Oracle Customer Insights Shows Promise of Predictive Analytics and AI

The News: Last week at NRF, Oracle introduced a new way to help retailers find their top future customers using data science. A new offering from Oracle Retail, Consumer Insights aids retailers in understanding the characteristics of their best customers then extends those traits to find similar potential customers among the petabytes of third-party consumer data in Oracle Data Cloud. This enables retailers to optimize customer acquisition campaigns with more relevant, targeted products and offers. Read the full press release from Oracle.

Analyst Take: Last week at NRF I wrote on Forbes about what I saw were some of the biggest takeaways from this year’s Big Show. Bottom line, Omni-channel and analytics ruled the roost and Oracle was another company to tout its wares in the predictive analytics space based upon customer data platforms and/or casting a wider net around how data could be used and what data would be available. 

What is Oracle Customer Insights?

Oracle Retail is rolling out this particular product, which undoubtedly will have a similar offering available from Oracle CX for industries that span beyond retail. The offering itself promises to use customer owned data along with a mass of third party data that lives within the Oracle Data Cloud. This data can then be coupled together to better understand customer behavior and most notably to predict the prospects most likely to become customers.

Some of the examples of data correlation that can be done when pairing these enriched data sense, adding predictive models and machine learning are really interesting. For instance, someone that may by high-end sporting apparel and their likelihood of purchasing a certain brand of shampoo. Seems somewhat obscure, but in the data lives signals that can help brands target better and understand their customers better–it’s powerful and compelling and like I said it has substantial potential beyond retail. 

Overall Impressions of Oracle Customer Insights Launch

The announcement is exciting. It isn’t necessarily vastly new and different but the realization of 360 customer visibility, Omni-channel, predictive analytics, AI and data science in one place does show where this is all heading. While we are hearing about CDP’s, it is really this type of solution that most companies are looking for–the CDP is a vehicle to make it happen. 

The way I see it, Oracle can differentiate around the volume of data it has in its data cloud. With a massive number of customers and the ability to use all of this anonymized data, I feel there is some promise in the solution and retailers should be looking to Oracle as a potential partner to help drive ambitions to match customer behavior with buying queues. Having said that, I expect this space to become more and more crowded as all of the big cloud, ERP and CRM vendors look to build on the mass of data and the solutions that can accompany it. 

Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.

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Image Credit: Oracle

The original version of this article was first published on  Futurum Research.