Oracle announced a slew of AI-driven capabilities across its Customer Experience Cloud Suite today that are designed to help users to deliver better, faster and more personal experiences.
If you think you’ve heard this before, it’s because Oracle joins its customer experience competitors in offering a similar set of capabilities complete with underlying artificial intelligence they are calling Adaptive Intelligence technology.
To give you a sense how broad Oracle’s customer experience offering is, the suite includes Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle CPQ Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud. That’s a lot of clouds.
The company hopes to use its flavor of AI technology to bring a level of automation and machine learning to a set of tasks, fueled by the data its many customer experience clouds are collecting. And Oracle claims to have boatloads of data — a collection of more than 5 billion global consumer and business IDs along with more than 7.5 trillion data points collected on a monthly basis, according to the company.
When you combine that much data with Oracle’s compute power and artificial intelligence algorithms, it helps feed the machine learning beast, and should at least in theory continually improve the outcomes in the products taking advantage of the Adaptive Intelligence tools.
Jack Berkowitz, VP of products and data science at Oracle, says Oracle is combining a series of artificial intelligence techniques including natural language understanding, machine learning and neural networks to come up with optimal solutions. “The [AI] engine operates behind the scenes that does modeling and feature selection and can combine the algorithms uniquely for the use cases. We provide recipes for consumer problems versus [business] problems, but then the system does the processing [automatically],” Berkowitz explained.
These capabilities appear in applications across Oracle’s customer experience product set and could include additional widgets, analytics and suggestions. That might take the form of more targeted recommendations in the commerce product, more personalized content in the marketing product, faster time to resolution in the customer service product, among others.
Much like its competitors implementing this technology, Oracle wants to put AI and machine learning within reach without a lot of extra work or expertise on the customers’ part, taking care of all the complexity behind the scenes.
“We wanted to greatly simplify what it takes to make these [AI] capabilities on-boarded by companies. We don’t walk in with armies of data scientists or require long integration projects. Connectivity and embedding is really right out of the box,” he said.
Whether that’s the case with Oracle’s customer experience cloud solutions remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the AI arms race is on and just about every vendor, big and small, is ready to compete along these lines.
