Process – RedThunder.Blog

RPA vs AI: Perspectives, Applications, and the Power of having both in Oracle Integration Cloud

I’ve had meetings with clients and colleagues who thought RPA and AI were the same thing, or at least part of the same philosophy.

In my opinion, this is only partially true and for this reason, I have decided to write this article to help clarifying where the two solutions differ.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), although often mentioned together in the context of digital transformation, are two distinct technologies, each with its own characteristics and purposes. Let’s remember that RPA has been talked about since the early 2000s and was certainly created to introduce the first concepts of automation within industrial and enterprise processes.

Let’s take a closer look at these technologies.

RPA is essentially a technology focused on automating manual and repetitive activities according to predefined rules. You can think of RPA as a “digital workforce” that performs actions on software and systems just like a human operator would: it opens applications, copies and pastes data, fills in forms, sends emails, or updates databases. Its great advantage lies in the ability to speed up and make more efficient low-value processes, eliminating errors due to distraction and freeing people from monotonous tasks. However, RPA is not “intelligent” in the strict sense: it operates within very rigid parameters and cannot adapt to new situations or understand context. For example, an RPA bot can extract data from an electronic invoice, but only if the layout remains the same; unexpected changes to the format could stop the automated process.

AI, on the other hand, encompasses a set of technologies inspired by human cognitive capabilities such as learning, reasoning, language understanding, image or sound recognition, and decision-making. AI can analyze large amounts of data, identify hidden patterns, make predictions, adapt to new conditions, and learn from previous results. Therefore, it doesn’t just follow predefined instructions but is able to evolve over time, improving its accuracy and handling situations not explicitly foreseen by developers. For example, an AI system can read text written by customers, understand its meaning, and determine its sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), or it can recognize and classify objects within an image, even if those objects are arranged differently than those seen in past images.

In summary, while RPA is ideal for improving efficiency in repetitive, standardized, and structured tasks, AI comes into play where flexibility, understanding of context, predictive ability, and adaptation to unstructured data are needed. The two technologies can also be combined—for example, using RPA to manage operational workflow and data collection, and AI to add intelligence at specific points in the process, such as document classification or handling requests in natural language.

This integrated approach enables companies to get the most out of automation: RPA brings speed and efficiency, while AI introduces the ability to solve complex problems and add intelligence to business processes.

To summarize, we can recap as follows:

RPA (Robotic Process Automation):

Focuses on automating repetitive tasks based on fixed rules.
Replicates human actions on software interfaces (clicks, data entry, data extraction).
Does not “learn” from data: follows predefined procedures without adapting.
Ideal for well-structured processes such as data entry, system-to-system transfers, extracting data from structured PDFs, updating records.

AI (Artificial Intelligence):

Is based on machine learning, deep learning, and NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms.
Can solve complex problems, learn from data, adapt, and improve over time.
Manages less-structured scenarios such as image recognition, text analysis, virtual assistance, natural language interpretation, trend forecasting.

So, RPA focuses on repetitive and structured tasks, while AI focuses on complex and unstructured tasks; RPA does not learn or adapt, while AI learns from data and improves its performance to automate processes that require cognitive capabilities and not just “mechanical” functions.

The good news is that today, Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) is a platform capable of combining Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, integrating both technologies within business processes.

This means a company can use OIC not only to automate repetitive and manual tasks through RPA—such as extracting and automatically entering data into business systems—but also to enrich these processes with intelligent components based on AI.

For example, OIC allows the incorporation of natural language analysis to better understand customer requests, supports agentic AI, orchestrate tools and actions, integrate document data extraction services through automatic recognition, or use predictive models to support more informed decisions.

All of this is orchestrated in a centralized and user-friendly environment, often without the need to write code, thanks to OIC’s visual tools and intuitive interfaces. In practice, a company can build workflows in which RPA and AI activities follow one another automatically: for example, a bot can gather data from different systems, pass it to an AI service for advanced analysis or classification, and finally archive the results in a management platform such as Oracle ERP Cloud.

