Textura’s AI chat agent can answer simple questions about payment information within the system.
Screenshot courtesy of Oracle, Inc.
Oracle has announced a new artificial intelligence-based agent and generative AI capabilities embedded within 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. Another of the services connected to it, the OCI 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 subcontractors 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 a lack of a signed compliance document, then automatically providing the needed form to the subcontractor.
Oracle says the technology can handle both generic questions about Textura documentation, as well as more complex queries that include user specific information, as it can call upon 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 needs to be handed off to a call center employee in a chat or on a 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, global vice president, Textura. “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, subcontractor and their 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. For example if subcontractors ask for the status of a payment, the OCI 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 OCI GenAI 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. And 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 customer-facing staff.
ENR Associate Technology, Equipment and Products Editor Jeff Yoders has been writing about design and construction innovations for 20 years. He is a five-time Jesse H. Neal award winner and multiple ASBPE winner for his tech coverage. Jeff previously wrote about construction technology for Structural Engineer, CE News and Building Design + Construction. He also wrote about materials prices, construction procurement and estimation for MetalMiner.com. He lives in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, where the pace of innovation never leaves him without a story to chase.
