Oracle is sprucing up its customer data platform, CX Unity, with a little machine learning. The platform will now support real-time behavioral data collection and personalization capabilities through Infinity, Oracle's digital streaming technology. Infinity captures web event, app and point-of-sale data to help brands build realistic representations of the customer journey. That previously required repeated and rigorous A/B testing, said Rob Tarkoff, EVP and general manager of Oracle Cloud CX and Oracle Data Cloud. "But by applying machine learning to that, you can come up with predictions and insights based on a holistic set of data, and it doesn't require you to do one-off activities," he said.

Oracle on Tuesday used its 2019 Openworld conference in San Francisco to introduce ways for B2B firms to bring sales and marketing data together, as well as tools to personalize and customer experiences based on a variety of contextual data. Among the updates announced as part of its customer event this week, the business software giant said it was going to offer an integration between its marketing automation applications and Oracle DataFox. Acquired last year, Datafox brought Oracle an artificial intelligence (AI) data engine designed to continuously extract company-level data and signals to help companies see where they can grow. The Oracle Datafox integration will mean B2B firms can have a richer view of accounts, which will help them rank and prioritize opportunities, said Rob Tarkoff, Oracle's executive vice-president and general manager, CX Cloud. "CX applications will no longer be trapped by data that sits in different silos," Tarkoff said during a keynote session, which was livestreamed from Oracle Openworld.