NetSuite unveils new product updates and AI innovations
At SuiteWorld 2024, Oracle NetSuite introduced key updates, including AI enhancements, a new procurement solution, and improved tools for project management and user experience to drive business growth.
Evan Goldberg - Founder and Executive VP of Oracle NetSuite
Oracle NetSuite is going all-in on artificial intelligence at this year’s SuiteWorld conference, unveiling a series of AI-powered innovations designed to help businesses increase efficiency and accelerate growth.
The annual event, taking place in Las Vegas, showcases NetSuite’s latest developments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cloud-based business management solutions.
At the heart of NetSuite’s announcements is a comprehensive AI strategy that promises to embed intelligent capabilities across its suite of products. These new features aim to help organisations gain insights, improve productivity, and enhance collaboration.
“We designed NetSuite to be the foundation of business growth, with a platform that can evolve and expand to meet changing needs and a data model that connects a customer’s entire business,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite.
“We continue to extend NetSuite’s capabilities to further strengthen that foundation. As customers scale their businesses on NetSuite, AI innovations and workflow optimisations help them gain intelligent insights, improve productivity, and simplify collaboration.”
The AI innovations announced today build upon the existing AI capabilities, including generative AI, already embedded within NetSuite. These updates span various aspects of business operations, from financial management and analytics to procurement and development tools, all aimed at helping NetSuite’s more than 40,000 customers in 219 countries and dependent territories to thrive in an increasingly competitive business landscape.
A Winning Hand for Finance Teams
One of the key AI innovations unveiled at SuiteWorld is NetSuite Financial Exception Management. This new feature leverages AI to automatically detect financial exceptions, enabling organisations to quickly assess situations, identify activities that need investigation, and gain actionable insights to resolve issues before the end-of-period crunch.
Complementing this is the new NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Assistant, which aims to revolutionise how finance teams interact with their data. This AI-powered tool allows users to retrieve information from their workbooks and create reports and visualisations using natural language queries.
For instance, users can simply ask for reports on accounts payable aging or the top five customers by balance, and the assistant will promptly deliver AI-generated summaries and key takeaways.
“We are embedding AI-powered capabilities across the suite so customers are benefiting from it as soon as they log in,” Goldberg explained. “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.”
These advancements in financial analytics are part of NetSuite’s broader strategy to help finance teams make more informed decisions and gain deeper insights into their business operations. The company emphasises that these tools are designed to increase efficiency, mitigate risk, and drive better decision-making, allowing finance professionals to focus on more strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in data analysis.
Raising the Stakes with AI-Enhanced ERP
NetSuite is doubling down on AI in its Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) offerings, introducing several new features designed to streamline financial reporting and help businesses capitalize on growth opportunities more quickly.
One of the headline features is Generative AI for Narrative Reporting. This tool is designed to help finance teams increase productivity and accelerate decision-making by efficiently creating AI-powered narratives, explanations, and visuals from financial and transactional data.
In NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, the company has introduced AI-powered narratives. This feature enables finance teams to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies, delivering detailed AI-generated commentary and narratives through the Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) Insights feature.
To enhance forecast accuracy, NetSuite has also added predictive forecast explanations to its Planning and Budgeting module. This tool helps finance teams understand the key factors behind AI-generated forecasts, increasing forecast accuracy and confidence, and enabling rapid action based on these insights.
Tying these features together is a new AI-driven digital assistant for NetSuite EPM. This intuitive interface allows finance teams to increase productivity and accomplish various tasks using natural language conversations.
“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. This can be a labor-intensive process that often diverts time away from more strategic analysis and slows down decision-making,” Goldberg noted.
“To address this challenge, the latest updates to NetSuite EPM help finance teams leverage powerful AI innovations to help increase efficiency, expand insights, and enable more time to be spent on value-added activities.”
Raising the Analytics Ante
NetSuite is upping the ante with significant updates to its Analytics Warehouse, introducing new AI features designed to help customers accelerate data analysis and gain contextual insights for enhanced decision-making.
Built on Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse leverages AI to harness business data and identify opportunities to drive efficiency. The latest updates introduce several new AI tools and models:
Auto-Insights: This feature generates data visualizations and natural language insights based on a dataset’s attributes, measures, and other points of interest, helping customers accelerate reporting and improve decision-making.
Explain: Leveraging AI, this tool identifies meaningful business drivers, contextual insights, and data anomalies, helping customers gain a greater understanding of their business.
Oracle Analytics AI Assistant: This feature enables customers to streamline data discovery through conversational interactions. Users can ask questions about data patterns, and the Assistant will create an answer and relevant data visualizations using Generative AI.
Out-of-the-box AI models: These no-code models are built for specific use cases and can predict scenarios such as customer churn and inventory stockouts, helping customers improve decision-making.
AutoML: This feature automates algorithm selection and customizes modelling workflows, helping customers improve insights and enhance efficiency without requiring technical AI skills.
Oracle Machine Learning: Providing a collaborative interface to explore data visually and tailor ML models to address unique business needs, this tool helps customers improve algorithm performance and expand insights.
