A Day at Oracle CloudWorld Tour London 2023

Earlier in April, PAC spent the day at Oracle CloudWorld to better understand how Oracle solutions and related services support business growth and offer hyper-personalized experiences through Oracle Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle is not alone in this journey, as was seen during the keynote session delivered by Oracle CEO Safra A. Catz, emphasizing Oracle customer use cases (e.g., Network Rail and London Stock Exchange), but perhaps more importantly, the resulting partnerships that flourished through these engagements, elevating its importance to “partnership is the new leadership.” Effectively, the relationship between Oracle and its customers has evolved into continuous collaboration fusing business and vertical knowledge with Oracle’s technical expertise to solve day-to-day and future business challenges. These, for example, include sustainability goals, new product creation, more efficient workflows, data democratization, delivering personalized value-added experiences for employees and end consumers, and opening doors to new opportunities.

Creating new experiences and opportunities is indeed a core focus for Oracle. During the event, the vendor announced its latest offering, Oracle Grow, part of the Oracle ME employee experience platform, which resides within Oracle Cloud HCM. Oracle Grow is an AI-driven solution catered to employee growth connecting learning, skills, and career mobility in one hyper-personalized environment.

According to Oracle, the Oracle Grow UI was designed with a social media experience in mind. It offers employees insights into their career paths (mapping) from their current role (e.g., business process manager all the way to, e.g., director). Based on employee data, the system will show what is needed to achieve a certain role or pick a specific career path. It also offers recommendations and a likelihood score for achieving a selected role based on employee data. This will allow employees to see and explore new roles and opportunities, including those they had not considered or did not know were in reach.

In PAC’s view, this is a powerful offering that will bring employees better experiences and greater clarity about their role and future in the company. Too often, employees feel as if they are a mere statistic within the wider business context, leaving people to feel undervalued, underappreciated, and unsure of their value and future within a business. Offerings such as Oracle Grow can bring change to this experience, enabling employees to have greater ownership of their career while simultaneously feeling recognized, valued, and having a sense of belonging. This creates a win-win scenario as the employee is ‘valued and seen’, while businesses will likely experience greater employee satisfaction with lower attrition levels.

Despite the real potential of Oracle Grow, it has to be said that the propensity for successful outcomes and employee engagements will depend on the amount and quality of employee data a company has available for AI to create holistic, accurate, and valuable recommendations and opportunities.