Learn About Adaptive Automation

A divide has formed between organizations that embrace AI and those that have fallen behind in their AI efforts. The risks associated with ignoring AI are many: lost competitiveness, reduced innovation, and diminished relevance. At the same time, adopting AI without scrutiny or due diligence compromises your goals, too.

A successful AI initiative must have a solid foundation built upon quality data, governance, and trust. It must follow a careful, measured, and considered path. Oracle is with you every step of the way to offer guidance and identify pitfalls.

Agentic AI Essentials

In Oracle Integration, adaptive automation uses AI agents, which bring human-like reasoning and creativity to a task. An AI agent works like a human would: It determines which tasks are important and completes them in the order of its choosing, based on current data and conditions.

1. What is agentic AI?

Agentic AI completes a task or makes a decision using the following resources:

The current conditions
Large language model (LLM): Provides agentic AI with extensive knowledge but can’t access proprietary information, to protect your organization’s confidentiality.
Tools: Give agentic AI access to proprietary information according to your rules.

2. What are the guard rails for agentic AI?

Pattern: Describes the behavior of agentic AI, including its required and suggested actions.
Prompt: Controls the behavior, output, and actions of agentic AI.

3. How do you provide human oversight?

Human in the loop allows people to oversee agentic AI by approving tasks, assisting agents, and reviewing deliverables generated by an AI agent.

Benefits

Adaptive automation offers many benefits to your organization.

Benefit	More information
Improve a business process	Adaptive automation finds new ways to achieve your goals while promoting creativity, innovation, and possibilities. For example, transform the opportunity-to-order process by implementing the following workflows: Flagging opportunities with missing or inconsistent data. Finding opportunities that have stalled and contacting the account team about them. Identify pricing errors and other issues in a contract.
Ease the friction in the development process	When integration developers are fully booked, a business team's automation goals can experience delays. Then, by the time a development resource is available, the requirements might have changed. Agentic AI helps ease this friction. As long as the required tools are already available, a business team can create adaptive automation solutions quickly and independently, without needing help from developers.
Introduce creativity	Predictable automation applies the same rules every time, but what happens when things change? For example, when your customers' needs evolve, or the market shifts, yesterday's predictable automation solution can become irrelevant quickly. On the other hand, adaptive automation can adjust to rapidly changing conditions, thanks to the creative ability of agentic AI.

Benefit

More information

Improve a business process

Adaptive automation finds new ways to achieve your goals while promoting creativity, innovation, and possibilities. For example, transform the opportunity-to-order process by implementing the following workflows:

Flagging opportunities with missing or inconsistent data.
Finding opportunities that have stalled and contacting the account team about them.
Identify pricing errors and other issues in a contract.

Ease the friction in the development process

When integration developers are fully booked, a business team's automation goals can experience delays. Then, by the time a development resource is available, the requirements might have changed. Agentic AI helps ease this friction. As long as the required tools are already available, a business team can create adaptive automation solutions quickly and independently, without needing help from developers.

Introduce creativity

Predictable automation applies the same rules every time, but what happens when things change? For example, when your customers' needs evolve, or the market shifts, yesterday's predictable automation solution can become irrelevant quickly. On the other hand, adaptive automation can adjust to rapidly changing conditions, thanks to the creative ability of agentic AI.

Options for Agentic AI

You have several options for adaptive automation in Oracle Integration.

Option 1. Develop agentic AI in Oracle Integration

If you haven’t built agentic AI yet, Oracle Integration has you covered! It provides a full-scale agent framework for developing robust, scalable, and adaptive automation solutions.
Most frameworks that offer agentic AI are either easy to set up but minimal control, or very technical to set up with significant control. However, with Oracle Integration, you get easy setup and significant control. Provide every agent with a pattern, which defines the goals for agentic AI (including guidance on how to reason, plan, and take action) and guard rails.

Option 2. Use Oracle Integration as an MCP server

Agentic AI that you built using another agent framework can use an automation solution in Oracle Integration as a tool. Simply mark the automation solution as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Any agentic AI that can discover an MCP server can connect to and interact with the automation solution.
Using Oracle Integration as an MCP server lets you take advantage of everything you've already built and deliver consistent outcomes when needed. Additionally, you can use an integration as a layer between agentic AI and an application's APIs to mitigate the risk of giving agentic AI direct access.
To learn more, see Oracle Integration as an MCP Server.

Agentic AI, LLMs, and Tools

Explore agentic AI and the components of their toolkit: LLMs and tools.

