Transforming Oracle Enterprise Mobility Using Intelligent Chatbot & AI - A Whitepaper by RapidValue

Transforming Oracle Enterprise Mobility
using Intelligent Chatbots and Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
A WHITEPAPER ON ORACLE MOBILE CLOUD ENTERPRISE

Transforming Oracle Enterprise Mobility using
Intelligent Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) index
01 Executive Summary
03 Why Enterprises are looking
towards a Conversational Bot?
12 Enterprise Use Case: Chatbot for
Oracle EBS Approvals
16 Oracle Bot Builder Portal in OMCe
25 References
25 Author
26 About RapidValue
25 Conclusion
06 Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise
(OMCe): Cloud Development
Framework for Oracle Enterprise
©RapidValue Solutions

Intelligent Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Human behavior tends to improve productivity
with continuous efforts. This leads to innovation
in technology and people have witnessed the
revolution in technologies like cloud, virtual
platforms, mobile applications, smart devices and
Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you talk about enterprise
mobility, the mobile apps have revolutionized the
way users interact with big enterprise systems like
Oracle EBS, JD Edwards, Siebel, Fusion cloud ERP
etc. and how they pull data from back - end forms
and databases. Mobile application development
has become both challenging and convenient with
Cloud and MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service)
systems. You would have seen the rise of Oracle
Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) and Integration Cloud
Service (ICS), which in fact, has made the mobile
application development more ‘declarative’ and
configuration can be done with minimal coding.
Now users are looking to install minimal mobile
apps on their smart phones and are trying to
explore more convenient ways to transact. With
the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine
learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing
(NLP) into cloud, enterprise mobility is becoming
more “conversational”, thus enhancing customer
experience. This has led to the evolution of Chatbots
Executive
Summary
which are considered to be the most recent
and powerful tool for engaging employees and
consumers in the B2E and B2C space. Change and
evolution is evident, but what matters is identifying
the right solution for adapting to the change
and the pace at which the adoption translates to
productivity.
This whitepaper explains, developing Intelligent Chatbot
for Oracle Enterprise Applications using Oracle Mobile
Cloud Enterprise. It discusses in detail the evolution of
Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Machine Learning on top
of Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, in order to bot-enable
Oracle Enterprise Systems. It helps you to understand,
how to develop an Oracle Approvals and Time-entry bot,
using Oracle mobile cloud enterprise by programming &
training the bot in NLP and Machine Learning.
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INTELLIGENT CHATBOTS AND
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
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Chatbots are computer generated automatic
programs which can run on messaging apps
and provide human - like conversation in simple
language. Chatbot works using Artificial Intelligence
and is enhanced using Machine Language and
NLP. It can eliminate the process of numerous
navigations when you do online shopping or the
tedious task of reading up the ‘FAQs’ section while
searching for the answer to your queries online.
Instead of navigating through several web pages,
chatbots can provide answers to your questions
through simple conversations.
For example, you can ask Bot, “What is the cheapest
flight ticket from San Francisco to Seattle?” or
“Provide me the list of Purchase Requisitions above
$10,000.”
What are Chatbots?
HELLO
HELLO
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Why Enterprises are looking towards a
Conversational Bot?
If you check your phone’s applications manager,
you will find that 80% of the mobile apps are
rarely used. The most commonly used apps are
the messaging apps like Facebook Messenger,
WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat etc. Hence, enterprise
users would prefer to transact business using
conversational messenger applications as much
as possible. Almost 4 billion users are using instant
messenger applications for business transactions.
The past decade has seen rapid transition of users
from desktop to mobile, and most of the users
prefer mobile now. CXOs tend to carry out most
of the business transactions through mobile phone
and mobile apps. The typical evolution of Chatbots
is represented below.
Transition from Desktop to Bots
Top Reasons for Chatbots Evolution in
Enterprise
Technology transformation is prevalent everywhere
and chatbots are rapidly replacing mobile apps to
a great extent for numerous business scenarios.
