle’s Larry Ellison stood beside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Softbank’s
Masayoshi Son as US President Donald Trump unveiled a A$798 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build a network of data centres and computing infrastructure to power AI across the US.