Feb 6 (Reuters) - Oracle on Thursday added

another set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to NetSuite,

one of its corporate finance software offerings, including some

that might make it faster for consumers to get a price quote on

purchases like custom bicycles.

Oracle has taken a different tack with AI than rivals such

as Microsoft ( MSFT ). Rather than racing toward general purpose

virtual assistants, Oracle has decided to add targeted features

that speed common-but-tedious tasks like entering a brief

write-up of how a sales meeting went into a corporate records

system.

Another such task that is common in the business world is

giving a customer a price quote on a complicated purchase that

might have a lot of options, when a sales professional would

need to sift through materials to come up with a price.

NetSuite on Thursday announced a feature to compile such a

quote via conversation with a chatbot asking what the customer

wants, which can either be used by sales professionals behind

the scenes to speed up their work, or directly by consumers in

the case of e-commerce businesses.

"When you buy something like a bicycle, you have to

configure it - figure out what parts you want and which parts

work together. We all do it when we buy our cars on the web

these days," Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of Oracle

NetSuite, told Reuters.

"If you can configure (products) for customers more easily,

you can do more deals in a day, or each deal costs less."

To power those features, Oracle has decided to skip the

costly race to develop huge AI models and instead works with

partners such as Canadian startup Cohere.

Goldberg said that Oracle's recent agreement to build

massive data centers with ChatGPT creator OpenAI could lead to

working with it as well, though the two firms have made no

formal announcements.

"I think you could safely say that there's a possibility

that OpenAI will be part of this," Goldberg told Reuters. "We

are eager to work with OpenAI."