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Oracle bets big on AI, drives Australian business transformation
At the Oracle CloudWorld Tour in Sydney, Oracle executives talked up the company’s strategy to integrate AI across its entire technology stack, empowering Australian businesses to move beyond experimentation and into practical AI-driven solutions
Artificial intelligence (AI) dominated discussions at Oracle CloudWorld Tour Sydney last week, with executives showcasing the company’s AI strategy and its impact on Australian businesses.
Oracle is embedding AI across all levels of its technology stack, from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to industry- and domain-specific applications and the Oracle database. This allows customers to leverage their own data with Oracle’s AI, rather than having to export it to external platforms.
Mike Sicilia, Oracle’s executive vice-president for global industries, noted that AI is becoming integral to business operations: “We’re getting to the point where AI just becomes the way we conduct ourselves, the way we do business. You don’t need to think about it as something separate.”
“[But] AI requires massive infrastructure,” he said, adding that the four main AI infrastructure suppliers run their training and inferencing workloads on OCI because of the economies that the platform offers.
“I think the next wave of AI agents will be all the way to the edge,” he added, pointing out that applying AI at the point where a doctor talks to a patient or a salesperson interacts with a customer has immediate value because both parties benefit at the same time.
Stephen Bovis, Oracle’s regional managing director for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), noted that Australian businesses are moving beyond experimentation and integrating AI into their business strategies to improve productivity, reduce losses and increase profits. Bovis also touted Oracle’s competitive advantage by embedding generative AI (GenAI) into business applications to address customer challenges.
Rondy Ng, Oracle executive vice-president of applications development, highlighted the “world-class stack” underpinning the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, where AI changes how functions such as accounting, supply chain management and human capital management work to generate new value. “We’re not going to sell you a non-AI version,” he said.
While Oracle will continue to support its on-premises applications, the company believes it is a question of when, not if, customers will switch to Fusion. On-premise customers are realising the cost of maintaining the status quo, and the promise of GenAI is leading more of them to consider switching to software-as-a-service (SaaS) rather than continuing to pay for systems that don’t keep up with technology trends.
Back-office functions such as handling invoices and generating reports can be done better and with greater automation in Fusion than they can in Oracle’s on-premise software, said Ng. For example, invoices come in a variety of formats, and AI agents can eliminate manual intervention without the organisation having to worry about optical character recognition (OCR) engines and application programming interfaces (APIs). They can understand the purpose of the document, check tax calculations, allocate to the right account, and so on, freeing up skilled people to perform higher-value work such as capital management.
He demonstrated the Document IO agent in the Fusion enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, showing how it is able to process a quotation that was handwritten in a language other than the user’s, generate an order based on the quote, its context (such as which employee submitted the quotation), match the subsequent invoice with the order, and generate a payment advice in the format specified by the supplier.
There are already around 100 generative AI use cases and more than 50 agents built into Fusion. More agents are being added this year, including a talent review assistant and a customer sales representative assistant. Like the others, they will arrive as part of the quarterly updates and will help businesses become more efficient, Ng said.
Meredith Rowan, Oracle executive vice-president and ANZ and ASEAN group president for applications, offered several examples of local AI adoption: one customer achieved 98% accuracy in processing non-purchase-order invoices, saving 122 person-hours per month. Another saw improved performance with AI-powered predictive ordering. Rowan herself leverages AI for drafting job descriptions, noting that AI is included in the pricing, allowing customers to scale their usage according to their needs.
Transforming business processes
Migrating legacy systems to Fusion offers access to higher-quality data, though it requires a transformation rather than a simple lift-and-shift. Ng pointed to a recent project where FedEx worked with Oracle and JP Morgan on a payables and supply chain financing programme as an example of the opportunities for organisations to take a fresh look at their processes.
But it does involve changes in roles and relationships. Chief financial officers (CFOs) want to be strategic advisers rather than someone who spends a lot of money on routine processes, and “AI is an opportunity to really streamline the processes, giving CFOs time to look at data”, Ng said. On the other hand, IT staff increasingly become business process optimisers instead of being people who install and manage hardware and software.
Some JD Edwards and E-Business Suite customers still question whether Fusion is up to the job, Ng observed. But there have been many successful examples of customers adopting Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM), for example, which now goes beyond traditional SCM to enable smart operations across order management, logistics, procurement and more – all on one platform, and incorporating technology to help front-line workers such as an AI adviser for maintenance staff that can help speed up diagnosis and assist with the generation of an appropriate work order.
Read more about cloud and AI in ANZ
- MongoDB is doubling down on its Australian presence with a new Sydney office, housing engineering, support and go-to-market teams focused on R&D and tackling the region’s legacy technology challenges.
- Federal government signs three-year whole-of-government agreement with Amazon Web Services, expanding access to cloud services for all levels of government.
- Australia’s utilities sector is exploring and implementing AI to enhance grid stability, manage rooftop solar and prepare for the influx of electric vehicles.