The integration between RPA and AI in OIC brings tangible benefits: it speeds up processes, reduces manual errors, and introduces advanced automation capabilities that allow handling both simple activities and more complex tasks that require “intelligence,” always ensuring security, compliance, and adherence to policies.

References:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/application-integration/

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/application-integration/robots.html

Oracle Integration & AI: Accelerating OIC Development Phases

In the evolving digital era, Oracle is embedding AI deeply into its Integration platform to streamline, automate, and enhance the development process. Rather than seeing AI as an add-on, Oracle’s strategy ties together infrastructure, development tools, and application integration so that teams can build faster and smarter.

Oracle’s AI-Innovation in Integration can be declined in 2 ways.

How the AI can be a value add for OIC developers
What OIC can offer in the Agentic AI area to simplify and accelerate AI adotpion in enteprise projects

In this article, I’m focused on the first point and I will try to explain how developers can take advantage of such AI features.

What coming from Oracle AI World event , recently occurred in Las Vegas, gave us the opportunity to be aware of:

Embedded AI capabilities: Oracle Integration includes embedded AI that helps with creating integrations (supported by using natural language), defining schedules, writing documentation about integration components, generating queries (e.g., FHIR, ATP), and resolving errors in B2B .
Connection with OCI AI Services and OpenAI: The platform allows use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI Services or OpenAI large language models in integrations. That means processes can use text/image processing, content generation, analysis, etc., directly as part of integration workflows.
“Use AI to Create an Integration”: A concrete feature allows a user via a natural-language prompt (in a chat interface) to ask Oracle AI to build the skeleton of an integration. The system determines which “nodes” (trigger/invoke), adapters, and connections are needed, builds a draft and lets the developer accept or modify it.

Here are key ways AI supports or accelerates development in Oracle Integration:

Phase of Development	Traditional Challenges	How Oracle’s AI Helps
Requirement Spec / Planning	defining what systems need to interact; understanding triggers; mapping workflows	Use natural language to describe needed integration; AI proposes flow, nodes, connections. Reduces time in planning and help you to build the skeleton of your rintegration flows
Design / Prototyping	deciding adapters, interfaces; drafting initial workflows	AI suggests adapters, trigger/invoke components; creates skeleton flows that devs can edit. Speeds prototyping
Implementation (Coding / Configuration)	manual building of integration flows; error handling; repetitive tasks	AI can assist in resolving errors; suggest corrections; provide diagnostics
Deployment / Maintenance	maintaining integrations as systems change; resilience; monitoring	AI helps with scheduling, modifying flows; possibly assisting in content or error handling maintenance. ”

Having said that, what’s the benefit coming from AI adoption in development?

I share with you some steps where the conjunction between AI and OIC is for sure a very good help

Faster development cycles — less time spent on repetitive or boilerplate tasks.
Lower barrier to entry — using natural language turns non-expert users or less technical team members into potential contributors.
More consistency — AI can enforce patterns, use standard connections, reduce errors.
Scaling & productivity — teams can do more, focus on higher-value logic rather than plumbing.

In my opinion, at the same time, it’s helpful is to get the most out of Oracle’s Integration + AI strategy, Organizations should:

Define clear prompts and use cases — specify systems, conditions, failure handling when using natural language with AI to build integrations.
Review and validate AI’s generated flows thoroughly, especially for critical business logic.
Invest in governance — keep track of which integration pieces were AI-generated, maintain documentation, versioning.
Train teams on AI usage: how to write prompts, how to troubleshoot AI suggestions.
Monitor performance and cost — AI services (especially LLMs) bring compute and data costs; ensure ROI.

I hope this content helps the community something like a sort of brainstorming and at the same time it helped me to point out some aspects

Conclusion

Oracle’s strategy of embedding AI into its Integration platform represents a significant shift in how enterprise software can be developed. By providing tools that allow parts of the development workflow — planning, design, implementation — to be partly automated or assisted, Oracle is helping developers move faster, reduce errors, and focus on more strategic problems.

