The HR technology industry’s active fall season is underway, with the HR Technology Conference & Exposition, Sept. 24-26, fast approaching. Earlier this month, Oracle hosted CloudWorld, the tech company’s massive user conference and technology showcase, in Las Vegas. Oracle’s product and service offerings span a wide range of information technology solutions as well as a full suite of enterprise applications beyond HR; nonetheless, the HCM technology elements were readily apparent at the event. This year’s iteration of CloudWorld included new product announcements, updates on Oracle HCM’s overall growth and progress, and several key customer success stories highlighting the impact of HR technology on business and HR transformation.
Here are some of the important updates and what they say about the state and direction of the HR technology industry.
The next wave of AI in HR technology
Not surprisingly, Oracle’s HCM executives devoted significant time in their keynote presentations and during one-on-one analyst meetings to updates on the latest innovations in AI technology. You may recall that at CloudWorld in 2023, generative AI capabilities were just beginning to be introduced into the Oracle Cloud HCM suite. At the time, they included common (but important) focuses like job description generation, employee feedback summaries and employee goal creation. These and other use cases formed a powerful and accessible set of new capabilities for customers, and Oracle executives estimated that at least a quarter of their customers were taking advantage of these new AI tools.
This time, Oracle explored how AI is evolving in its application suite with a new group of functions called Oracle AI Agents. These extend the generative AI version 1.0 capabilities into more fully realized and automated processes that are designed to help employees and managers complete their work more efficiently. The Agents use AI to fully automate end-to-end business processes like benefits enrollment or shift scheduling. They can deliver personalized insights, content, references and recommendations for action—all in the context of specific business processes and in support of specialized user roles.
For example, an AI Agent deployed for open enrollment can help with important functions such as:
- answering employee questions about options and current enrollments
- providing guidance on factors to consider when making elections
- offering personalized recommendations based on plans, options and employee information
- helping to complete the task of enrollment and any post-enrollment requirements.
These AI capabilities are all embedded directly in the benefits enrollment flow and in context of the specific company rules and policies. The Oracle AI Agents help to dynamically and securely use data from Oracle Cloud HCM, additional company-specific documentation (like benefits plan documents) and even external, connected data sources to generate up-to-date, source-identified and contextually relevant information and assistance to complete the process.
In total, 19 separate AI Agents for HCM were included in the initial announcement, spanning capabilities across employee lifecycle management, career and performance development, compensation and benefits management, and compliance and information management.
The major takeaway from this announcement is that these Agents and the processes they support represent the next important step in the evolution of AI capabilities in HR technologies. They take the power of generative AI and extend it by understanding context, creating personalized experiences, and scaling to meet the needs of any organization of any size—all to support increased efficiency and consistency. While generative AI 1.0 mainly manifested in text creation, these new Agents support much more and are likely to become the new standard of AI deployments in HR technologies. Oracle has made a major step forward in the HR tech AI arms race.
A new approach to skills management
A major focus in HR technology innovation over the last several years has been the goal of helping organizations understand, manage and develop employee skills. The conversations around skills have likely never been more endemic—from the HR technology provider community to major human capital management consulting organizations to numerous writers, speakers and thought leaders. Major organizations are attempting to reimagine many of their talent management processes like recruiting, training, career planning and workforce planning to make them “skills-centric.” In fact, other than generative AI, probably the most prevalent topic in HR tech in the last few years has been skills—and what, where, when and how they should be managed in the HR technology stack.
An organization’s typical HR technology platform now offers various applications for skills data and skills management capabilities—in the ATS, LMS, talent intelligence platforms (a newer category of HR tech) and in core HR systems. It can be extremely challenging for HR and HRIT leaders, particularly in larger organizations, to best determine where in the HR tech stack skills should be managed, and that is really just the start of the journey to skills-based talent processes. Skills are now becoming so important to many organizations that having skills-related data housed in multiple, potentially siloed systems will likely create a significant barrier to skills-centric talent management.
At CloudWorld, Oracle announced its approach to helping organizations manage skills more effectively and efficiently with its updated Oracle Dynamic Skills application. Dynamic Skills aims to make it possible for organizations to centrally manage their skills data, import skills information from external systems as needed, leverage a pre-defined library of over 10,000 skills and have skills data made available throughout the talent management processes.
At the event, Oracle leaders emphasized how organizations must have skills libraries, definitions and skills management as a central part of their HR system of record and not dispersed in different HR applications, such as those for recruiting or career planning. By centralizing skills management and developing an open architecture that allows for the addition and augmentation of skills data from other sources, Oracle aims to help organizations better manage and leverage skills in all of the HR processes and functions that are moving towards a skills-based focus.
HR technology of tomorrow
In the last few years, and certainly in the last few months, AI technology and skills technology have been the two most important areas of innovation in HR tech. With these two major announcements at CloudWorld, Oracle has made it clear that it understands the criticality of both of these trends and that it is committed to pushing the envelope on innovation and impact for its customers. Oracle has moved ahead of the HR tech market with these latest announcements, and it will be interesting to see how the market reacts.
Hope to discuss this all with many of you at the upcoming HR Technology Conference, where—among the hundreds of solutions on display—there will be a sharp focus on AI technology, skills technology and much more.
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