Some of the major reasons why the world is
gradually, moving from mobile applications to
chatbots are:
Desktop PC Web/browser App Chatbots
Hard Client App Mobile App
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Rise of Messaging Apps
The users are more conversant with the
chat and messaging apps and feel that
messaging apps are convenient to use.
About 75% of smartphone users use, some
sort of messaging apps. As per analysis, there
are one billion active users for Facebook
Messenger and Whatsapp++ (Source:
Statista, Nielsen surveys), which means
users are more into the messaging apps.
Also, mobile apps usage per smartphone
has saturated and most users use on an
average of 26-28 apps per month.
Popular Messaging Apps as of Jan 2017 (Source: Statista)
WhatsApp 1000
LINE
BlackBerry Messenger(BBM)
Telegram
Kakaotalk
217
100
100
49
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
Viber 249
Skype 300
WeChat 846
QQ Mobile 877
Facebook Messenger 1000
Snapchat 300
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Development Cost and Time Reduction
for Bots
With more evolvement of AI, NLP and
ML, it is more convenient to reduce the
cost and development cycle of chatbots.
There has been a constant support for
bot development frameworks. Facebook,
Microsoft, Google etc. started supporting
bot. There is a rise in bot development
framework, as it is being used by various
global companies, which has led to the
reduction of time and cost.
Problem of App Fatigue for Enterprise
Users
This can be one of the most important
reasons driving the chatbots trend. If you
take an average user, almost 80% of his
apps are rarely used (2 out of 10 apps are
used only once and 5 out of 10 apps are
used less than ten times). When you add
enterprise apps on top of the general
consumer apps, some issues may arise.
Also, enterprise apps have got their own
constraints. For instance, if you install a
mobile app for performing a requisition, it
might instruct you to change the way you
login to your mobile phone. The overall
productivity increases as users still need
to maintain, manage and upgrade all the
“rarely” used apps periodically, and get
notifications from most of them. This results
in app fatigue and there is a problem in
managing the apps. Organizations are
Convenience
Chatbots need less training since users are
already conversant with chat apps, whereas
enterprise mobile apps need certain
amount of visual navigation and workflow
training for users which results in some
adaption challenges.
With chatbots, the users are provided with
a more human - like interaction which
makes them easier and convenient to use.
looking for ways to reduce app fatigue and
therefore seem to develop more chatbots
for specific scenarios and use cases.
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Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise
(OMCe):Cloud Development
Framework for Oracle Enterprise
Evolution of Oracle Mobile Cloud
The most time-consuming and challenging
task for a mobile app developer is to look into
the complex backend functionalities like push
notifications, Single Sign - On (SSO) configurations,
managing user security etc. Almost 50-60% time
of a mobile developer is dedicated to developing
back - end code and he/she needs to write several
lines of code to make something like a SSO /
push notification / offline synchronization or user
management to work. This is when companies
started to develop “MBaaS” (Mobile Backend as
a Service). Oracle’s offering to MBaaS was Oracle
Mobile Cloud Service (MCS). Oracle also, developed
the Cloud Integration platform known as
Integration Cloud Service (ICS), which has
pre - built connectors for all the major ERP
systems, databases etc. and on - premise
agents for database connectivity. This
makes the whole mobile app development
infrastructure 100% on cloud and zero on -
premise. Continuous innovations on Oracle
Mobile Cloud platform resulted in adding
the bot flavor to Oracle MCS.
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Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise provides a web
portal based framework for chatbot development.
It enables developers to develop, program and
train bots to respond to human conversations. It
has an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine at its core
which uses NLP and ML algorithms to decode the
human conversations, sense the emotions and
provide responses which are accurate. The latest
version includes “Bot Analytics” called Customer
Experience Analytics or CXA, which provides good
analytics on bot adoption, match cases etc.
Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise: The New
Oracle Mobile Cloud Service Platform
Chatbots do not use or depend on an app to
be installed on iOS or Android phones. They
are compatible with other popular messaging
platforms like Facebook Messenger, Skype,
WhatsApp etc. It needs to be instant chat and
prompt response, and has to perform better than
normal conversation mode in plain text. By adding
Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Machine Learning
algorithms, Oracle has developed a complete bot
development framework on cloud called Oracle
Mobile Cloud Enterprise or OMCe. (Oracle Bot
Platform was initially called Intelligent Bot Cloud
service or IBCS).
