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Oracle (ORCL+0.27%) unveiled a new feature on Thursday that allows businesses to build their own AI agents. No coding necessary.
“We’ve been infusing AI, we’ve been building agents, and the tools we have been using internally at Oracle we are now making available for customers and partners,” Oracle applications development & strategy group vice president Miranda Nash said.
The new functions will be available on the company’s Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, a product that businesses can use to help run finance and HR departments, assist with the supply chain, and more.
AI agents are hyper-specialized and fully-autonomous AIs that in Oracle’s case can help businesses with specific workflows. Oracle unveiled more than 50 AI agents last year that can do everything from answering employee questions about company benefits to scheduling shifts.
As of Thursday’s announcement, clients will also have access to an AI Agent Studio where they can “bring the agent workforce to life in your company,” Nash said, by putting into production, testing, customizing, and more importantly, creating your own. If your business has specific needs that can’t be addressed by one of the existing AI agents offered by the Fusion suite, you can now create your own agent without even writing a line of code.
“You don’t have to be an engineer, you don’t have to be an IT person. If you can explain in clear English what needs to happen, that’s basically the skill you need,” Nash said.
Customers just need to type in what goal they want the agent to pursue, and what tools it has available to accomplish the goal and the agent will do the rest. The agents can use applications native to Fusion and beyond to do so, calling out to external systems like Microsoft (MSFT-0.33%) Teams or Slack (CRM+0.53%) if need be.
AI agents and agentic AI have been all the rage in tech recently, with every single major tech company from Meta (META+1.39%) to Microsoft unveiling their own versions of the technology in rapid succession over the past year. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed late last year that we are entering an “Agentic Era” of autonomous AI workers, although some analysts have more conservative estimates of the merits of AI workers.
Nash thinks they are the future of sophisticated AI.
AI agents can get confused when they have too many definitions, Nash said, and to make sure things work smoothly the best practice is to keep them fairly narrow.
“Over time, what we will do more and more is combine these specialized agents to do really complex things,” Nash said.