- At the Sydney leg of the Snowflake World Tour, the company showcased how its platform simplifies data management, reduces costs and drives AI adoption for Australian businesses.
Macquarie Bank is among the Australian customers that have switched to Fusion. Eleanore Bennett, Macquarie’s global head of finance platforms and solutions, said as the bank needed technology “that’s going to flex and grow and adapt”, it moved from an on-premise Peoplesoft implementation to Fusion, allowing the finance and tax teams to focus on their core competencies.
“We’re fully committed to our digital transformation strategy,” she said, adding that the strategy will evolve to include AI. This will help Macquarie reach its desired state more quickly, but compliance issues are of particular importance as the business operates in regulated markets.
Rowan underscored Oracle’s significant R&D investment and its unique position in providing security and embedded AI across the entire technology stack. She highlighted the South Australian Department of Treasury and Finance's implementation of Fusion Financials as a “gamechanger”, driving efficiency through shared services across government departments.
Oracle was also the first supplier to provide SaaS services to an Australian government, she recalled. In the aftermath of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, a case management system to assist survivors based on Oracle’s cloud software was set up in just three days. Among its functions was the distribution A$350m in cash and 26,000 pallets of goods donated by the public. This story has particular significance for Rowan, who is from a farming family in the Strathbogie Ranges in central Victoria.
Asked what Oracle can do to help with the way Australian organisations are apparently floundering with innovation, Bovis suggested innovation and productivity are important issues for the local economy, and Oracle can help with both. For example, OCI was one of the first cloud providers to offer Nvidia Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) within Australia, and Oracle is helping companies make significant changes to the way they manage their supply chains.
It can also help break the nexus between revenue and headcount, he said. A customer in the healthcare sector has benefited from improved rostering, and a retailer is enjoying improved performance thanks to changes that help ensure the right products are in stock at the right stores.
Over the next 12 months, Bovis expects to see local growth for both OCI and Fusion. Dedicated cloud regions, which are on-premises deployments of OCI for individual customers, are becoming increasingly common, and the new entry-level configuration known as Dedicated Region 25 with a minimum of just three racks is “a game changer” in this regard, he added.
Price-performance advantage
Carlos Cienfuegos, head of Oracle Cloud ANZ, stressed the importance of performance over price. He touted the value proposition of OCI’s higher performance, allowing businesses to achieve more with fewer resources.
“[Australian] buyers are quite astute,” he said, giving the example of one customer that uses twice the monthly data egress allowance on one day a month, realising that the total bill from OCI is still lower than it would be from other public cloud providers.
Another consideration is that the Oracle database is exactly the same on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as it is on OCI. So, if an organisation is not consuming all the credits it has committed to on Azure, for example, it can run Oracle database workloads there at minimal or no cost, secure in the knowledge that it could easily migrate to AWS or OCI if desired while keeping all the data onshore.
Inside Suncorp’s cloud and AI journey
One of the customers speaking at Oracle CloudWorld Sydney was Tom Richardson, Suncorp’s executive general manager for bank transition and corporate technology. His job title reflects the sale of Suncorp Bank to ANZ Bank, leaving Suncorp as a pure-play general insurer with well-known brands including AAMI, GIO, APIA and Shannons.
To put the company’s size into perspective, Richardson pointed out that 2.5 million of its policies were in the path of the recent tropical cyclone Alfred.
After three years of technology simplification, Suncorp is now 90% cloud and 10% SaaS. Moving to Oracle Fusion makes the company more agile, especially in areas such as human resources, he said. The company is re-platforming all of the five major insurance functions: policy, claims, marketing, contact centre and corporate.
Finance (currently running on the old Oracle E-Business Suite) will be up and running on Fusion by May 2025, and HR by March 2026, accounting for 75% of the applications and 85% of the data that Richardson is responsible for, saving money and increasing agility.
Another current focus is AI. Around 80% of originating and servicing at Suncorp is via digital channels, and customers take part in two million AI-enabled chatbot conversations a year, “and that’s doubling every six months or so”, Richardson said.
On the other hand, “insurance is a people business” and the company realises that when it comes to claims, it is dealing with people at a difficult time. The human touch is essential in those circumstances, so staff members are provided with an AI-generated summary of the relevant information before talking to the customers. It would otherwise take a case manager between five and 30 minutes to assemble the information, and that is time better spent talking to the customer.
The company’s board and executives see AI as part of its strategy, Richardson said, which makes it easy to put the right guardrails in place. Some 500 employees have already been through formal AI training, and 400 people from the business and technology sides of the company attended an AI hackathon, so “it’s filtering right across the organisation” and “the opportunities are brilliant”, he said.
While insurance has traditionally been a data business from an actuarial perspective, Richardson noted that the use of streaming data, such as weather reports and telemetry from vehicles, will grow in tandem with AI adoption.
“The next two years is about execution,” he said. “There will be no limit on the number of new use cases we have for that AI capability.”
