AI World: Oracle brings agents to bear on world of finance

Customer insight: Choctaw Indian Nation uses Fusion AI

Although it has yet to venture down the agentic path, one of the US’s largest Indian nations, the 250,000-strong Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is incorporating Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications into its workflows, and has been using various embedded Fusion AI features to automate processes and goals.

With roots dating back centuries, the Oklahoma Choctaw operate as a sovereign nation and, as such, the tribal administration is responsible for running a range of programmes in areas such as education, healthcare and housing. The nation even has an independent judiciary dating back to the 1830s.

The tribe also oversees a range of business activities, operating casinos, resorts and restaurants, along with agriculture and farming.

The Choctaw government turned to Oracle’s AI services out of a desire to streamline its business processes, expand its capabilities and offer an evolving range of services to its members.

“For sovereign nations, leadership means planning for future generations. Embracing AI is key to building a strong foundation that supports our values, drives economic growth, and secures our long-term success,” said Emily Crow, Choctaw Nation IT director of enterprise services.

“With Oracle Fusion Applications, we’ve been able to automate key business processes, improve insights and help grow the next generation of leaders. We’ve already adopted over 40 generative AI capabilities and look forward to leveraging more of Oracle’s AI agents and the AI Agent Studio to better support our people and improve operational efficiency as we continue to expand,” she said.

“With broad and complex operations, it’s often challenging for tribal nations to oversee business and workforce data across multiple industries while also meeting unique regulatory requirements,” said Steve Miranda, executive vice-president of applications development at Oracle.

“With Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, the Choctaw Nation has been able to take advantage of advanced AI capabilities to increase productivity, streamline critical business processes, cultivate the next generation of leaders, and set the stage for a future of innovation and growth.”

The Choctaw IT team is using Oracle Fusion Cloud AI features in two core areas: finance and human resources.

On the HR side, seeking to improve the experience for its 13,000-plus employees, generate more insightful data on its workforce, and reduce time-consuming manual processes, it is now using AI-powered features in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).

These features include agentic capabilities to support employees in areas such as goal-setting and performance reviews, career and skills development guidance, and opportunity discovery.

The organisation is already realising benefits in several areas. Beyond mere time savings, it said it was now able to scale career growth conversations more broadly across its employee base.

Turning to financial matters, the Choctaw Nation is using Fusion Cloud ERP in the service of increasing productivity, reducing costs and improving financial controls, and is already using embedded AI capabilities to streamline its invoice processing. It also hopes to implement more AI-powered features, such as predictive cash forecasting and narrative reporting.

In addition to all this, the Choctaw Nation is spinning up Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI to support translation between English and Choctaw, and preserve and grow its pre-Colombian language, which has fewer than 300 living speakers.