Oracle announced that a new artificial intelligence-based agent and generative AI capabilities now are embedded in Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service. Available to all Textura subcontractors in the U.S., the AI-powered assistant provides support to give payees answers to common pay application questions. 

The AI agent is now part of the Oracle Textura Intelligence module, which connects to a number of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI services including Oracle Language Service. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GenAI service can be configured to use multiple third-party large language models, such as from Cohere and Meta.

The AI agent's capabilities are designed to reduce the need to contact Textura support and speed up navigation of the payment system. 

According to Oracle, a subcontractor could ask the assistant "what is the status of my payment?" and it would then provide an answer drawn from Textura's data. The AI assistant would call up a list of the subcontractor's projects and ask which they were referring to, then it could determine that the payment has not been released due to lack of a signed compliance document and automatically provide the needed form to the subcontractor.

Oracle says the technology can handle generic questions about Textura documentation and more complex queries that include user specific information, calling on Textura datasets via internal application program interfaces. The AI agent can also notify users of missing information, such as a document requiring notarization and can start a chat session when it detects a query needed to be handed off to a call center employee in a chat or call. 

"Subcontractors are essential to project success but paying them quickly and correctly is a complex process. This is the reason we created Textura and why so many contractors have adopted the solution,” said Mike Antis, firm global vice president. “This enhancement helps improve the experience for the 200,000 subcontractors who log in to Textura each month, assisting them to quickly find the answers they need to get paid and focus more of their time on the job at hand."

Textura was founded in 2004 and helps automate payments among general contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. Purchased by Oracle in 2016, the company says it has processed over $1 trillion in construction payments to subcontractors representing work on 120,000 projects and payments to over 200,000 subcontractors since the acquisition. Oracle says users call Textura's support more than 11,000 times per month on average.

While the AI agent was designed to answer basic questions from subcontractors logging into Textura, Oracle says it can also interact with the company's other AI services to retrieve complex information. If subcontractors ask for the status of a payment, the Generative AI service is invoked to semantically match the request with Oracle's Payment AI agent. The AI agent is given the authenticated user ID and calls an on a Textura API to pull up the subcontractor's projects. The Generative AI service is then called again to compile a user-friendly response with a list of the projects. The entire query involves a generative AI referring to an agent AI referring results back to the generative AI. 

Answering questions and gathering information has emerged as a fertile ground for agent-based AI in construction. Tech company Trunk Tools offers AI agents to retrieve project documentation quickly from large sets of data. In a sign of shifting priorities within the industry, many of the recent layoffs at Autodesk were part of the company's effort to promote use and development of AI and reduce the number of customer-facing staff.