Chris Leone on Oracle's Fusion Agentic Applications and the Future of Enterprise AI | Cloud Wars Live

**Bob Evans** (0:08)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Cloud Wars brought to you by our friends at Oracle.
As businesses undergo AI transformation, agentic AI is becoming a more and more indispensable part of that evolution. So to discuss that dynamic, my guest today is Oracle Executive Vice President, Chris Leone, who heads up Applications and AI. And Chris is leading what Oracle is calling its new Fusion Agentic Applications, so really has not just the front row seat, but his hands on the wheel for what's going on here at Oracle. Chris, welcome, always good to see you.

**Chris Leone** (0:44)
It is a pleasure to be here, great to see you, Bob.

**Bob Evans** (0:46)
Chris, what a crazy time we're in now, right? You think after the last couple of years, things couldn't move at a more frenetic pace with more potential for customers, but that seems to be the case.

**Chris Leone** (0:58)
It is a very, very exciting time. I honestly, it's great to be part of it. It's great to be in this atmosphere, where you feel like you learn something new every single day, which is...

**Bob Evans** (1:13)
Yeah. So Chris, I know that one of the things we wanted to do here is get into a discussion of your new AI Studio Skill and Fusion Builder Experience. But before that, the whole agentic applications field itself is so new. How about if we start there and just give an overview of what Oracle is doing with its Fusion Agentic Applications and how that's different, and what is the unique value there for customers?

**Chris Leone** (1:41)
Yeah. Great. We've moved up the agent experience curve over the last few years. Like everybody else, we started with single agents, we went to agent teams, we delivered AI automations through workflow agents. Then we really saw customers asking for us to put a full system together, full agentic harness together to deliver value around a particular business process that they wanted to optimize.
About six, seven months ago, we said, hey, this concept of agentic applications, which is a full defined business application with a experience layer, with a kind of agent or decision layer, with a kind of more deterministic layer, and putting that in as part of the system of record was something that we said, hey, look, if we could deliver this kind of end-to-end experience that was defined around a business objective or a business outcome that customers were trying to achieve, and we kind of allowed them to build it so it could orchestrate the process for them, kind of remind them of the actions that they needed to take and kind of be that optimization engine for the process was something that we started to build and we kind of got into it and customers started to see it and they were like, hey, this really could help automate a big part of what I do around a particular process. So that's kind of how it started and kind of where it's at today.

**Bob Evans** (3:17)
Yeah, and Chris, I think what, you know, among the things that, unique things that Oracle is doing now, I think just with that name, Fusion Agentic Applications, right? I mean, was it a couple of years ago, the comment about that agents are going to blow away applications, I think understandably got a lot of customers have been at tizzy about that and certainly isn't an approach that Oracle's followed. But Fusion Agentic Applications, I think, offers the promise of the best of both. The things that agents can do, the traditional things that apps have done to allow that new interplay that you just described it that customers have.
Could you talk about that a little on how this brings the best of both worlds?

**Chris Leone** (3:59)
Yeah, it's a really great question. I'll give a few examples. It's easier to talk through examples. When I think about what we've been doing for the last year and what customers have been deploying, have been what I'll call advisor agents, where you can ask questions, get recommendations, even commit some transactions as part of the application. We've delivered a lot of those, over 1,000 of those, and customers have deployed those.
But with agentic applications, we wanted to go further. I'll give an example of one of our agentic applications is sourcing command center. The source of command center is a great one.
The defined objective that a customer can give the source of command center is, look, I want to reduce my supplier spend by 10 percent or 15 percent, and I want to maybe reduce lead times for getting inventory by 5 or 10 percent. They can give that as an outcome for that agentic process that they defined. Then the agentic application does the work to identify where there's inventory shortages, and it can create RFQs, it can kick off auctions, it can monitor those auctions and award winners. But through that entire process, a human can sit in the middle, and the system can recommend the next action, define what that should be, why it's prioritized, and help the individual manage that entire cognitive load of that entire process, and help them incrementally go through the process. And what's even better is we talk about this autonomy dial. And part of what we can do with agentic applications is start to automate more and more of those actions, that execution, without a person having to hit the button, okay, take the next action, take the next action. And so that really frees people up to do other more important work, strategic work, manage the outcome of that process, versus managing the minutia of every task that goes into it. And so that's the concept of agentic applications, is really to move from kind of day-to-day task completion to more and more autonomous work completion. And the more we can turn that autonomy dial up, the more it frees the organization up to work on more strategic initiatives.