Oracle says it's building a suite of AI agents into its cloud-based enterprise applications, claiming they can make and execute decisions autonmomously within business processes. But analysts are urging caution given unresolved questions around data integration and liability.

Unveiled in London this week, Fusion Agentic Applications will be integrated with the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications suite, covering financials, ERP, HR, payroll and supply chain management. Oracle argues it has a structural advantage here: the data needed to train and run these agents already lives inside its enterprise applications.

"Applications that can reason, decide, and act in pursuit of defined business objectives," is how Big Red's application development executive veep Steve Miranda framed the shift, a move away from process-focused software toward outcome-driven automation.

Oracle, for example, promises a Design-to-Source Workspace Agentic Application, which it says can work across engineering, supplier, and sourcing decisions to create one "coordinated and continuous process."

However, Balaji Abbabatulla, Gartner vice president and vendor lead for Oracle, was more measured, pointing to unanswered questions about how the technology will be implemented in an enterprise setting.

"Our position is that this sounds good, but be cautious. It doesn't necessarily look as glittery as it sounds. There are challenges under the hood which are not being overcome right now, but maybe over time," he said.

In January, Gartner said boards of global businesses are putting tech teams under pressure to implement AI agents. Application, database, service layer, and cloud vendors are all scrabbling over the expected bonanza, trying to build influence over enterprise AI strategy.

Oracle’s pitch is to house AI agents within its enterprise application suite, and sell AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications to help organizations build, connect, and run AI automation and agentic applications. Oracle has also launched an AI Data Platform to integrate data from different sources to build AI agents.

Gartner's Abbabatulla said that via the Platform Oracle wants to connect non-Oracle repositories, legacy applications - such as SharePoint repositories - and extract information from them. Although Big Red provides tools for data or technology experts to do that, it is not automated.

“There's no kind of autonomous way of synchronizing these different data repositories in the background,” he said.

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Building agents to run application-based processes will require a lot of work – and most likely spending money with Oracle to get the right engineering expertise, he added.

That's a hurdle for some large enterprises already invested in data platforms from Databricks, Snowflake, Cloudera or other vendors, with some initiatives harking back to the "big data" investment era. Abbabatulla sees Oracle's pitch as partly defensive, using data-in-context as an incentive to keep customers within its ecosystem.

“The transition overhead is massive, because these are investments people have made for years now,” Abbabatulla said. “This is unlikely to actually attract them to let go of this investment, but I'm sure there'll be organizations willing to try this in addition to some of those other investments they have made.”

Oracle and other vendors must still answer the question of who takes responsibility for AI decision-making should it go wrong, a problem The Register has been raising for a couple of years.

If an AI agent makes a bad decision at scale and speed, cascading errors could spread before anyone notices. Oracle's answer so far is monitoring and audit tooling, but Abbabatulla is unconvinced: "I don't see a clear response from any vendor on the liability issue."

Mickey North Rizza, IDC group vice-president enterprise software, was more bullish, calling it a "significant shift" in agentic systems as they continuously complete work within the enterprise software system.

“Overall, this is a great move for Oracle positioning it as a market shaper towards the Agents as Apps. It won’t be the app with the best UI that does well, but rather the agent that reliably completes outcomes that are at scale, with trust and bring sustained economic leverage," she said.

With boards pressuring tech teams to deploy agents, Oracle, like every major platform vendor, is fighting for a piece of that pie. ®

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