Continuing to make AI practical for everyday business use, NetSuite announced a host of new AI-powered features at SuiteWorld 2024. The latest capabilities add new functionality and improve on existing features to support process automation and insights for employees to help boost efficiency and improve decision-making.
As with previous releases, AI capabilities are built into NetSuite rather than being separate tools or plugins, and they come at no additional cost to customers. SVP of Application Development Gary Wiessinger called out “Suiteness”—the benefits that come from all your data, workflows, and employees being centralized in a single system—as a key advantage of embedding AI in NetSuite.
“AI is all about the data that it’s built on,” Wiessinger said during the product keynote on September 11. “Our AI can leverage more of the data across your whole business, enabling us to do more with AI than point solutions will ever be able to.
NetSuite plans to roll out these updates over the next 12 months.
AI-generated insights into your financials
Finance teams could benefit from several new planned AI updates, including NetSuite Financial Exception Management, which can review large volumes of transactions to help spot anomalies that don’t match past patterns and warrant a closer look. A dashboard will flag journal entries, invoices, sales orders, and other transactions in one place and even suggest potential fixes.
“It's the convergence of AI and Suiteness targeting that goal of continuous close,” said Craig Sullivan, group vice president of product management at NetSuite.
Sullivan also announced that NetSuite Bill Capture(opens in new tab), an existing module that uses optical character recognition (OCR) and AI to automatically populate bill record fields in NetSuite and match them with other documents, is being developed to handle vendor bills from other countries with different address formats, layouts, and taxes. Bill Capture is also planned to support other languages.
Wiessinger noted this feature can help employees beyond finance. For example, it could flag a sales order a rep is preparing with an excessive discount.
Generative AI will bring several enhancements to NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)(opens in new tab) solutions. The narrative reporting tools within EPM are being developed to use GenAI to draft written reports and visualizations breaking down your company’s performance. Finance staffers can then review and refine the AI-generated narratives that accompany key financial reports, saving time compared with starting a report from scratch.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, another EPM module, is planned to use GenAI to provide commentary and insights on your financial plans, forecasts, and variances. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting already leverages Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) to continuously evaluate these plans to reveal trends, anomalies, and biases, and the new GenAI Insight Narratives is intended to offer explanations alongside those insights. All of this can help give stakeholders within and outside the finance function a helpful peek behind the curtain.
Finally, an AI digital assistant in NetSuite EPM is being developed to quickly provide answers to employees’ questions about these predictive plans and budgets so they can better understand what these reports mean for their business.
Simplifying and deepening analytics with AI
NetSuite SuiteAnalytics, one of the most widely used tools in NetSuite, could give your workforce a lift with an AI assistant that turns text prompts into useful summaries and visualizations by pulling the relevant data from workbooks. Based on your feedback, the NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Assistant can also modify those insights to reflect different parameters or chart types.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse(opens in new tab), a cloud data warehouse and analytics module designed specifically for NetSuite, is expected to provide similar capabilities with its own AI assistant, powered by the Oracle Analytics AI Assistant, that can turn datasets into nearly 50 different visualizations using GenAI. And an Explain feature in the data warehouse and analytics software can help you make sense of the results by highlighting drivers, anomalies, and other contextual insights.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse already comes with prebuilt AI and ML models and uses AI to help centralize and validate data. The data warehouse plans to add more out-of-the-box AI models designed to unlock specific performance insights, such as customer churn or inventory stockouts.
Packer Fastener, a rapidly growing manufacturer and distributor of fasteners and other industrial supplies, is experimenting with these new AI and ML models and has already found real-life business cases for them.
“We're predicting things like item stockout and customer churn,” Packer Fastener CTO Bill Feck said. “So for example … can we detect if a customer's usage is trailing off, and how to get that information to salesmen quicker so that they can act on it and do something before it's too late.”
It should also be easier for professionals without extensive experience in data science to identify the best models for what they’re trying to analyze, as the NetSuite application can assess the data you’re using and recommend the best algorithm.
For more technical employees, a new capability in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse called Oracle Machine Learning is being created to let them tweak machine learning algorithms to their specific needs to help improve performance and output.
Turbocharging NetSuite development and customizations
NetSuite administrators and developers know that SuiteScript is a powerful way to extend and customize the platform’s functionality. A new generative AI SuiteScript API is designed to let these NetSuite pros further enhance these capabilities by embedding GenAI into these extensions and customizations, creating SuiteApps that cater to their business’s unique processes and demands.
Developers can get another boost with Oracle Code Assist, which is being optimized for SuiteScript. This tool, powered by large language models running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), is planned to generate code for NetSuite customizations and extensions. Oracle Code Assist can also test, analyze, and explain code, delivering a major productivity boost for your engineers.
On the keynote stage, NetSuite SVP of Technology and AI Brian Chess showed how the AI code companion could write code to create AI-generated summaries summing up a customer’s recent exchanges with support in case records.
NetSuite Prompt Studio(opens in new tab) is another feature that can help system administrators improve the quality of NetSuite Text Enhance AI-generated content across the system. Admins can tailor the format, tone, and creativity level of responses to what makes the most sense for their organization and user base to derive more value from GenAI-powered features.
“You can tailor the AI-generated content precisely to what you want it to be,” Chess said.
Text Enhance is also being developed to translate AI-generated copy, group vice president of product management Allison Auclair announced.
With all NetSuite customers now running on OCI(opens in new tab), the next step is upgrading the service architecture underpinning the system. NetSuite will adopt Oracle Autonomous Database in the coming year to deliver additional performance enhancements, Chess said.
“The autonomous database uses AI to self-provision, self-tune, self-patch,” he said. “It finds patterns and fixes problems faster than a human ever could. It's the most flexible and elastic form factor out there, and it's going to make NetSuite more dynamic than ever.”
Finally, NetSuite plans to release an Advanced Customer Support (ACS) AI Playbook designed to help customers get the most out of this groundbreaking technology in NetSuite. ACS experts will help organizations build, configure, and optimize AI functionality across their suite.
“The sheer volume of AI-driven features that we’re adding demonstrates our commitment to delivering on the vision of AI everywhere,” Chess said. “We’re doing it so you can achieve more than ever before, and we’re excited to see what you’re going to create with these capabilities.”
It's not too late to attend SuiteWorld 2024 virtually! Register now(opens in new tab) for SuiteWorld On Air to catch more keynotes, breakout sessions, and hands-on workshops.