Hype or Necessity: Can Oracle Chatbots Drive Your Business?

A recent survey found that 67% of people expect to use messaging apps (chatbots) to talk to businesses. In reality, more and more businesses are integrating chatbots with enterprise applications to drive business, as well as improving operational efficiency. We’re starting to see this in a range of fields – sales and marketing, customer service, HR, accounting and more.

Chatbots Provide Benefits Across Industries

The use of chatbots speeds up work processes and eliminates the need for training. In addition, chatbots simplify the exchange of information and automating complex business processes. Gartner points out that “Chatbots are essentially the ‘apps’ of voice and messaging platforms, defining how people converse with your digital business services and data.”

Chatbots eliminate the need to create or download a specialized mobile app. Additionally, they allow less-technically savvy employees in large companies to easily ‘communicate’ with enterprise data systems using simple, commonly-available messaging applications.

Here are just a few examples of how chatbots help employees, customers and partners communicate more effectively with enterprise systems:

– In Call centers or help desks, chatbots can reduce workload by automating the response to routine requests.

-With Accounting, chatbots can help keep track of various tasks like expenses, revenues, and outstanding invoices.

– In Sales, field sales reps can inquire about availability of parts or products.

– In HR, chatbots can help employees fill in hour reports or expenses, get their work sheet or shifts, call in sick, etc. The data is then automatically fed to backend systems.

But … Can Chatbots Access My Legacy Oracle Forms or EBS Applications?

In October 2017, Oracle introduced AI-powered intelligent bots to help enterprises engage Customers and Employees. This powerful platform allows developers to program Bots to respond to end user queries without heavy coding. In addition, it can connect to most major messaging channels in a matter of hours. However, the challenge remains -“How can we connect this powerful platform to our core back-office applications such as Oracle forms, E-Business Suite, Primavera and JD Edwards, which were designed years ago without the support for modern messaging applications?”

AuraPlayer fills this gap, to easily extend any Oracle application to chatbot by exposing the applications as REST services to act as the backbone of any messaging application. See this 2-minute video from Oracle Open World, where Oracle’s VP of Product Management for Mobile, Bots and AI, Suhas Uliyar presented a chatbot solution powered by AuraPlayer and Oracle’s Intelligent Bot Cloud Service.

You can view the full Oracle chatbot demo below – an Oracle EBS inventory management messaging bot running in a Slack workspace. It offers a lookup into Oracle Inventory, allowing for easy sales replenishment and orders from field. The Slack environment is due to the internal/enterprise context, but the functionality could be implemented with any messaging application like Facebook. To learn more about Oracle’s BOTS platform and its ability to create robust conversation applications with ease, join the live webcast, Personalize Instant Apps for Your Chatbots

Don’t think it can be this simple? Try us! Choose a use case from your Oracle EBS / Forms application and tell us why you think it would make a great chatbot. If we agree, we will build your prototype on us and feature it live on stage at the Collaborate conference in Vegas April 2018.