Oracle and Microsoft recently announced a collaborative pact for the interoperability of several products from each company to support Bing Searches and other applications. It is their largest collaboration, and not the first. My questions include whether or not this is significant, and if it is, what does it say about the future CRM?
Microsoft is optimizing AI models to power Microsoft Bing conversations searches every day using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI infrastructure and Microsoft Azure AI Infrastructure.
Okay, it’s significant. There’s no need to spend much time on this question.
The competitors are able to create truly large supercomputing environments to help drive the AI future by opening up a lot of proprietary hardware. These two software giants are acting more like old-fashioned hardware companies, even though they both have strong hardware capabilities.
Cryptocurrency Contrast
I can’t resist a quick sidebar.
Have you noticed how few things like this have happened in the crypto world? Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said a few years ago that cryptocurrency was still a solution looking for a problem. Krugman’s predictions have been proved wrong in the interim years as Sam Bankman Fried waits for sentencing.
Just look at the actors and forget about the differences in crypto versus artificial intelligence. Satya Nadella and Larry Ellison, both veterans of the technology wars with decades of combined experience and scars, are the perfect pair to discuss the future of tech. The collaboration between their companies reveals a lot about how they envision the future of technology. It’s similar to Ray Kurzweil’s singularity.
Kurzweil predicted that AI would augment human effort and thought. AI takes a great deal of horsepower, not just storage, to pull off its magic — and since Oracle’s customers are also Microsoft’s customers and vice versa, neither could survive by telling customers that their products couldn’t work closely together.
What is Strategic Defense Collaboration?
Microsoft, the prime contractor, won a Defense Department Contract, which I have said many times. This new collaboration could be influenced by this contract.
This is a much larger deal than Oracle and Microsoft combined, and may be the only time in history where such a collaboration could occur between two rivals. We may be watching the Defense Department bring two competitors together in a transaction that would ordinarily raise eyebrows at the Justice Department.
AI could be used for CRM, specifically to predict the near future with a vast computing environment. Since the Greeks invaded Troy, predicting the future accurately in wartime has been a military need and goal. It is possible that we will be watching technologies developed for one arena being deployed in another.
In this technologically advanced age, it is almost acceptable to rework Bismarck’s statement that war is just politics. When business becomes war through other means, the feeling is uneasy that the customers could be the enemy.
The Double-Edged Swords of AI
In light of the social media mess, and after a positive start which saw many analysts including myself sing its praises I am a bit hesitant about getting ahead on AI.
I fear that AI in the future will spread throughout the society and become a voice that says, “Does that sound like fries?”
My hope is that AI will eliminate the lag in so many interactions between customers and vendors, reducing it to zero.
The sales process is where this lag time is most noticeable. Salespeople are bombarding you with offers that solve problems which you may have only vague ideas about. The salespeople have to juggle a huge number of “opportunities”, trying to see which ones are viable.
Wouldn’t a neutral source be able to tell the buyer: “You really need to get this to reach the CEO’s stretch goal for the year?” Wouldn’t it also be nice if an unbiased source told the sales rep that “These situations are non starters, but this is a real winner?”
It would be wonderful, and I have been looking for these technologies since I was young. We’ve come closer with each new version of CRM but we’re still a long way off.
AI for Relationship Management
In the past, VRM was popular. But the gap between need and capability was still huge. Who would pay all the tech and labor needed? VRM was a good idea, but it didn’t work out.
Then, AI. The need is still there — to find a better way to engage vendors and prospects without so many dead ends that come with conventional sales. AI could fulfill that need, but a few things would first have to be accomplished.
A loud hissing would first be heard as air is let out of the balloon. In a world where AI is the dominant force, salespeople are less important. Second, businesses will have to get used to having a resource in-house to tell managers which products to buy.
We may be a long ways off from that, but we can expect the AI juggernaut will accelerate. Who knows what the future of the world looks like by the end of the decade?