While the Caesar’s Palace punters watched the slot machine wheels spin at the hotel’s casino, a different kind of system was on the minds of SuiteWorld attendees in the conference centre next door.
Oracle NetSuite founder and EVP Evan Goldberg delivered the day one keynote at the developer’s SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas and remains confident that a combination of NetSuite’s integrated platform and the power of parent company Oracle’s systems will allow its users to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and hit the software jackpot.
“By ensuring AI is built into existing business processes and not bolted on, we are helping our customers achieve immediate value from the latest AI innovations at no additional cost,” said Goldberg. “Our latest updates build on the hundreds of new generative AI use cases we added last year and will help our customers further increase productivity and gain more value from the suite.”
Cirque du Sol-AI
Speaking to the conference’s 7,500 attendees in a purpose-built marquee next to Caesar’s Palace, NetSuite ringmaster Goldberg laid out the key AI additions, including two major updates: Ask Oracle and the NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Assistant.
‘Ask Oracle’ is a box at the top of the screen where users can enter any question or command, and then take action directly from the answer screen.
The developer is also releasing an AI assistant for its business intelligence tool SuiteAnalytics, unsurprisingly known as NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Assistant.
“This is a true assistant,” said Goldberg. “You can have a conversation with it in natural language as it helps build reports and visible visualisations. All we need to know is what kind of insights you want, and the assistant will do the rest.”
Customers can retrieve information from workbooks and create reports and graphics using the assistant’s natural language interface. For example, users can ask the assistant for reports on accounts payable ageing or the top five customers by balance.
An example given onstage of how Ask Oracle and the SuiteAnalytics assistant could work together involved Finley, a financial controller at an online retailer. She logged into NetSuite on Monday morning to find out that sales had spiked over the weekend. Curious about what caused the rise, she used Ask Oracle in the top bar and the system flagged that a recent discount on a battery item had triggered more sales than expected.
The discount campaign had just launched and Finley needed to ensure the company had enough stock of the battery to cover the higher-than-expected sales. She opened SuiteAnalytics to update the forecast numbers and asked what would happen if demand continued at the new higher rate – how many units did the company need to order to cover the expected orders? It came back as 30 units short, and the batteries needed to be ordered by September 13 to meet the forecast demand. Finally, she asked the AI assistant to contact a department manager to order them.
Raising the stakes on financial expectation management
There were a plethora of other AI-based announced at the show, including NetSuite Financial Exception Management, a new tool that automatically detects exceptions or unusual activities in areas such as invoices or journal entries and flags them to users.
Financial Exception Management’s AI algorithm constantly reviews all new and updated transactions to detect potential exceptions, and users can see all flagged exceptions in one place, with the system also predicting the potential impact (for example the difference between the expected amount and the recorded amount).
The system allows NetSuite’s customers to review the exception, see similar past transactions that can give more context, identify whether it needs to be investigated and resolve it – with potential fixes highlighted by the tool. Once the exception has been marked as resolved, the system removes it from the list.
Betting on budgeting: Enterprise Performance Management additions
The developer also announced a range of AI developments to its NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) product.
This ‘family of tools’, which includes NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and NetSuite Account Reconciliation, allows customers to connect data from multiple sources to integrate their financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and tax reporting processes.
“Finance teams often spend a significant amount of time gathering data and creating narratives to explain financial results, justify important decisions and forecast future growth,” said Goldberg. “This can be a labour-intensive process that often diverts time away from more strategic analysis and slows down decision-making,”
AI updates to NetSuite EPM include:
Generative AI for narrative reporting: This allows finance professionals to streamline financial reporting by using financial and transactional data to generate draft reports, and add charts, visuals and explanations.
AI-powered narratives in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: This enables finance teams to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies and deliver detailed commentary on them.
Predictive forecast explanations in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: This allows finance teams to quickly and easily understand the factors behind AI-generated forecasts, allowing them to rapidly take action if needed.
AI-driven digital assistant for NetSuite EPM: This enables finance teams to accomplish a variety of tasks using natural language conversations via an AI interface.
High roller analytics
Updates to NetSuite’s Analytics Warehouse, the developer’s data storage and analytics platform, have added new embedded AI capabilities allowing users to interact with the system’s multiple data sources.
For example, customers can create a stock-out prediction model to determine whether an item at a particular location is expected to grow out of stock within a certain time period, or run scenario predictions such as customer churn and flag them to the relevant people or departments.
What happens in NetSuite, stays in NetSuite
A release accompanying the announcements stated that NetSuite’s embedded AI capabilities are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and designed to respect customers’ enterprise data, privacy, and security.
With OCI Generative AI services, no customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers. Role-based security provides an additional layer of security, offering the ability to serve up only content that end users are entitled to view.
Other announcements
While AI dominated proceedings, the event also contained several other announcements relevant to finance professionals.
NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro: Previously known as NetSuite OpenAir, SuiteProjects Pro is designed to help customers monitor the health of projects, assist with project planning, and increase productivity.
NetSuite SuiteProcurement: This new indirect procurement solution lets users connect from NetSuite to vendor sites to shop for any good or service their business needs. The feature allows users to streamline indirect procurement processes and access discounts from suppliers including Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage.
A NetSuite Connector for Salesforce: This integration allows joint customers of the two vendors to automatically share real-time data between NetSuite and customer relationship management (CRM) software giant Salesforce. Due to go live in the next 12 months, the connector will enable increased visibility into order and fulfilment details, invoice, order and sales data, customer and contact information, and accelerate order-to-cash and revenue recognition processes.
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