• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 2, 2024

Oracle has big plans for its future -- but it’s no longer just about enterprise software as the company prepares to move its headquarters from Austin, Texas to Nashville, Tennessee -- a city that for years has been making efforts to attract major corporations to the area. 

The company's new campus in Nashville "will ultimately be our world headquarters," Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said last week at the company's health summit.

When I visited the Northern California headquarters in the early 2000s to attend a roundtable of journalists with Ellison, Oracle focused on enterprise software, competing mostly with SAP.

Since then the company has expanded into advertising support, artificial intelligence (AI), data, database management systems, and cloud computing.

Oracle recently announced new AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) to help marketers, sellers, and service agents accelerate deals. AI capabilities help organizations generate more sales faster by automating time-consuming tasks.

Aly Pinder, research vice president at IDC, believes these updates are good examples of how AI and machine-learning models can improve customer experiences and create the efficiencies needed for service workers to be more productive.

The technology is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). By leveraging its leading AI services, Oracle supports more than 50 generative AI (GAI) use cases that are embedded within Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite and designed to respect customers' enterprise data, privacy, and security.

The company said customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers. An individual customer is the only person allowed to use custom models trained on its data. Role-based security, which is embedded directly into Oracle Fusion Applications workflows, also protect the data. 

The new AI capabilities help to reduce workload cycles by automatically crafting contextually aware responses to customer questions.

The features help service technicians optimize schedules by automatically recommending relevant jobs based on availability, location, skills, and billing status.

The features come more than a month after the company launched over a dozen generative AI capabilities across the entire suite of Fusion Cloud applications.

And in April, Oracle Japan announced it plans to invest more than $8 billion during the next 10 years to meet the growing demand for cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan.

The investment will grow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) footprint across Japan. It also will help customers and partners address digital sovereignty requirements in Japan.

The goal is for Oracle to significantly expand its operations and support engineering teams with Japan-based personnel.