Speaking to a packed auditorium at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 in San Francisco, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd predicted that by 2020, 90 percent of all software applications and services will incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) at some level and that more than half of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously. It was just one of the many predictions that Hurd shared that day, all linked by a common theme: the immense value of gathering, contextualizing, understanding, and acting on huge quantities of data-with help from machine learning and AI.

Many of these predictions are coming true, as yesterday's enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems give rise to a new breed of applications that continuously improve and adapt, based on up-to-the-minute conditions. Fundamental business applications handling finance, procurement, project management, risk management, and other back-office functions now incorporate a variety of innovative services from the cloud.