Recently, Oracle has added an Intelligent Bot
Builder platform and Analytics to create Oracle
Mobile Cloud Enterprise or simply OMCe.
Oracle’s all - in - one Mobile Cloud framework for
developing mobile backend services. Bots and
enhanced analytics is the new Oracle Mobile
Cloud Enterprise.
Mobile
Cloud
Service
(MCS)
Intelligent
Bots
Customer
Experience
Analytics
(CxA)
Oracle
Mobile Cloud
Enterprise
(OMCe)
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Major Components:
Intents, Entities, Utterances and BotML
The major building blocks of Oracle chatbot
consists of Intents, Utterances, Entities and
Dialogue Flow. The heart of the design is the
Oracle Bot AI Engine. Oracle has leveraged several
open source platforms and tools for developing
the AI engine, NLP and for handling chatbot
conversational queue. Apache Kafka is used to
handle the volume of conversational messages
in chatbot and Sakura AI is used for building AI
engine.
The below figure shows the major components for
building an intelligent chatbot as listed below:
•• Oracle Chatbot AI engine.
•• Components for developing custom
logic & connectors for Oracle ERP
backend.
•• Channels configurator for hooking to
messaging applications.
•• Security for entire bot application.
NLP Engine: Intents, Utterances and
Entities
Chatbots use NLP and ML algorithms to
establish a smooth conversational flow. The
whole NLP engine is built by configuring
and training, using the Intents, Utterances
and Entities to generate maximum
information from the conversation in
order to perform a sequence of actions.
Oracle Approval Bot Components
Oracle Bot AI Engine
Custom MCS Components
Channels Configuration
Security
•• Intents
•• Utterance
•• Entity
•• Dialogue Flow/YAML
•• Component Services for MCS
•• Custom Components for EBS and
•• other back ends
•• Push Notification services
•• Facebook Messenger Integration
•• Webhook Configuration
•• Security
•• Basic Auth
•• Oauth using Facebook SDK*
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Intent and Utterance
Intent can be explained as a user intention
or what the user wants from a query. For
example, Check Flight, Get List of Pending
Approvals, Enter Time Card – these are all
specific Intents. Intent can have multiple
ways of asking or decoding the information
from it. This is called Utterances. Utterances
are the various phrases or sentences by
which a user can ask a query. Utterance is
“Oracle Approval List” - Intent and Utterance
ViewApprovalList
“All approvals with me”
“My approvals queue”
“Show pending approval
worklist”
“Approval needing attention”
used to decode and map a specific Intent
to generate the next action. This is where
the power of NLP engine comes into play.
Sample Utterances for “Check Flight” Intent
can be phrases like ‘Book Flight from San
Francisco to Seattle.’ or ‘I want to check
flights to Seattle.’ or ’What are the flights to
Seattle now?’
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Entities
A bot needs to extract the information from
the Intents and Utterances and initiate the
next sequence of action. Entities are used for
this and they are the variables parsed from
an Intent or the parameters associated with
an Intent. For example, the intent “Book
flight” will have a parameter to describe
more on the “Class of flight” to lead to the
next action. So the Entity here is “Flight
Class” and bot will ask question to check
whether the Flight class is Coach, First or
Business. If we consider an Intent “Approval
List”, then it will extract a parameter (Entity)
“Approval List type” which may have values
like Purchase Approvals, Invoice Approvals,
Expense Approvals. Entities are then, used
in the Dialogue flow engine (YAML) and
passed to backend (Oracle ERP) as part of
MCS integration component to fetch the
actual parameter value list by querying the
backend system database.
