Oracle pushes AI deeper into enterprise workflows with Fusion Companion

Oracle is adding a new orchestration layer to its Fusion Cloud Applications suite to help enterprises automate business workflows, coordinate AI agents, and execute tasks across applications with less manual intervention.

The new layer, named Fusion Companion, will allow enterprise users to initiate business tasks through external AI assistants such as ChatGPT, rather than navigating individual enterprise applications to find the right workflows or tools, the company said in a statement.

It interprets users’ objectives and coordinates the transactions, workflows, approvals, and AI agents needed to complete tasks, including taking authorized actions across other enterprise systems, the company added.

Companion aims to reduce friction in enterprise AI adoption

That ability to coordinate and complete tasks without manual intervention will result in improved productivity for business users in an enterprise, said Stephanie Walter, practice leader of AI stack at HyperFrame Research.

“Companion’s automation means that an employee does not have to initiate multiple steps separately to complete a particular task. That could replace a sequence of clicks and handoffs with a request and any necessary approvals. It reduces the need to navigate applications, while keeping their business processes in place,” Walter added.

Fusion Companion’s ability to let employees initiate tasks through external AI assistants while keeping execution within enterprise systems could help CIOs address the tension between employees’ growing use of these tools and the need to preserve established business processes, security policies, and approval controls, said Ashish Chaturvedi, executive research leader at HFS Research.

“Access through ChatGPT carries real weight because it meets employees where they already spend their day. Many knowledge workers now open an AI assistant before they open any enterprise application. If you have ever watched a colleague draft an email in ChatGPT and then switch to an ERP screen to copy figures across, you have seen the friction Oracle is trying to remove,” Chaturvedi said.

Walter, meanwhile, sees a potential reduction in integration complexity for CIOs, as Fusion Companion could provide a common orchestration layer for employees to access enterprise workflows through different AI assistants, reducing the need to build and maintain separate integrations for each interface.

Challenges around implementation

However, the implementation of Fusion Companion is not without caveats.

“One of the caveats concerns data movement. When a user works through ChatGPT, some business context has to travel to that external assistant for the conversation to make sense. CIOs, therefore, should want precise answers on what data leaves the Oracle environment, how it is retained, and how this fits with their contracts with OpenAI,” Chaturvedi said.

Another concern is the reliability of intent interpretation, Chaturvedi added: “A well-phrased request will usually map to the correct process, but ambiguous requests could trigger the wrong transaction, and the consequences grow as agents gain authority to act.”

There are also concerns around dependency and erosion of process knowledge among enterprise users.

“When Companion becomes the layer that decides how work flows, including across non-Oracle systems, Oracle gains considerable influence over the enterprise’s process architecture. While that is convenient for Fusion-centric organizations, it could be a concern for those that want to keep orchestration neutral,” Chaturvedi said.

Over time, he added, delegating more work to AI agents could also erode employees’ understanding of underlying business processes, making exceptions and failures harder to diagnose when automated workflows break down.

Alongside Fusion Companion, Oracle is adding Fusion Agentic Home, a native interface within Fusion Applications that serves as an alternative for enterprise users who prefer not to rely on external AI assistants to delegate tasks and manage AI-driven workflows, while using Companion as the underlying orchestration layer.

Both Fusion Companion and Agentic Home are being made available as part of the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Release 26D, the company said.

The article originally appeared on InfoWorld.