I just took the AI Agent Studio Foundations exam from Oracle.  I could not help but reminisce a bit about conversation as a user interface.  I have written a bit on this before.  

Firstly it took me back to my first exposure to Alexa some 10 years ago or so.  This long tube that could pick out a new human voice across a room filled with ambient noise.   I discovered the "Hal, Open the bay doors" easter egg on my first interaction. 

I was working for Powerschool at the time, and we were tyrying to work out how we could develop a Skill for our Parent Application.  As parents we are all familiar with the "How did school go today?" response of "Fine".  The thought that we might be able to bridge the parent / student interaction with a conversation mediated by an Alexa skill seemed very exciting. 

What is interesting in Oracle's approach is solving making the enterprise data available to agents, ensuring the enterprise security issues are addressed  and then unleashing the partner community to build interesting stuff.  It will be interesting to see how it develops. 

I can see a world where I am in context within an application and I get an agent, advisor, counselor to assist me.  This seems an adjunct to existing applications. 

I can see another world where the advisor is helping you develop the context and the nature of engaging with an application becomes purely conversational.  I can see this being expensive in terms of tokens, but look what happened to solar panels.