Resource	Use
Agentic AI	Agentic AI is an assistant that achieves a goal. In Oracle Integration, the goal of agentic AI is the automation of a business process. Agentic AI is a wrapper around AI engines and other non-AI resources. Agentic AI uses an LLM and tools to achieve its goals.
LLM (Large language model)	Agentic AI uses an LLM primarily for its reasoning abilities. An LLM is an AI engine that is skilled at auto-complete and predictions. It has problem-solving skills and vast knowledge of facts and concepts. However, an LLM doesn't have all the knowledge that agentic AI needs, including its goals. Additionally, an LLM has no access to your organization's proprietary information; this restriction protects your organization's confidentiality. Therefore, agentic AI also needs tools to do its work.
Tool	A tool provides agentic AI with information that an LLM doesn't have. Tools help with the following goals: Gain enterprise connectivity by connecting to applications and data. Complete work by synchronizing data or accomplishing a task. Keep a human in the loop for approving actions, offering guidance, or handling errors. Augment agentic AI with enterprise content for grounded answers using a built-in RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) engine. Work with other technologies, including B2B, decisions, healthcare, and robots. You can provide nuanced guidance for each tool.

Resource

Use

Agentic AI

Agentic AI is an assistant that achieves a goal. In Oracle Integration, the goal of agentic AI is the automation of a business process. Agentic AI is a wrapper around AI engines and other non-AI resources.

Agentic AI uses an LLM and tools to achieve its goals.

LLM

(Large language model)

Agentic AI uses an LLM primarily for its reasoning abilities. An LLM is an AI engine that is skilled at auto-complete and predictions. It has problem-solving skills and vast knowledge of facts and concepts.

However, an LLM doesn't have all the knowledge that agentic AI needs, including its goals. Additionally, an LLM has no access to your organization's proprietary information; this restriction protects your organization's confidentiality. Therefore, agentic AI also needs tools to do its work.

Tool

A tool provides agentic AI with information that an LLM doesn't have. Tools help with the following goals:

Gain enterprise connectivity by connecting to applications and data.
Complete work by synchronizing data or accomplishing a task.
Keep a human in the loop for approving actions, offering guidance, or handling errors.
Augment agentic AI with enterprise content for grounded answers using a built-in RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) engine.
Work with other technologies, including B2B, decisions, healthcare, and robots.

You can provide nuanced guidance for each tool.

How to Trust Agentic AI

Your trust in agentic AI grows when you provide clear guidance and then measure the result. Oracle Integration provides the following tools for guiding an agentic AI and evaluating its outcome. After all, AI adoption moves at the speed of trust.

Keep in mind that whether an employee or agentic AI is responsible for a business process, the process rarely runs perfectly. People and AI make mistakes. Therefore, you have to find the point at which adaptive automation becomes good enough. If adaptive automation makes mistakes at the same rate as a person, you might decide that it's just as trustworthy as an employee, and maybe even more useful.

Feature	Overview	More information
Prompts	Provide clear guidelines	A prompt helps an AI agent achieve a specific goal and is similar to the written work instructions that you'd provide to human workers. A prompt includes a structured set of instructions for handling tools, including the order in which to run tools. A prompt also defines the end criteria and offers guidance for handling exceptions. When crafting a prompt, start by providing the problem that the AI agent needs to solve and the information that the agent needs to solve the problem.
Pattern	Define agentic AI behavior	A pattern describes agentic AI behavior. A pattern includes safeguards, which are required actions, such as removing personally identifiable information (PII) from the output of agentic AI. A pattern also includes guidelines, which are suggested actions, such as answering questions about expense reports only. Customize the Oracle-provided patterns so that they have the appropriate complexity and fine-grained control. Or, if you've already created patterns outside Oracle Integration, use them instead.
Tools	Provide nuanced guidance for each tool	Tool builders are responsible for writing guidelines for their own tools, so agentic AI receives best practices from the people who are best suited to writing them. This guidance helps agentic AI optimize its use of each tool.
Human in the loop	Provide human oversight	Agentic AI sometimes need help and human intervention, just like employees do. To maintain business continuity even when agentic AI acts inconsistently, supervise agentic AI in the same way you would employees. Use human in the loop for this supervision. You can allow or require agentic AI to keep a human in the loop when it needs help.

Reuse Existing Automation

Your adaptive automation journey doesn't begin with a blank slate. If you've already built predictable automation solutions, you can use their components in adaptive automation.

Consider the components that agentic AI needs to do its job:

Good data: Agentic AI knows only as much as the data that it has access to.
Access: The ability to connect people, processes, and applications determines what agentic AI can do.

The predictable automation solutions that you've already created give agentic AI the keys to your business processes, according to your rules.

Streamline the implementation process for adaptive automation by building on the established automation solutions that are currently powering your business. This approach reduces development time, ensures consistency across your automation solutions, and supports scalability as your automation requirements evolve from rule-based scenarios to more dynamic use cases.

Next Steps

If you need help deciding between predictable and adaptive automation, see Choose Between Predictable and Adaptive Automation.

Otherwise, if you're ready to identify the technologies and features to include in your automation solution, see Plan an Automation Solution.