Possibly maps to domain object
Adds relevance to intent
Important word in an input
Variable/parameter for intent
View Approval List Entity: Approval Types
Purchase Request
Expense Report
Leave Request
Entity
Synonyms
“Oracle Approval List”- Entity and Parameter List (Synonyms)
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Dialogue Flow Builder
After the Intents, Utterances and Entities
are defined in OMCe, the next step is to
program the dialogue flow or sequence of
steps that the bot needs to pass through
the process and respond to a conversation.
The steps to execute are based on the
inputs from the Intent and Entity, and
programmed using ‘Bot Markup Language’
or BotML. In simple terms, BotML is used
for defining the process flow or state flow
or workflow as a set of rules. This is called
Dialogue Flow and is developed using
BotML, which is written in YAML.
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Enterprise Use Case: Chatbot for
Oracle EBS Approvals
Let us consider a customer who got multiple
cloud and on-premise enterprise systems in place.
Say they use primarily, Oracle EBS as their ERP
system and use Salesforce for Leads & Opportunity
management, Taleo for Hiring management and
Microsoft On-premise Outlook for email & calendar
activities; and they want to go mobile. A single
mashup mobile application built on Oracle Mobile
Cloud enterprise (OMCe) can solve the issue of
managing multiple apps for disparate systems, and
can develop a chatbot approvals application for
quick approvals. Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) layer of
OMCe can be used to build the backend integration
services from various systems like EBS, Salesforce,
Outlook etc. and Intelligent Bot builder can be
used for building the Approvals app. Approvals
need instant and quick responses. Especially, the
approval apps will be used by managers, who may
not even look at transactional enterprise apps and
need quick ways of checking pending worklist
and approving transactions. A conversational
chatbot build on a popular messaging channel
like Facebook Messenger can solve this issue. It
is simple to use and there is no training needed.
Managers will be using messaging apps which are
considered to be the best way to reach them. The
below screens show a typical Purchase Requisition
Approval Chatbot application built for Oracle EBS.
Oracle EBS Purchase Requisition Approvals: Chatbots using FB Messenger
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Other Typical Use Cases for Bots
Chatbots have made innovative inroads to most
enterprise systems and simplified the ways in
which transactions are done. Chatbots have good
use cases related to HR and Sales.
HR Self - Service Bot
The chatbot can revolutionize the way HR
employee self-service is managed and can avoid
lot of surfing through the Oracle forms and
navigating through multiple pages in the mobile
app. The self-trained intelligent Human Resource
Bot can answer typical questions such as,
•• What is the latest travel policy for
sales managers?
•• How many leaves are available in my
absence /PTO balance?
•• When is my corporate insurance
expiring?
•• What is the change in premium for
my dependent’s insurance?
•• I want to apply PTO for next week,
how do I do that?
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Time Card Creation Bot
Employees can create time entry details using
the time entry bot. They can ask the bot to simply
enter timecards by following simple conversations.
•• I want to log time for today.
•• Can you copy and create time from
last week?
•• Can you show the total time entered
for last month?
•• Is there any day pending for entering
time?
Oracle Time-entry Bot using FB Messenger
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Sales and CRM Bot
Imagine a sales manager who is on the field
chatting with customers and team members. He
would like to have a bot in his Facebook messenger
or WhatsApp or Skype. There is no need for him to
log in from a desktop to see his list of opportunities
or click through mobile app UI to find the top 5
products. He can just ask the Sales & CRM bot to
answer the question.
•• Do I have a meeting with Mr. Charles
scheduled next week?
•• What are the top 5 performing
products?
•• Show the latest opportunity waiting
for negotiation.
•• What was the best price with which
I closed the sale of the device last
week?
•• Can you fix a meeting with Mr. Charles
next Monday at 10 am?
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Start the mobile backend development
& bot development from MCS portal.
Oracle Bot Builder Portal in OMCe
To develop the Oracle EBS approvals bot, we can
leverage the full extent of Oracle Intelligent bot
builder portal. The bot builder is a web based
portal which helps chatbot developers to configure
the bot using less code by easy to configure Intents,
Entities and dialogue flow. It also has a mechanism
to test the Intents and Entities to see how much
matching of results exists. The various steps to
configure the Approvals Bot using OMCe bot
builder portal is shown below,
The various steps are listed below,
•• Create a new mobile backend for
Approval Chat Bots.
