Today, companies are using data to help create a meaningful, and consistent way to improve customer experiences. Organizations can gain a competitive advantage by enhancing the value of their existing applications with the use of AI, and natural language generation to accelerate operational efficiencies. Accelerating advances in emerging technologies like internet of things (IoT), big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence have radically transformed the way we conceptualize application development. Embedding deeper, data-driven insights from structured and unstructured data into customer demographics and preferences, algorithms that can identify behavioral patterns and customer propensity have enabled companies to address the customers’ needs, including products, pricing, and service delivery. What began as a few simple uses of analyzing data to understand the habits and activities of their customers has evolved into much more complex and intelligent applications.
The rise of intelligent applications
With embedded AI and analytical capabilities, intelligent applications autonomously learn, adapt, and discover patterns of behavior. These applications continuously learn from every end-user interaction to improve performance and use predictive analytics to quickly adapt to the information they receive. Intelligent applications use built-in machine learning algorithms to process vast amounts of data and continuously improve performance.
Intelligent applications have become a present-day necessity that every organization must adopt soon if they want to keep up with ongoing changes to provide better customer experiences. SaaS applications provide new autonomation capabilities without the need to upgrade, patch, or purchase additional software. This lets companies benefit from advanced technologies faster than ever before. In the end, the best technology is that which frees employees to focus on rewarding work that drives the enterprise forward.
As an example, Equity Residential, one of the leading publicly traded owners and operators of high-quality rental apartment properties, rolled out intelligent applications to better support their employee experience. The company implemented Oracle Digital Assistant to enhance the external candidate experience on its career site even further, allowing candidates to ask about open jobs in a particular location, the status of their application, or even employee programs. With Adaptive Intelligence, Equity Residential was able to enhance the recruiter experience to streamline candidate review and provide the ability to quickly find similar prospective candidates for job openings. The company can now connect its HR information to other business applications in a centralized placed where employees and managers can easily access the records remotely.
Essential building components for intelligent applications
Given that intelligent applications are imperative to a business’s agility and resilience, enterprises face an urgency to build a new breed of cloud-based applications that are smarter, fully integrated, deliver faster time to value, and are easy to onboard and use while also being cost-efficient.
Cloud native architecture
Adopting a cloud native model of application development is the most appropriate starting point. A cloud-native application consists of independent building blocks called microservices that can easily integrate into a cloud environment. Each microservice is independent and packaged in a software container. Managed by an orchestrator, a microservice does not require a large relational database. Having its own repository for a single codebase, a microservice packages and isolates dependencies, and it is deployable independently in multiple environments. Through robust automation, microservices can be quickly deployed with unlimited frequency or whenever new features and updates to the app are ready for installation.
AI based microservices
Developers are incorporating AI in the form of deep learning, machine learning, and kindred technologies into cloud-native architectures to allow for smarter and richer applications with faster development lifecycles. On a cloud native environment, AI microservices are containerized and orchestrated dynamically within lightweight interoperability fabrics. Each containerized AI microservice exposes an independent, programmable RESTful API, which enables it to be easily reused, evolved, or replaced without compromising interoperability. Containerized AI microservices may be implemented using different programming languages, algorithm libraries, cloud databases, and other enabling back-end infrastructure.
But for it all to interoperate seamlessly in complex AI applications, there needs to be a back-end data fabric for reliable messaging, transactional rollback, and long-running orchestration capabilities provided by Kubernetes.
Intelligent application development with OCI
OCI offers enterprises Oracle Cloud Native services to build intelligent and modern applications quickly and efficiently. Oracle helps developers build application components or microservices using the tools and technologies they are comfortable using. With OCI, applications and services can be deployed on containers. These containers can be created much faster than hypervisor-based instances, providing a more agile environment and facilitating DevOps.
Developers can use traditional as well as dynamic scripting languages such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, and Python in multi-lingual or polyglot environment, along with many data management options including MySQL, NoSQL, Hadoop and more. Oracle also helps developers to move containers and application packages directly to OCI, with built-in support for Kubernetes.
AI services on OCI enhances applications by providing new capabilities to improve the customer experience and accelerate business results. As the world’s leading enterprise applications, Oracle Cloud covers all aspects of the business including HCM, ERP, SCM, EPM, CX and more. Business users can drive better analytics experiences using AI to help make better decisions.
For more information on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle AI apps, see Oracle Artificial Intelligence. Or, try our cloud free.