Oracle gears generative 
AI to customer service

New generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in Oracle’s cloud services are expected to transform customer experiences in the coming years.

During the annual Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas this week, Oracle today announced new generative AI-powered capabilities within Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX). The new capabilities, says Oracle, are embedded in Oracle Fusion Service processes to improve customer service delivery, productivity, and the overall customer experience.

Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company says, the new AI capabilities “bolster existing embedded AI capabilities already in use by thousands of users and will help to transform customer service agent and service stakeholder productivity by streamlining processes and automating content generation within a single integrated solution”.

Aly Pinder, research vice president of the IDC, says many organisations struggle to fill traditional customer service roles and are adding more automation, digital assistants, and self-service channels to keep up with customer expectations.

“With the latest updates to Oracle Cloud CX, organisations can take advantage of generative AI to rapidly solve issues and enhance the customer experience by increasing service agent, field technician, and customer self-service efficiency.”

The new capabilities include:

• Assisted Agent Responses: AI uses the history of a service interaction to draft an initial response that can be reviewed and edited before sending. For example, assisted authoring can accelerate and improve response quality in high-volume scenarios like ecommerce, financial services, telecommunications, and utilities.
• Assisted Knowledge Articles: AI assists in developing articles for emerging service issues so service agents can quickly gain the knowledge needed to help customers. For example, ensuring that standard operating procedures for particular problems are quickly and accurately documented in complex high-tech and medical scenarios.
• Search Augmentation: AI can help employees quickly find the best solution to a customer’s question within knowledge articles, or other indexed documents.
• Customer Engagement Summaries: AI incorporates the history of communications with the customer and with internal staff to summarise the problem, steps undertaken so far, and the planned next action.
• Assisted Guidance Authoring: AI uses relevant subject matter within a guide to help an administrator quickly define a consistent process for agents to follow when attempting to solve customer issues.
• Field Service Recommendations: AI suggests contextually relevant content from trusted troubleshooting source material to improve the efficiency of technicians.

During a panel discussion at Oracle OpenWorld, Mike Scilia, EVP of Oracle Global Industries, said that such generative AI capabilities were expected to make a massive impact in healthcare.

“It has a very paper-intensive workforce as an industry that is required to be regulated to create reams of documentation. AI will play a tremendous role in assisting in increasing the velocity. Then, if we look at what I’ll call raw horsepower data, like pathogen sequencing, whole genome sequencing and things like this in life sciences, AI as a service become really interesting. 

These kinds of things become a services utility, and one of the biggest advanced will be in personalised medicine. 

“If you get into a situation where we understand somebody’s DNA, RNA, we can give them medications that are safe and efficacious for them in a way that we have almost no visibility into today.”

Other sectors would also see dramatic advances, he said.

“If you think about retail business and hospitality business and food, and beverage, the customer loyalty scenario can really be enhanced with everyday customer outreach. All these things can be personalised, based on buying patterns, based on interaction patterns. I don’t think there’s an industry that is not affected. There’s an application or use cases across every industry.”