In an industry first, Oracle is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help automate digital marketing.

AI is revolutionizing a wide range of industries, but Oracle is applying it to digital marketing campaigns, with its newly announced Fusion Marketing platform. Unlike many lead generation systems, that merely raise brand awareness, Fusion Marketing is specifically designed to generate leads.

Fusion Marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically score leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to talk to a salesperson, and generate a qualified sales opportunity in any CRM system.

Oracle hopes Fusion Marketing will address the disconnect many salespeople feel when using a CRM system, where siloed data often works against making a sale. Oracle’s new system is designed to address that and accelerate marketing campaigns by automating the lead generation process from end-to-end.

“It is time for our industry to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that we can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience. “This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell. A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster.”

Oracle’s Fusion Marketing is just the beginning, as experts say AI will continue to transform digital marketing.

“Machine learning algorithms are integral to digital marketing and that will only increase over time. The best digital marketers have embraced this fact, and have already shifted their focus towards more human-first activities. Machines are better at crunching numbers and making data-driven decisions. But they still need humans to decide what data to feed into those systems. This comes from understanding human behavior, a deep sense of empathy, and expert-level storytelling that are hard to replicate through AI.” – Dennis Consorte, Digital Marketing Expert and Expert at Digital.com, told WebProNews.