Oracle aims to deliver the most value from AI investments to customers

“Customers in the Asia Pacific region are very interested on how we’re embedding AI into all elements of our application portfolio to accelerate outcomes for them,” says Maz Songerwala, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Service Experience.

As Oracle unveiled its first AI Center of Excellence in the Southeast Asian region, the partner ecosystem in the region felt that they finally have the opportunity to showcase more AI capabilities to customers and also collaborate to develop more use cases to address the demands of customers.

But the opening of the new AI Center of Excellence is just one part of Oracle’s plan to enable AI adoption in the region. Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) has also signed a contract with Oracle to implement an Oracle Cloud Isolated Region for the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) and the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF).

Apart from that, the tech giant announced plans to invest more than US$6.5 billion in developing AI and cloud computing infrastructure in Malaysia last year. These announcements are not only a testament to Oracle’s commitment to the region but also ensure customers that they have the right infrastructure in place to support their AI workloads.

According to Maz Songerwala, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Service Experience, customers in the Asia Pacific region are very interested in Oracle’s direction on how they’re embedding AI into all elements of its application portfolio to accelerate outcomes for customers.

“With AI, both generative and agentic, customers are very interested in understanding how they can leverage these capabilities and take advantage of it,” said Songerwala (pictured above).

While there remain some concerns on the cost of developing and deploying AI, Songerwala pointed out that Oracle’s differentiator factor is that the AI is embedded into every element of the product, without any separate charges.

“As part of our Fusion portfolio, customers get quarterly updates. And in quarterly updates, we introduce net new features and functionality that the customers just get as part of having the subscription overall. AI capabilities, whether they're generative or agentic, are deployed as part of those updates. So, the ROI is still the initial ROI that the customer is using cloud for,” said Songerwala.

Oracle Fusion Cloud offers a unified solution that seamlessly integrates diverse business functions across the enterprise landscape, including human capital management, financials, supply chain management, and customer experience.

For example, Songerwala explained that if a company is using cloud for payroll, their initial ROI model they chose in the first place was probably focused on retiring legacy systems at a different cost structure so that they can run payroll faster and also reduce the sprawl of legacy systems in their environment.

Now, that same company with human capital management (HCM) subscription for payroll, the AI capabilities further accelerate the outcomes, without any additional charges. Put simply, Songerwala pointed out that the conversation on increased cost for AI doesn’t come up because Oracle believes that customers are buying outcomes.

“And so that conversation (about ROI) doesn't really come up for us. It's more around where else can you help me with my business process and if AI has a role to play,” added Songerwala.

Supporting business requirements

Echoing his views is Sunil Wahi, vice president, Solution Engineering, Oracle Asia Pacific. According to Wahi, Oracle’s customers in the region have adopted use cases around HR requisition management and doing assisted authoring with these capabilities.

“It's more about a process change, which we are seeing from customers and a culture of shift to adopting these automated business processes, which are running through agentic AIs,” said Wahi (pictured above).

From an APAC standpoint, Wahi mentioned that there is a core set of industries that are currently leading the AI adoption. This includes the financial services industries like banks in Australia, Vietnam and India as well as large logistics and transport companies. The healthcare industry is also witnessing a strong adoption.

“It's just constantly increasing. There are a lot of new-age startups which have also started rolling out some of these GenAI services within Fusion Cloud,” added Wahi.

As such, Songerwala believes that as more embedded AI is adopted into the capabilities, it will eventually lead to businesses deciding where they want to adopt AI and how quickly they can use it.

Interestingly, Wahi pointed out that even SMBs are now looking towards this as most modern business practices are powered by agentic AIs that are part of Fusion Cloud applications and NetSuite, it enables faster and agile deployment.

On concerns of data privacy and regulatory requirements, Songerwala highlighted that Oracle’s approach is to have AI within the customer’s specific context. This allows them to provide specialized recommendations.

“In all the agreements that we've had with customers around data privacy, data security, and how we use it and who uses it from an Oracle perspective, are inherited in our AI approach. There is no way of customers' data getting aggregated together. Everything is just in the context of the customer's environments. And then the AI sits on top of that to provide appropriate specialized recommendations,” he explained.

Songerwala also mentioned that data security and privacy is at every layer. With this, customers feel that Oracle is not just providing specific needs but also doing it securely.

“This was the fundamental design principle we had because that is a concern out there, especially because people's initial exposure to open AI models. From the very beginning, that was not our approach,” said Songerwala.

The next steps of the journey

Looking ahead, Songerwala believes that Oracle will focus more on enabling customers to take “far more advantage of their software investment from just a SaaS standpoint they’ve had before.”

This means Oracle will focus on building on the momentum to help customers realize the benefits and also share the practices out there. Apart from that, Oracle will also look to shape their product roadmap on where they put their investments in.

“Figuring out how the entire workflow can get enabled by the software and what Oracle needs to do to provide that in the most seamless way and not just within each module. This is kind of where I'm seeing the next push that will shape our agent investment, regardless of where it is in the portfolio,” added Songerwala.

For Wahi, as product management has released a whole amount of innovation in Fusion Apps, the focus will be on adoption and to support customers drive more adoption in automating business processes from an AI agent standpoint and to them understand their data.

“We have released a lot of AI capabilities in our data intelligence platforms. And for us, the focus is also to drive adoption of these agentic workflows within analytics and within the business processes. We'll continue to help customers drive more adoption because that will generate conversations in terms of ROI, value realization and so on. And that's the mission moving forward for Oracle,” concluded Wahi.