Oracle Seeks AI and ML Guidance to Take Over Salesforce in CRM

Can AI and ML guidance be a helping hand for Oracle to take on Salesforce to boost B2B sales?

After the big announcement of Oracle about its next generation of Fusion Sales in late July as part of the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), a PR representative communicated to VentureBeat via an email that the product "raises the bar for the entire industry and stomps all over Salesforce's sector."

While Salesforce denied mentioning any comment on Oracle's claim, it is crystal clear that Oracle is applying AI and machine learning (ML) to cease the customer relationship management (CRM) giant as well as related start-ups like Gong and Salesloft. The company mentioned it believes its Fusion Sales is the next generation of CRM, focusing on assisting sellers in the era of business-to-business (B2B) sales transformation.

"Progressively, we've realized that the way we've built Fusion into a more modern cloud stack, not only permits you to streamline processes from front to back but using machine learning also helps people to do their work better with CRM tools," stated Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle's Fusion Cloud Customer Experience.

The earliest generation of big tech digital sales tools (which include Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics) were routinely about sales forecasting and included a variety of third-party integrations, Rob Tarkoff explained. Now, Fusion Sales can assist sales professionals in campaign ideas, plan key accounts across both advertising and marketing, and move through a unified selling effort that includes content management, advertising, and sales orchestration. "We know that we're not the largest provider of CRM tools – that is Salesforce," Tarkoff told VentureBeat.  "…but we think that if we drive these innovations, we can raise the bar for the rest of the industry to respond to that."

According to Robert Blaisdell, senior director, and analyst at Gartner, by 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based strategy to data-driven decision-making, availing technology like that of Oracle, that unites workflows, data, and analytics.  "Most of the big trends we see with AI focus on supporting B2B sales reps in their daily sales tasks by saving time and effort while also providing insights," he said to VentureBeat via email.

Oracle's main focus is on data quality for machine learning. Tarkoff said Oracle is utilizing the power of the company's customer data platform (CDP) to "establish extensive profiles on each of our prospects that can then be activated more constructively through the AI and ML models we use, so we're constantly testing new models." That hinges on the quality of the dataset provided to those models, he further mentioned.

Oracle's core approach to its Fusion Applications, built on Oracle Cloud, has always been to develop as many advanced machine learning models into flows, from the database layer into the applications layer.