Virgin Australia identifies 11 AI agents for finance and procurement

Sean Percy, second from right, speaks at the Oracle event in the US.

Virgin Australia has identified 11 detailed use cases for Oracle AI agents in its finance and procurement operations, with the first one now in production.

Finance and procurement product manager Sean Percy told Oracle AI World in the United States that the first agent in production is Document IO for invoice scanning.

“That's had some really good success - we've got quite a high success rate with invoice ingestion,” Percy said.

“We've got a couple in procurement that we're looking at, a couple of Q&A agents that are currently in UAT [user acceptance testing] and also the general ledger agent as well, which is another one that everyone's quite excited about.

“Then there's a large backlog, but really we're just trying to start small and grow from there.”

Percy said there is internal interest in accounts payable agent from Oracle.

“That has huge potential for us [and is] a very manual process today,” he said.

Likewise, there is interest in deploying an agent to handle expense claims.

“We're in the travel industry. We travel a lot, so if we can help streamline that process with the expenses agent, then that's going to be really good, too.”

Stepping into AI in the Oracle ecosystem is only possible due to earlier modernisation work.

Notably, the airline moved from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to Fusion Cloud for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) in 2023.

This now has it running Fusion Finance and Fusion Procurement, as well as EPM Account Reconciliation (ARCS) and Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC).

Percy said that directly after the transition, there was “a very large backlog of incidents … enhancements [that] we had … to get through.”

Virgin Australia brought in Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to provide Oracle application management services

“When TCS came on board, they really hit the ground running,” Percy said.

“We had a number of on-site individuals that came and partnered with the business, which was really good. and then from there, we really got through the backlog of incidents. 

“We've [since] looked at enhancing the software, enhancing our business processes, and trying to increase our footprint within Oracle and with TCS from there.”

Increasing the footprint is occurring now, with Virgin Australia adopting Oracle human capital management (HCM).

“We're currently implementing HCM,” Percy said.

AI adoption is also following, with Oracle AI agents being contemplated or adopted in multiple parts of finance and procurement.

Percy indicated that Virgin is carefully considering its AI options in the vendor ecosystems it works with.

“One thing that we realised is all our different vendors have AI coming in, and it's about having that defined strategy on what we're going to use,where and what makes sense,” he said.

“I think that's probably the biggest thing for us at the moment.”

Percy added that his role at Virgin is essentially as a conduit between finance and IT.

“I'm really the IT business partner between the finance and procurement teams and IT,” he said.