Oracle Vs. Salesforce on AI: What to Expect When

Oracle and Salesforce are both promising artificial intelligence assisted apps with capabilities including machine learning and natural language interaction. Here's what's behind the tech and when it gets real. Oracle and Salesforce both announced "AI" initiatives this week, but there are differences in the scope and scale of what's promised, the pace of their rollouts and even how they're talking about artificial intelligence. For starters, neither vendor is talking about to sort of sentient, general-purpose AI seen in science fiction depictions ranging from "Iron Man" and "Star Trek" to "The Terminator" and "2001 a Space Odyssey." Rather, both vendors are talking about assisting humans with "smart" apps that apply closed-loop machine learning and data science to combinations of customer data and third-party data.