The future path will require careful balancing of innovation with oversight, but for companies willing to adopt and adapt, the promise is strong: more agile, intelligent, and automated integration development.

Stay tuned … the future is now and several other news are already in plans!

Decisions and Business Rules in Oracle Integration (OIC) to support an Automation Process Platform

Business rules (later “decisions”) always play a crucial role in a process automation platform

As you probably already know, Oracle Integration (OIC) is a complete business automation platform cloud based, fully Oracle managed, that enables customers to connect their applications and data, automate business processes, and innovate with AI. This is what we define a unique and complete toolkit for integrating and connecting applications and technologies

Today, as a new enhancement of this platform, we have the chance to build decision rules directly in integration projects giving you the power of the flexibility and agility in building new automation processes leveraging rules based on “if-then-else” or “decision tables” patterns

When building your integration projects in OIC, you are now able to add several components so to build your specific implementation leveraging the components you need adding to the project the functionalities like the pure integration flows with connections, robots, B2B, Healthcare and now Decisions, too

Once decisions are added to your project, you can design and later test what you have implemented to verify the correctness of the rules

And selecting the decision type you can design your logic

In this way, decisions allow you to ensure consistency in decision-making throughout the organization. Decisions ensure that the same conditions always lead to the same outcomes, reducing the risk of errors due to subjective or inconsistent judgments. This standardization now extended to all components in OIC, and it’s particularly useful when the same decisions are made across multiple processes helping also the reuse of those rules

Decisions define a clear decision points which can be automated within a process, such as determining eligibility for a loan, assessing the risk level of a transaction, or triggering approvals. Automating these rules you can reduce manual intervention, accelerating processes, and ensuring timely and accurate outcomes.

Consider that “decisions” are typically decoupled from the process logic, meaning they can be modified independently of the core workflow. This makes easier to adjust processes when business requirements change—whether due to new regulations, market conditions, or organizational changes—without needing to re-engineer the entire process. This flexibility helps the business to remain agile and responsive.

Below a sample just to consider how business rules, via a decision table, can be built leveraging a flexible and easy way to maintain the changes and using a simple and standard browser

A decision table, like that one shown before, can consist of an input expression and several input entries. It is represented as columns within a table. You can use input variables, outputs of other decisions, or built-in functions to define input expressions.

Of course, business rules (decisions) are essential for ensuring that processes are compliant with laws, regulations, and internal policies. For example, in industries such as finance, healthcare, or insurance, where compliance is critical, business rules ensure that processes adhere to the necessary legal requirements. Decisions can be updated when regulations change, ensuring ongoing compliance without the need for manual oversight.

Looking at the decisions use, we can put in evidence and summarize some advantages and especially those ones listed below.

Reusability: you can build your rules once and reuse those ones, gaining efficiency in making & maintaining them with a faster policy change approach without impacting an automation solution. Furthermore you can reuse those from within an integration flow, process workflow or any application

Efficiency: the policy maker doesn’t have to rely upon an integration specialist; he can build and maintain their own policies by themself

Fast policy change: you can change policies quickly without disrupting the areas of an automation solution that’s because you can change policy details independently from the components which use a decision

Now, stay tuned… very soon this feature will be available in GA, and not only Limited Availability, on all OIC instances

In summary:

Decisions and business rules in general enable greater flexibility, reducing operational risks, and improving both internal operations and external customer experience

References:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/application-integration/

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/user-process-automation/model-decisions.html

Take advantage of using Recipes in OCI Process Automation

Today, Oracle Process Automation with its Recipes helps organizations to reach process excellence faster. The recipes are business process solutions developed with OCI Process Automation (OPA) and available for you once you have provisioned OCI Process Automation service.

Recipes can be deployed as-is, or extended to meet requirements customer-specific.

