This is part 1 of a three-part series; go here for part 2 and stay tuned for part 3.

Let’s be frank: AI is the most transformative technology of our generation. Hardly a week goes by when there isn’t an announcement about a new model, a new service, new funding, new collaboration, or new regulation.

But a tool or technology is only as good as the ways that it is used by skilled practitioners, and AI is already being deployed across nearly every industry to help with real-world use cases. These range from personalized treatment plans in healthcare, to real-time risk assessments in finance, to intelligent equipment-failure mitigation in manufacturing, to sophisticated genomic analysis in the pursuit of disease prevention in life sciences.

And for developers, the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey of over 46,000 professional developers indicates that 77% are using AI tools in the development process or plan to use them soon. This is rapid adoption by experienced developers of a new technology that will have staying power.

Man typing on laptop at desk with monitor

Our mission is your success

So, to align with and support you in this massive shift, our mission at Oracle is to help you build, enhance, and scale applications with AI to extract the full integrated potential of your business data.

To do that, Oracle has infused AI at every layer of the stack—from SaaS applications to AI services, databases with built-in AI and ML, some of the most advanced GPU and networking infrastructure on the planet, and a very strong ecosystem of partners with domain-specific expertise. AI is part of nearly everything we do.

The framework we’ve devised for describing how you can build the future with data and AI is divided into three stages:

  1. Build faster with AI by using GenAI services.
  2. Bring AI to your data by using the powerful capabilities built into our database services.
  3. Deploy and scale anywhere with OCI and our multicloud partnerships.

Build faster with AI using OCI application development services

Let’s examine each of these stages, starting with “Build faster with AI.” We’re talking about using AI to build applications and adding intelligence to any app.

We referenced the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey earlier. Another insight from that report is that 83% of more than 28,500 professional developers agree that increasing productivity is the biggest benefit of using AI tools. So, to be clear, AI is not about replacing you, it’s about supercharging your ability to be more creative and productive and spend less time on the things that don’t interest you.

And for the survey respondents currently using AI tools, 82% of them use it to write code. Further evidence of this trend comes from the market research firm Gartner®, which projects that, “by 2028, 90% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 14% in early 2024.”1

Two men looking at laptops

Oracle Code Assist, an AI code companion

To fulfill this overwhelming demand for AI code assistants and to help you build applications faster with AI, last year we announced Oracle Code Assist, an AI code companion to help you boost developer velocity and enhance code consistency (which is incredibly important in large organizations with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of developers).

Oracle Code Assist has been created specifically for Oracle customers and so is optimized for the languages that you use the most: Java, SuiteScript (for NetSuite customers), PL/SQL (for database customers), and application development on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle Code Assist is powered by large language models (LLMs) running on OCI. You engage with Code Assist through a plugin for either IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio Code, so you stay within your IDE or editor and can remain in flow. You specify which parts of your codebase serve as the context for your Code Assist prompts, and the generative AI (GenAI) model generates the response, whether it pertains to one of the following areas or more:

  • Code creation or test cases
  • Annotation or summarization
  • Code explanations (which are great for speeding up code reviews)
  • Finding and suggesting bug fixes

One important thing to note: Oracle has deep respect for privacy, so customer data—your codebase, prompts, and chat sessions—aren’t shared with any model provider.

OCI Generative AI and task-specific AI services

Code Assist is just one of our many GenAI capabilities. The OCI Generative AI service consists of high-quality prebuilt LLMs from leading providers. You can customize them with your own data, through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or fine-tuning. And the same capabilities are in every type of distributed cloud region that we offer, including public, private, government, and sovereign. And as I emphasized before, your data is not shared with any LLM providers.

Whether it is using OCI Generative AI or one of our many task-specific capabilities, you can add intelligence to any app with OCI AI services. API connectivity makes it simple to connect and get started right away with services like these:

  • Oracle Digital Assistant is an extremely popular chatbot service that many customers are using to “talk to their database” and query by using natural language.
  • Speech and Language are perfect for voice-to-text and transcription capabilities, while Vision is ideal for quickly identifying characteristics and anomalies in visual media.
  • Document Understanding is central to the intelligent document processing use case, for extracting common data fields out of invoices, contracts, and other types of content.

Man looking at phone at desk with computers

OCI and Fusion SaaS AI Agents

One of the most exciting applications of these capabilities is AI Agents, which are proving to be a valuable way to harness the power of generative AI. An AI Agent is an LLM-based autonomous system that can understand and generate text. It uses tools and other AI Agents to perform complex tasks, and has planning, reasoning, and acting capabilities. This system can comprehend and respond to requests in a way that mimics human chain-of-thought processing, which makes it an effective tool for automating processes and improving user experience.

There are many, many examples of AI Agents— in fact, Oracle has announced more than 50 AI Agents, which are already being incorporated into Fusion SaaS offerings. These AI Agents can make tasks more efficient and, in some cases, automate tasks that were manual or difficult to do before. AI agents can help businesses reimagine how work is done across finance, HR, supply chain, service, sales, and marketing. And of course, these new agents will be part of customers’ normal quarterly SaaS update.

Additionally, OCI offers everything you need to create your own AI Agents, as highlighted in the next section. Our complete application development platform, converged databases with built-in AI, world-class AI infrastructure, and enterprise-grade privacy, security, and integration provide just about everything you need.

OCI AI customer success

I’ll end this post by highlighting two customers who are having strong success with OCI Generative AI services.

Brain4Data is a German startup focused on combining AI with robotic process automation for small and midsize businesses to make recommendations for their employees or customers. Fred is the name of their GenAI-powered agent, and Brain4Data needed to use RAG to access reams of a customer’s internal data to generate trustworthy answers and actions, while keeping Fred fast, affordable, scalable, and reliable.

At first, the company stored customers’ data in a separate vector database on an external server, but that added complexity and slowed performance. Instead, Brain4Data chose Oracle Database 23ai, which we’ll discuss in the next post, and after just a few months their AI agent Fred could answer 80% of end-user questions, which is a fantastic result.

Intermedia is a cloud communications company that helps over 135,000 businesses connect using voice, videoconferencing, chat, and more. To provide outstanding customer support, Intermedia staff engineers field 300 to 400 chats daily across 21 languages—a task that requires thousands of staff hours a year.

Intermedia chose OCI Generative AI to automatically summarize the transcripts of hundreds of chats a day in just minutes, which is a huge timesaver and helps with training, building up the knowledge base, and identifying common customer themes. The time saved on responding to customer issues could instead be redirected to increasing customer satisfaction through product, usability, and documentation improvements, which is a big win for all involved.

 

This is part 1 of a three-part series; go here for part 2 and stay tuned for part 3.

1Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for AI Code Assistants, Arun Batchu, Philip Walsh, Matt Brasier, Haritha Khandabattu, 19 August 2024
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.