AI That Takes Action in Customer Experience: Oracle's Agentic Move and the Competition

Over the course of my career I have witnessed many technological transformations, but the agentic AI revolution we are living through right now is an entirely different kind of turning point. Until now, AI has summarized text for us, analyzed data or given customers standard answers, essentially playing the role of an assistant. But this spring, the era of the assistant is drawing to a close and the era of “action” is officially beginning. We are talking about autonomous systems that don’t just make recommendations but go into the system on my or my team’s behalf and take action: renewing contracts, launching campaigns and proactively resolving service crises.

Oracle Fusion Agentic Applications: From Reactive to Proactive

The Fusion Agentic Applications platform that Oracle introduced on April 9, 2026, at its AI World Tour event in New York aims to transform today’s reactive customer experience infrastructure into a fully proactive model. In a service crisis, for example, the system doesn’t just flag the problem as a red alert on a dashboard; it reaches into all of the company’s back-end data to run a risk analysis, understands approval hierarchies and advances the process to the next stage of resolution without any need for human intervention. Oracle’s biggest trump card here is that it can directly and securely access not only front-end data but the vast data lake rooted in the entire enterprise resource planning infrastructure, from supply chain to finance.

The Major Rivals in the Market: Salesforce Agentforce and Others

Of course, Oracle is not alone on this playing field. Salesforce Agentforce, which all of us know well from our hands-on work designing technology architectures for retail operations, is one of the most ambitious and established players in this race toward AI that takes action. With agents born at the very heart of the customer relationship management ecosystem, Salesforce can make sales and service teams’ workflows autonomous with far greater flexibility. Microsoft, meanwhile, is pursuing a different strategy with its Copilot approach, working its way into the office software employees already live in all day. Oracle’s clearest line of defense against these giant rivals is that Oracle AI Agent Studio lets organizations build their own agentic applications from ready-made agents supplied by Oracle, its partners and external sources, with no need for traditional application development.

The Rules of the New Era for Customer Experience Leaders

So what do all these technology wars mean for us? As customer experience leaders, we now have to focus less on how many questions our software answers and more on how many complex processes it successfully completes. The role of employees is evolving too, from workers who enter data into the system to orchestrators who oversee the decisions AI agents make and manage the exceptions.

As I emphasized in my recent CX Bulletin analysis, “The Cost of the Employee Experience Crisis: 20% Engagement and a $10 Trillion Loss”, these technological tools will not deliver the big leap expected of them unless they lift the operational burden off employees’ shoulders and boost their motivation. If AI that takes action can break down organizational silos and be integrated in an environment of transparency and trust, it may finally turn the seamless customer journeys we have been chasing for years into reality.