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Oracle’s AI Upgrades for ERP and EPM Show Why AI Is in Reach for Any Enterprise
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to fuel the arms race among enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors. Earlier this year, Oracle announced that it has extended the AI (machine learning, to be more precise) capabilities within the ERP Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud products.
Using this announcement as an example of what we can expect, these capabilities should no longer sound too remote for any enterprise, big or small:
- The Expense Reporting Assistant uses machine learning to improve the automatic classification of expense items, monitor policy violations, and reduce audit risks, thus streamlining and automating expense report processing.
- The Project Management Digital Assistant learns from past time entries, project planning data, and the overall context to tailor interactions and smartly capture critical project information.
- Advanced Financial Controls continuously analyze transactions, setups, and configurations to automate audits and help prevent financial leakage by using self-learning algorithms and routing incidents to analysts for investigation.
- Advanced Access Controls use graph-based analysis to assess violations hidden inside complex, recursive, and dynamic security configurations. These controls also automate user security analysis by using AI to protect business data from insider threats and fraud.
- Intelligent Supplier Management enriches supplier profiles with AI-sourced and validated company data to power scoring and categorization. It also uses AI to extract dynamic supplier risk signals from news and press releases to manage supplier risk.
Our Take
AI capabilities are becoming a distinguishing factor among the biggest ERP players, both established and new. Considering that any given ERP implementation is expected to last up to 15 years, even if the immediate practical application of AI doesn’t seems so feasible, the foresight baked into engagements with a vendor investing in AI will likely pay off huge dividends within the lifespan of that ERP.