In addition, to expediting time-to-value for new deployments, the available recipes can be used also as a sort of blueprints for organizations who want to start with new processes built on OPA.

So, just to position the recipes and when better to use them, we can try to post some questions.

Are you a Developer and looking for quickly deploying new business processes?
Are you a System Integrator needing to start from a pre-built asset so to be later customized meeting better your needs without reinventing the wheel?
Are you looking for some samples to be used for demo purposes to test capabilities and functionalities without starting from scratch?

All these questions can find in the OPA Recipes the right answer.

Now, OPA includes the following recipes … and much more will come soon.

Every single Recipe has its own documentation to drive the implementer.

I suggest to carefully look at the system requirements before using those ones; all those recipes are intended only for guidance.

In order to run those recipes, you must perform the following configuration tasks on your Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) instance in order to successfully run the recipe.

Assign IDCS application roles
Create the required users in IDCS

After you’ve configured the roles and other resources, you can activate and run the application and test the process and some capabilities like business searches, how to escalate tasks using the native workspace or the analytics graphical view to see if the process flow is altered by manual intervention.

Now you can see how the “Credit Increase Request” can be imported into your own OPA instance:

Create a new process in the application process section

Click on the “Create Application from Recipe” action from the palette:

Select, for example, the Approve Credit Line increase

And now, you can see all the artifact imported in your application.

Selecting the “Credit Line Increase Approval” link, you can access the BPMN design of the process

The process is now ready for you to be activated (or customized) selecting the “activate” button at the top of your page

And now ready to be tested in the workspace

You can now start a new request and the web application will appear to you, something like that one here included:

You can load demo values to speed up the test so to quickly see the outcomes of the execution

A new item is now available to be worked by the assignee approving, rejecting, … all the actions that the human workflow will be configured for the specific user, group or application role

As we know, OPA can be used to support business processes to build “system 2 system” or “system 2 human” implementations and when the User Interface is required to interact with the running process you can also modify or extend the web UI leveraging the powerful features to adapt your web page, embedding basic and advanced controls so to drive the business user and simplifying his job reducing errors due to wrong data input

Try it by yourself… it’s a very good accelerator!!

Public and Additional Documentation

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/recipes.html

https://www.oracle.com/it/integration/process-automation/features/

OCI Process Automation and Oracle Artificial Intelligence in Action

It’s very interesting feature what recently delivered with OCI Process Automation.

It’s possible now to upload in your workflow a document such a passport, driver license, … documents from where it’s possible to automatically extract data.

No more manual procedures but everything managed by the solution to automate business processes.

This is a meaningful improvement of the OCI offering highlighting synergies and native integration among the big number of OCI services available in each OCI region of the world.

Artificial Intelligence is today the most relevant technology from which we can take advantage in simplifying our lifestyle, reducing time with bureaucracy, and getting a benefit from other several new services before unimaginable.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Document Understanding, what natively integrated in Oracle Process Automation, is an Oracle AI service that enables developers to extract text, tables, and other key data from document files through APIs and command line interface tools. With OCI Document Understanding, you can automate tedious business processing tasks with prebuilt AI models and customize document extraction to fit your industry-specific needs.

You can easily identity this service navigating the OCI Console in the Analytics & AI section.

With this service, you can upload documents to detect and classify text and objects in them. You can process individual files or batches of documents using the ProcessorJob API endpoint.

The following pre-trained models are supported and offering support for different pre-trained model like:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Text extraction
Key-value extraction
Table extraction
Document classification
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) PDF

In your daily life, how many times you need to show your passport, your driver license, or your health insurance card to start a new request?

Some examples are:

Renting a car
Accessing the hospital to do triage
Medical checkup in healthcare
Hotel check-in
…

This is the reason why today Oracle can offer this added value in his Cloud offering… to simplify your daily activity, to make your life better.

A simple process, as I said before, can be that one about the “Car Rental”. Trying to imagine a human workflow behind, we can think about a BPMN process used to manage every step where for example an approval is required.

