I have accepted the fact that I am getting old (or is it “more experienced”?). At this point, I have been working on and around Oracle EPM products for almost twenty years. In the early 2000s, I was getting data from Hyperion Enterprise before we installed Essbase to do reporting. I dove into Essbase and began learning as much as I could. Once I reached a point where I felt I had done everything I could at my position as an administrator, I moved into consulting in 2010 to continue developing myself and learning more. As part of that, I took some training on OBIEE to help support customers with BI installs.

My point is, for 15+ years (maybe 20) EPM and BI users have heard about the promise of self-service BI: empowering users to analyze and visualize data independently. I remember hearing this in my OBIEE training and it was exciting to think about users digging into the data to answer business questions.

The thing with BI products is that there has to be someone technical to connect all of the data sources on the back end. It takes a special someone to figure out the right strings to pull to get all of those data sources normalized and linked up so that end users can do their reporting and analysis. It may be my bias as an implementer, but I don’t know how far users go past the initial dashboards that get created. I certainly hope it’s more common than I have seen.

As I sat in the Kscope Sunday Symposium presentations by Oracle product management and heard about all of the AI features coming to Oracle EPM, it dawned on me that all of the amazing things that I imagined 15 years ago will soon be possible and more accessible than ever. Users will soon be able to to chat with the AI built into Oracle EPM products and get visualizations fed back to them. To recycle an old sales pitch, analysis at the speed of thought is about to be real.

I am looking forward to seeing the developments in Oracle EPM products and I’m excited to see what our customers do with them. You can find the current AI features available in Oracle EPM products here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/fusion-ai/aiafl/epm-features-with-ai.html. That list is about to get much longer. These are exciting times we live in.