“For growing businesses, making sense of data can be a time-consuming process that may require advanced data science and coding skills. With limited resources, many businesses are not able to invest in these skills and miss out on valuable data insights,” Goldberg explained.
“We’re dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes unlock the full potential of their data. The latest updates to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse will help customers automate data analysis and leverage AI to produce fast and meaningful insights that can help improve decision-making.”
To illustrate the practical applications of these new features, NetSuite highlighted a customer success story. BirdRock Home, a manufacturer of home goods, is using the new predictive model for customer churn in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse to optimize its product strategy, improve customer experiences, and grow revenue while keeping existing customers engaged.
Mark Chuberka, senior NetSuite administrator at BirdRock Home, commented, “Ecommerce marketplaces are extremely competitive environments, and it can be difficult for merchants to stand out and create brand loyalty. With predictive insights on customer churn, NetSuite helps us understand customer demand for specific product lines and forecast which new products will likely drive continued growth.”
A New Deal for Indirect Procurement
In a move to help businesses streamline their purchasing processes and control costs, NetSuite has introduced SuiteProcurement, a new indirect procurement solution. This offering is designed to help customers track and control every purchase from request to payment, optimising the procurement process.
A key feature of SuiteProcurement is its integration with major suppliers. Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage are the first vendors to support this solution.
“For growing businesses, indirect procurement can be a time-consuming and costly process that negatively impacts the bottom line,” Goldberg stated.
“By allowing customers benefit from these great offers from Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage directly in NetSuite, SuiteProcurement will help optimise spending and enable customers to efficiently buy the goods and services needed to support growth.”
The collaboration with Amazon Business will provide SuiteProcurement customers with substantial offers. For instance, customers will be eligible for a 12-month, no-cost Amazon Business Prime Medium membership (valued at US$1,299) that provides business-only pricing and savings, and a 50 percent discount on membership renewals in subsequent years.
Mobeen Khan, Amazon Business director of business development and global partnerships, commented, “Amazon Business helps millions of business customers worldwide make smart business buying decisions, save time and money, and grow their companies. We are very excited to collaborate with NetSuite on the upcoming launch of SuiteProcurement, giving our mutual customers instant access to a vast selection and amazing deals on their everyday business purchases.”
Similarly, Staples Business Advantage will offer NetSuite SuiteProcurement customers dynamic pricing to help them receive an average of 10 percent savings on all business essentials.
Powered by Oracle Business Network, SuiteProcurement brings together business supplies and service vendors to improve the buyer experience and accelerate and control purchasing. Key features of SuiteProcurement include:
Seamless vendor integrations
Automated approval processes
Automated purchase order creation and invoicing
Complete visibility of spend
Improved data accuracy
Streamlined accounting processes
These features are designed to help customers reduce costs, enhance financial controls, support compliance with organizational policies, and improve relationships with suppliers.
Doubling Down on AI
NetSuite is not stopping at financial and procurement tools. The company is also introducing several other AI-powered innovations to enhance various aspects of its platform:
NetSuite Prompt Studio: This new tool allows administrators and developers to configure the format, tone, and creativity level of AI-generated responses. It gives customers more control over generative AI prompt configuration, enhancing end-user productivity.
SuiteScript API: This feature helps organizations quickly introduce new AI-powered functionality by enabling them to embed generative AI capabilities into NetSuite extensions and customizations. This allows customers to complement NetSuite’s out-of-the-box AI features with generative AI-powered SuiteApps tailored to their unique business needs.
Oracle Code Assist SuiteScript optimization: This AI code companion helps developers build extensions and customizations faster within NetSuite. It can quickly create boilerplate code, build and run unit tests, generate documentation, and answer coding questions, increasing overall productivity.
NetSuite Advanced Customer Support (ACS) AI Playbook: This offering helps organizations configure, optimize, and create new AI-powered capabilities throughout the suite, enabling customers to quickly deploy new capabilities that support increased efficiency, expanded insights, and enhanced decision-making.
NetSuite’s High-Stakes Bet on AI
As the curtain falls on the first day of SuiteWorld 2024, it’s clear that NetSuite is placing a big bet on AI. The company’s comprehensive approach to integrating AI across its suite of products represents a significant step forward in the evolution of cloud-based business management solutions.
From financial exception management and advanced analytics to streamlined procurement and AI-assisted development tools, NetSuite is dealing a new hand to its customers. These AI-driven innovations aim to help businesses of all sizes increase efficiency, mitigate risk, and accelerate growth in an increasingly competitive business landscape.
As Goldberg emphasized throughout the announcements, the goal is to embed AI seamlessly into existing business processes, providing immediate value to customers without additional cost. This strategy positions NetSuite at the forefront of the AI revolution in business software.
For corporate accounting teams and CFOs, these innovations promise to transform financial processes, offering deeper insights, more accurate forecasting, and increased productivity.
With these announcements, NetSuite has shown its cards, and it’s clear they’re playing to win in the high-stakes game of enterprise software. As SuiteWorld continues, attendees will undoubtedly be eager to see how these AI innovations perform in real-world scenarios. In the fast-paced world of business technology, NetSuite is betting that AI is not just the future – it’s the present.
