The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AI
Oracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases.
The new support portal from Big Red — My Oracle Portal or MOS — which went live in early December, has been frustrating customers and support staff for the last few weeks.
Oracle has yet to respond to a request for comment.
In November, Greg Parikh, Oracle veep for information development and operations, said in a blog post that the MOS portal offers new features, including AI-powered interactions, streamlined navigation, improved search capabilities, and enhanced knowledge access.
It is perhaps remarkable that in making these improvements, Oracle seems to have made the service worse.
One support professional who spoke to The Register said users were increasingly facing a chaotic situation with MOS. "Obviously, Oracle is using this new AI to cover all customer needs, which is not working that well. Support note numbers get no satisfactory results, automatic service requests can no longer be created by Oracle customers, and patches and fixes are no longer visible because the indices are deleted."
Deutsche Oracle Anwendergruppe (DOAF), the German-speaking user group for Oracle users, also noted unreliable and incomplete search, for example, the Exadata Master Note — formerly Doc-ID 888828.1 — does not appear in the search results. There has also been a loss of favorites and personalization in the switch to the new portal, the user group said.
Meanwhile, support professional has to waste their time contending with broken or internal links and limited patch search and downloads, the user group said.
Frustration also boiled over onto Reddit, as users shared their experiences with the new Oracle portal.
Users pointed out IDs had completely changed, such that searching for 888.1 — the Primary Note for Database Proactive Patch Program — or 555.1 — database 19c Recommended One-off patches returns error message KA912 as the top result. "Links to other documents, which still reference the old IDs, are currently failing for me," one user said.
Others said they had to waste time recovering information which was previously in easy reach. "Even finding ‘Release schedule of Current Database releases' took me several logins and searches. And the resulting view is definitely worse; at least they could hide the right panel, which effectively shrinks the readable window," another said.
Eric Guyer, founding partner at Oracle and SAP advisory and consulting firm Remend, said while the old portal was basically all access, to everything, for anyone with an Oracle Customer Support Identifier (CSI), the new portal seemed to have become more minimalist, tightly controlled, and chat-bot driven.
"People used to the old portal will wonder where everything went. Bug or feature I don't know yet. Might be great… or it might be another signal that Oracle's focus is elsewhere," he said.
Iain Saunderson, CTO of Spinnaker Support, which provides support for Oracle and SAP, said the introduction of the new portal was affecting customer onboarding to alternative support to Oracle. "The frustration from the community around the portal launch is that Oracle hasn't consulted their users. It doesn't work. People can't get to the information they need. We've had a few concerns from prospective customer who are concerned about their ability to do business in MOS."
Some readers may be keen to point out that the apparent degradation of its customer support using AI comes at the same time Oracle has seemingly bet the company on AI. In the autumn, Oracle announced a $300 billion cloud compute contract with OpenAI, but KeyBanc analysts warned that Big Red may need to borrow roughly $100 billion over the next four years to build the datacenters required. Concerns over debt and the cost of building AI infrastructure have meant Oracle has lost around a third of its value since it peaked in September, more than the value of the OpenAI deal. ®