Wednesday, August 28, 2019

CRM Artificial Intelligence Trends across Oracle, SAP

Oracle 

Oracle announced the launch of their Intelligent Cloud Applications the exact same day Salesforce announced Einstein. At the time, Oracle’s project leader told they were “trying to avoid the hype and build apps that people can buy, use and make money with.”  Instead of creating a single, all-encompassing new “AI brand,” Oracle has been focused on specific AI and machine learning applications in their cloud services — ready-to-use apps that can be quickly and easily tailored to a specific uses.

Earlier this year, Oracle introduced several new AI powered functions to their customer experience cloud (CX Cloud Suite). According to the company, these include:


  1. AI-powered personalized marketing/experience – personalizing the content each customer receives.
  2. Predictive recommendations – using a customer’s data to recommend products they would be most interested it.
  3. Optimizing the selling process for representatives – opportunity analysis of clients to create guidance to help close deals.
  4. Chatbots

Since then Oracle claims to be adding more AI powered functions to its cloud.

Last year, Oracle bought Crosswise, a data company that offers machine-learning based cross-device data, which could be used in cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics. Oracle appears to have bought this technology to augment its data cloud platform.

Oracle claims their big advantage in AI is their unique access to enterprise data. The company claims to have “5 billion global consumer and business IDs, with more than 7.5 trillion data points gathered monthly.” These data points include historical and dynamic customer data such as click-stream and social activities, and inputs such as weather, lookalike audiences, etc. Such customer information can be mined to find customer behavior patterns. The long term vision is being able to have AI that can provide more seamless and natural direct customer service across platforms.

Oracle President of Development Thomas Kurian said at the recent Oracle Openworld conference that there vision of the future is, “No longer is it just web and mobile screens, but you could speak to the application. You can interact with it with messaging. You can take pictures, and we can identify images, compare them with other things, and automate transactions.”

Our research seems to indicate the these claims about the use of AI in Oracle’s CRM are aspirational, there don’t seem to be any presently developed products for machine vision at the company. While this may merely be posturing by Kurian, we suspect that Oracle will indeed be developing AI initiative actively in its CRM offerings. How it will compete with Salesforce in this regard – only time will tell.

SAP

German software giant SAP has the goal – according to Global VP Volker G. Hildebrand – “to build machine learning technology into all our software, across every line of business and industry we serve.” This includes SAP Hybris, their main cloud CRM service.

In July the company relaunched SAP Leonardo, their integration platform to enable companies to more easily integrate AI and machine learning into their business. SAP Leonardo appears to integrate the various SAP product offerings for machine learning, IoT, big data, analytics, etc.

Similar to Salesforce (and to the claims made by Oracle), SAP is also developing machine vision applications for it’s Hybris CRM product.

The company also announced machine learning facial recognition capacity for SAP Hybris, a platform that “sells omni-channel customer engagement and commerce solutions.” SAP claims the system will allow stores to automatically determine the age and gender of customers entering their locations, and make personalized product recommendations based on the stock information.

Among the products SAP is currently developing is Charly the Chatbot. This chatbot is a customer-facing, “conversational commerce app.” It is a prototype designed to function as a digital assistant for individual consumers to help them find products, make recommendations, request refunds, etc.This prototype, according to SAP, is an “experiment on microservice-based business models.”

How SAP plans to use this in the B2B CRM context is not very clear. At present, Charly seems to be limited to Facebook Messenger.

SAP is also experimenting with using their technology on Pepper Instore Assistance, a robot that is designed to act as a personal, in-store customer service rep. Both Charly the Chatbot and Pepper Instore Assistance are currently prototypes. We aren’t certain of when these initiatives will become regular offerings for SAP, and it’s unclear exactly how they’ll integrate with Hybris.
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