You were not excluded. You were quoted.
Shared by Derek from PeopleSoft Insider · October 26, 2026
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Ian, our top contributor on the PeopleSoft Career Community site sent me something this week that I did not want to be true.
It was an analysis of what Oracle’s AI spending means for anyone still running PeopleSoft, and it landed hard.
PeopleSoft will keep working, it said, but it will not gain intelligence. An innovation dead end.
I went looking for holes in the sourcing. I did not find any.
At Oracle’s Applications Analyst Summit in April, leadership said plainly that its AI agents are not coming to EBS, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, or Hyperion. Rondy Ng, EVP of application development, put it in one sentence:
“To enable this, you have to get to SaaS.”
-- Rondy Ng, EVP of application development
That is not a rumor.
That is the person who owns application development telling you where the agents live.
So the wall is real, and anybody claiming Oracle is still investing equally in both is selling something.
Then I went back to what Oracle shipped in PeopleTools 8.63 [ https://substack.com/redirect/d461b53f-5903-41af-96ae-054350e430f1?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ], which is not nothing.
MCP server support you deploy like Integration Broker.
A Natural Language Search Service that wraps your search index in a secure API an agent can call as the user.
An AI assistant inside Application Designer that reads inherited PeopleCode and explains it.
And buried in Sasank Vemana’s own explanation of the MCP server [ https://substack.com/redirect/5d43017d-32f3-4d25-a537-b07455e99aaa?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ] on Quest’s podcast is a sentence I have not been able to stop thinking about:
“It’s something that customers, again, today can implement on their own. But what we did is rather than each customer going and implementing their own MCP server separately, we thought it may be handy if it’s part of the PeopleTools infrastructure itself.”
Read that again.
Oracle’s own product manager is telling you that 8.63 did not create this capability. It packaged it.
But this isn’t really about which release you are on. What I want to highlight is the set of questions nobody in your shop has asked yet.
Do you actually need to wait for Oracle’s MCP server?
No. You need a way to expose a handful of your own APIs to an agent, securely, as the user. You have had Integration Broker for twenty years. REST service operations are your tools. The MCP server is a thin wrapper that tells a model which ones exist and what each one does.
Can you do it without Oracle’s tooling?
Yes, and people are. MCP is an open standard, not an Oracle product. The server can run anywhere that can reach your service operations.
Can you build your own?
If you already know your integration layer, that’s a weekend, not a project.
The hard part was never the server.
The hard part is deciding which five service operations to expose, writing descriptions a model can actually act on, and holding the line on which ones are allowed to write.
And Event Mapping [ https://substack.com/redirect/6566070e-52f8-49fa-83f6-d6cb96490664?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ] is the piece people keep missing.
If you want AI assistance inside the application rather than beside it, Event Mapping puts your logic on a delivered component without touching it. Fluid page, AI call, no customization footprint, survives the next image.
That combination of Integration Broker outward and Event Mapping inward is the whole architecture, and both halves have been sitting in your environment for years.
So the real question is the uncomfortable one. Do you know how to drive an LLM?
Because that is the actual gate. Not the tools release. Not the vendor’s roadmap. Whether the people in your shop can write a tool definition a model will use correctly, spot the confidently wrong answer, and decide what an agent is never allowed to touch.
ROLE OF THE WEEK
PeopleSoft Functional GL/KK Lead [ https://substack.com/redirect/3a546892-9f53-4d7a-8930-cc6575ba315f?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
Metaformers, Inc. | Contract or full-time | Eastern US base preferred
If you have carried Commitment Control through a public sector budget cycle, this one was
written for you, and the requirements tell you how short that list is.
8 to 12 years functional GL, KK, allocations, and reporting
4 to 5 full implementations as the GL/KK lead
Working knowledge across more than three modules
PeopleSoft Financials including integrations
Public sector experience required
The work is architectural rather than configuration. Mapping financial business processes,
designing for the gaps that mapping exposes, and knowledge transfer to the people who will
own it afterward. Two things to know before you apply. Contractors must come direct,
with no third parties. And sponsorship is not available on the full-time option.
Hiring PeopleSoft talent? Your role can run here. Reply to this email.
I know the objection.
“I’m a PeopleSoft person, not an AI person. This is somebody else’s job.”
It was. For about eighteen months.
Prabhu Chinnasamy, who comments here regularly, already built an MCP server over PeopleBooks for the specific tools version his shop runs, scoped it to the developer and API references, and grounds his coding agent on it so he stops getting answers from a release he is not standing in.
Twenty years in PeopleSoft. He did not wait for a vendor to ship it.