We can also imagine, not necessarily a process behind but simply the need to upload some info or data which need to be sent to other applications or database so that OPA can be used to easily configure a webpage from where it’s possible to upload data into an Oracle Database using its REST adapter or leveraging the DB adapter included in Oracle Integration Cloud Enterprise Edition (which includes OCI Process Automation).

I have tried to imagine a “Car Rental” process designing a step by step process for example when a long term rental is requested and its acceptance needs to be approved

As you can see below, when you design your WebForm from OCI OPA Console you can find on the right side, included in the activities section, the new icon about the AI Document Understanding.

This icon can be dragged & dropped into your canvas to model the web UI as you prefer and need.

It’s a pre-built integration, so you don’t need to think about REST invocation or similar. Everything is pre-configured for you and then you can easily use it without coding or similar stuff.

Once the process is implemented (here a quick overview how to do it), you can enable this one for production purposes

The operator can use the web UI to start a new request, clicking on the pre-defined process and/or including the new application in a web portal or into the Oracle SaaS springboard in according to the specific process.

Once the operator has identified the right process, clicking on the “Nuova Richiesta di Noleggio”, the webform appears to accept the required info.

If, AI Document understanding, has been properly configured, the end user can upload the image of the passport, or other provided documentation, so to start the automatic data acquisition

In a while, you can see how automatically all personal data appear on the right side of the page, filling the right field.

You can, of course, add other info to enrich the information required … something like below included. The web UI is highly customizable, and you can build your own web page as the business requires.

In this way, the desk operator can scan your documents and with a simple click, uploading the image, it’s possible to collect all the required information without huge effort taking advantage of:

Less time for data entry
Less errors for manual activities (i.e. reading passport and typing them)
Better and quicker customer experience

I encourage you to test it by yourself to personally understand how much it’s easy to do it. A very low effort to improve processes introducing in your business innovation, efficiency, and automation.

Helpful resources:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/user-process-automation/implement-intelligent-document-processing-forms.html#GUID-1C3EF754-8BAC-410E-B915-5A63F3EA786C

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/document-understanding/using/pretrained_doc_document_class.htm

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/post/intelligent-document-processing-in-oci-process-automation

Process Automation helps you to rapidly design, automate, and manage business processes in the Cloud

Step-by-step guide discovering how to provision and build a business process with OCI Process Automation

OCI Process Automation (shortly OPA) is an OCI PaaS Oracle Managed cloud service which helps customers to build their business processes based on Structured or Unstructured models. This is the best solution to easily manage business processes granting to business users to build their own implementations without coding but just using a web browser and drag&drop capabilities… what we usually call a “no code” environment

The article has the goal to explain how, step by step, we can quickly test the features included in OPA… starting from my experience with the tool.

Just to simplify the explanation, I will describe a “happy path” process … in my example building one business process which usually is quite loved by everyone…. mainly when talking about the Vacation Request Approvals 🙂

agile Oracle Cloud Infrastructure consumption

Over the past couple of weeks, I was getting back into the normal life of Cloud Engineering (the #BuildWithAI global hackathon isn’t the only thing that I focus on – check this article out #BuildWithAI Announces Winners). And something that I was doing was actually less about technology but more about budgeting – Cloud Estimations.

This is an interesting puzzle because of a couple of different elements.

Cloud is supposed to be elastic. But budgeting is typically not. Nor are project estimations and costs. Nor are approval processes. Nor are procurement processes. There are so many things in a business that are not elastic.

The people provisioning are not necessarily in charge of the costs. And I know as a developer, these overarching cost discussions aren’t necessarily the one you get invited to.

Integration, Process and Visual Builder

OIC makes integration easy with ODI

We know OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) is capable of file based integration for ERP over API.
And we do know that ODI (Oracle Database Integrator from Data Integration Platform Cloud) is capable of ingesting large file and processing it for ERP through the database layer aka ETL / ELT.

Continue reading “Integration, Process and Visual Builder”