Oracle OpenWorld 2019 will take place September 16-19 in San Francisco, with over 1,000 planned sessions on topics including transformational technologies, growth acceleration, intelligent cloud applications, and more. Here are 5 of the upcoming, fascinating marketing sessions. You can also view the full CX session catalog here. Today, companies are struggling to provide a complete customer experience due to the disconnected nature of the underlying data. Staying ahead of the curve by connecting all customer intelligence across all interactions will shape the leaders of tomorrow.

Oracle has been investing heavily in making it easier to weave AI and machine learning capabilities into a variety of applications, especially its Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications. In theory, this should facilitate automating many aspects of ERP, supply chain and revenue-management processes. But as with most cutting-edge technologies, the devil is in the details. Melissa Boxer, vice president of adaptive intelligence at Oracle, explained what these capabilities mean in practice. The vendor considers its Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps a strategic initiative to develop next-generation smart applications using big data on top of the Oracle Cloud.

The legacy of fake news has created renewed demand for reliable online news distribution. This is where Flipboard, one of the first digital news curators, is finding a niche. Launched in 2010, the Palo Alto-based news aggregator provides a digital magazine-style content platform that it claims is used by more than 100 million people each month. Flipboard expects to hit profitability in 2018, a result the company says, of connecting millions of people to publishers--a high percentage of whom are affluent (and human) audiences that advertisers crave. Flipboard is depending on cloud applications and ad tech analytics to make sure the content from its advertisers and publishers is being read by real people.

As Oracle recounts, Apache Spark excels at running machine learning queries on massive data sets. Predicting consumer behavior is considered the holy grail of marketing, but a classic problem is filtering out the noise from customers who are ready to buy. Web activity such as search and browsing may generate petabytes of data, then there's past-purchase history and offline behavior such as in-store purchases. Then there's reams of demographic data to analyze -- age, income, affinities -- in search of the coveted target market. Alexander Sadovsky, director of data science at Oracle, runs a team responsible for crunching data on audience behavior and advertising across different channels, whether Google, Facebook, the wider internet, or in stores.

The biggest reveal at the Oracle Modern Customer Experience (CX) event held in Las Vegas from April 25 to April 27 was the debut of Oracle Adaptive Intelligent apps for CX. Adaptive Intelligent Offers (AI Offers) is the first app in a planned portfolio of artificial intelligence applications that will eventually span CX, ERP, human capital management, and supply chain management. The introduction was no surprise. Oracle said a CX app would come first when it announced Oracle Adaptive Intelligent apps last September. Since then the company has been refining the behind-the-scenes automated machine learning capabilities.

Oracle will launch the first of its machine-learning powered Adaptive Intelligent Apps this spring, but what's next for Oracle Data Cloud? Here's a look at promised and possible use cases. The first of five promised Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Application (AI Apps) will be generally available this spring. As for next steps for the petabyte-scale treasure trove known as the Oracle Data Cloud, we'll have to wait and see. The AI App plans emerged at the January 17 Oracle Cloud Analyst Summit in New York.

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.

Leading investment crowdfunding platform OurCrowd has registered its 6th successful exit as portfolio company Crosswise has been purchased by Oracle. The transaction was revealed in Israeli media on April 15th revealing that Oracle paid 50 million for the "machine learning based cross-device data" company. The transaction closed on April 14th. OurCrowd, and its registered investors, participated in a Series A funding round that provided 670,392 to the young company. Co-investors on the funding round included Giza Venture Capital, Horizons Ventures and a "high profile angel group."