He is not the only one. Practitioners across this ecosystem are wiring Integration Broker, Event Mapping, and their own models together right now, and almost none of them are writing about it.
And, if you attended Reconnect Deep Dive last week, you probably attended a few sessions that showed how other organizations are already using PeopleSoft and AI.
Here is the part for anyone who owns the budget.
If your AI plan is a line item on a migration that starts in 2028, you have a three-year gap where your team gets no practice. The organizations that come out of this well are the ones whose people learned to work with these tools on a system they already understand, not the ones who learned on a new platform during a cutover.
For the recruiters reading this
I pulled our job board before writing this. One posting is tagged Integration Broker. One is titled Integration Developer. Not a single posting mentions AI, MCP, or agents.
The skill is forming and the requisitions have not caught up. That gap is the arbitrage, and it closes.
Ian’s analysis was right about the wall and wrong about what is on this side of it.
Nobody took your intelligence away. They just stopped including it, which means you bring your own.
So here is the question I will leave you with:
If you had to stand up one agent against your own environment this quarter, without waiting for a single Oracle release, what would stop you?
Reply and tell me. I read every response.
LEARNING AI TOGETHER
The honest answer to that last question, for most people, is that they have not had anywhere to learn it.
That is most of what the PeopleSoft Career community is for now. Inside it you will find a way to get seen and noticed by recruiters and the AI playbooks, the prompt library built for PeopleSoft work rather than generic prompting, and the playlists that walk through this material in order instead of leaving you to assemble it from scattered posts.
More useful than any of that: other practitioners doing the same thing at the same time. People comparing what worked, what hallucinated, and what they would not let an agent near.
If you are going to learn to bring your own intelligence, learn it next to people who know what an Effective Date is and what PS_JOB and PS_LEDGER is.
community.peoplesoftcareer.com [ https://substack.com/redirect/a9d97c40-c2ea-4656-a850-2f75925106a3?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
THE PEOPLESOFT JOB MARKET THIS WEEK
A caution first. Three of the ten most recent postings come from one staffing firm, same Florida location, three different titles. That is one firm building a bench, not three openings.
The real pattern is public sector and higher ed carrying the board again, with one posting putting a number on the table.
Lead Programmer Analyst - North Dakota University System, Remote (USA), Full-time, $95k to $107.5k (6 days ago)
Lead PeopleSoft DBA - The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson TX, Full-time (2 weeks ago)
Senior PeopleSoft Integration Developer - York University, Toronto ON, Full-time (3 weeks ago)
Senior Administrative Analyst, Technology Procurement - City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco CA, Contract (1 day ago)
Student Account Associate Supervisor - The Pennsylvania State University, University Park PA, Contract (1 day ago)
PeopleSoft Middleware Engineer - Bright Vision Technologies, Remote (Wesley Chapel FL), Full-time (1 day ago)
PeopleSoft Framework Developer - Bright Vision Technologies, Remote (Wesley Chapel FL), Full-time (1 day ago)
That North Dakota role is worth a look if you want remote and stable. A fully remote lead position at a university system with a posted band is rarer than it should be.
And the absence I mentioned in the story is the real headline. Integration skills show up. AI does not appear once.
View all open PeopleSoft roles: PeopleSoftCareer.com/jobs
FROM THE PEOPLESOFT BLOG
PeopleSoft MCP Server: What PeopleTools 8.63 Means for AI Agents - what Oracle shipped, what you still own, and why agent queries hit the search cluster instead of your production database. https://blog.peoplesoftcareer.com/peoplesoft-mcp-server/ [ https://substack.com/redirect/5d43017d-32f3-4d25-a537-b07455e99aaa?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
Oracle September Layoffs: What PeopleSoft Pros Do Next - what the cuts signal about where the money is going, and the moves worth making this quarter. https://blog.peoplesoftcareer.com/oracle-september-layoffs/ [ https://substack.com/redirect/180ce569-3ad0-43bb-aa71-b76815c08db8?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
PeopleTools 8.63: The Complete Resource Hub - every feature breakdown in one place, from MCP and Code Assist to containers and Customization Groups. https://blog.peoplesoftcareer.com/peopletools-8-63-guide/ [ https://substack.com/redirect/d461b53f-5903-41af-96ae-054350e430f1?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
See you next week.
Derek Tomei
Founder, PeopleSoftCareer | Editor, The PeopleSoft Insider
Oracle packaged it. Oracle did not invent it. You have had the parts since before they had a name for it.
P.S. The prompts, the playbooks, and the playlists are all inside the community, and so are the people figuring this out in real time. If you want to stop reading about AI in PeopleSoft and start doing it, that is where to start.