Oracle MCS Application Development Dashboard – New MBE for Chatbot
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•• Define MCS Mobile backend ID and
anonymous key in bot builder.
•• Integrate the MCS and bot using the
MCS URL.
MCS and Bot Authentication and Integrate using MBE id, Anonymous key and MCS URL
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Create a new intelligent bot
•• Create a new intelligent bot from the
Bot Builder UI.
Oracle Intelligent Bot - Create New Bot
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•• Define Intents and Utterances as
shown below.
Defining Intents and Utterances in Bot Builder
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•• Define Entities for listing the
parameters to be mapped to the
Intent.
Defining Entities and Values
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Training and testing the bot using the bot
builder
Validating, Testing and Training Bot Accuracy
The screen below shows the in-built real
-time testing and training of the bot, using
the “training” feature of NLP. The bot can be
tested to understand the confidence level
or matching percentage of the conversation
to the Intent and Entities.
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Dialogue flow builder using YAML
The Oracle Intelligent Bot builder provides
facility to design the way the bot should
interact with custom components using
the Dialogue Flow builder which is written
in language YAML.
BotML Dialogue Flow YAML
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Channels configurator in bot builder
The below screen shows Oracle Intelligent
Bot builder’s OOTB (Out of the Box) feature
to configure messaging platform channels.
It shows configuring Facebook Messenger
in the bot builder portal. It is as simple
as taking the page access token and app
secret from Facebook page and mapping
in the channels configurator page. Similarly,
the verify token and web hook URL from
bot builder UI is configured in the Facebook
page for mapping them.
To Facebook Page
1. Webhook url
2. Verify Token
From Facebook Page
1. Page Aceess Token
2. App Secret
Channels Configurator in Bot Builder
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Oracle Chatbot custom components
Custom components are built in Oracle
MCS portion of OMCe and linked to Oracle
Intelligent Bot service. Node.js based
scaffolding is used to write custom logic
and build APIs to link to backend Oracle
ERP systems.
Defining Custom Bot Components in Bot Builder and MCS
1. Define Custom Components
in BOT
2. Configure names in
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Intelligent Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI)Conclusion –
OMCe, Future Powered by Analytics
References
Chatbots market is growing annually at 36% and will reach 3 billion USD globally by 2021 (Source:
MarketsandMarkets). The evolution started early last year and will continue strong with the advent
of AI, ML and NLP. Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise (OMCe) will be one of the end - to - end bot
providers with capability of enterprise back - end integration, mobile cloud service features and
analytics. OMCe will have more easy to use “Visual Dialogue flow editor” and enhanced “Analytics”
in a single platform. The Analytics portion (CxA) can provide valuable insights into the bot usage
and will help to take strategic decisions. The bots will become easy to configure and extend by
any user with minimal coding skills. Definitely chatbots are here to stay and revolutionize the way
humans transact with enterprise systems.
1. Gartner Newsroom - http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3018618
2. The Statistics Portal - https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global-
mobile-messenger-apps/
3. TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/18/app-abandoment-is-on-the-rise-as-
consumers-stick-to-the-apps-they-know/
Author
If you’d like to know more about enabling
Oracle enterprise apps through mobile and
chatbots, please reach out to us at
contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
Abhijit Ramachandran
Practice Manager –
Oracle Mobility Solutions,
RapidValue
abhijitrc@rapidvaluesolutions.com
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A global leader in digital transformation for enterprise providing end-to-end
mobility, omni-channel, IoT and cloud solutions. Armed with a large team of experts
in consulting, UX design, application development, integration and testing, along
with experience delivering projects worldwide, in mobility and cloud, we offer a
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www.rapidvaluesolutions.com
+1 877.643.1850
www.rapidvaluesolutions.com/blog
contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
©RapidValue Solutions November, 2017

Transforming Oracle Enterprise Mobility Using Intelligent Chatbot & AI - A Whitepaper by RapidValue

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