Microsoft and Oracle have their own cloud database news: they’re linking their systems to share data and let applications running in one cloud use data stored in the other. The deal should expand the market for Oracle applications to companies that prefer to keep their data in Microsoft Azure. CDP users get more choices in where to host their systems.
The News Gods have apparently adopted summer hours, since nothing of interest happened on Friday. That lets us catch up on some Artificial Intelligence items that we didn’t get to earlier in the week. We’ll start with LogMeIn, which is expanding beyond remote access software to offer an AI-powered Bold360 customer engagement suite. It will deliver customer support, advisory, and shopping bots and bot-powered advice to customer-facing employees.
More on advertising: IBM has launched Watson Ads Builder, which uses AI to help marketers build ads that engage in chatbot-style conversations. AI to build AI. Wondrously meta.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.