Oracle NetSuite Unveils AI-Powered 'NetSuite Next' at SuiteWorld 25

SuiteWorld 25 - the change management challenge around AI

The 8,000+ customers and partners who attended this week's SuiteWorld 25 in Las Vegas, were treated to a glimpse of an AI powered future, as Oracle NetSuite unveiled its NetSuite Next AI era. The timing couldn't be better as a recent customer survey carried out by NetSuite found that 75% of them are already using AI weekly, and 56% daily, with the most popular AI automated tasks including bank reconciliation, report creation, and invoicing. NetSuite says its latest product offerings, which will become available over the next six to 12 months, will help customers gain better insights from the data they have, improve productivity, and encourage collaboration through its SuiteCloud AI Connector Service, which uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Popular use examples from customers included autonomous close for financials, AI-driven customer health scoring, and project risk analysis. The AI connector service integrates with external AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude, while SuiteAgents, built on the SuiteCloud Platform, will automate business processes, and help them understand their business operations better by giving more accurate insights gained from their data. NetSuite Next will initially roll out in the US market, and expand globally within six months, whilst new AI developments on the SuiteCloud platform are already available. The company said customers' transition to NetSuite Next is expected to be pretty seamless, and will lead to better data transformation and decision-making, for both existing and new NetSuite customers. Speaking on a panel at a strategy session Evan Goldberg, NetSuite founder and Executive Vice President said: What you're seeing is a combination of a lot of work that we've been doing behind the scenes. As LLMs (Large Language Models) became more sophisticated, it was clear that we had the opportunity to make deep changes that could deliver much more value to our customers. The field has been moving so rapidly because obviously the amount of intellectual horsepower that's being applied to AI is unlike anything I've ever seen during the Internet revolution. He went on: We see this as an enormous opportunity for our customers to get more of what they've always wanted - great insight and productivity, control, agility, collaboration - all those same things, so we're supercharged with the power of these large language models and other AI capabilities. The company expects all of its customers to eventually switch to NetSuite Next, and thinks most of them will also use Ask Oracle, its natural language assistant. But it believes customers won't see this as implementation or technology issues, but rather a change management challenge. Goldberg commented: We think a lot of people will move. It will be very easy and useful, but it's not sort of required. We haven't figured out a timeframe yet as it is a change management issue. We have companies that rely on customizations, which will generally all work in NetSuite Next so it's not like anything breaks, but they may rely on training based on the existing UIs, and they will need to upgrade that training. So we know that there's going to be some change management in moving everybody onto the NetSuite next platform. Gary Wiessinger, NetSuite Senior Vice President of Applications Development, who was also on the panel, added that customers want to get more stuff done in the same timeframe, and want some of the more mundane work done automatically: They want improved control, agility, and LLM collaboration, and meeting those objectives will improve productivity, it's just getting more stuff done at the same time. Everyone wants that. Wiessinger said that when he has asked customers what they spend the most time on, or the most repetitive effort on, they said fake reconciliation, journal entries and creating reports: That's where we're going to focus our AI automation efforts. That's where people spend time. That's where they want us to help them save time, and of course this leads to more insight. You can get those insights right now, we used to get them once a month before, now it's easy to see them all the time. Obviously, as a CFO you need insights about what's going on in the business, and AI can help that today. Brian Chess, Senior Vice President Technology and AI, said that the ability for financial controllers to use natural language to interrogate the data will also give them better insight: The other thing I would add is the ability for a CFO or a financial controller to ask a question using the natural language processing of Ask Oracle in NetSuite Next, is key. I've spoken to many financial controllers, and they really want the ability to interrogate the system to get an answer quickly. It lends this idea to speed, to be able to get the insights that they need rapidly, regularly, and without having to navigate around a big memory structure to get the answers that they need. But Chess also believes that the change in the ways users interact with their systems, that will come with NetSuite's next generation UX framework, Redwood, which has been designed to support advanced AI, will be massive: The AI that we're applying lends itself to helping the FD really understand the business, because that's what they really want to do. I think that a big piece of it, the changes that we've made with Redwood, the usability aspect, is really important as well. We want people to interact with NetSuite in a way which they've never thought of before. The new AI offerings and user interfaces that NetSuite has announced will give its customers the potential to solve a range of business issues and problems, according to Wiessinger: For every industry we serve, we have a long list of ideas about problems we can solve better using AI, whether it's finance, sales, operations or HR. There isn't anywhere where we haven't come up with a big, long list of customer and user problems that we can solve better. There's so much potential everywhere. As users get their heads around AI products, developments and next generation platforms, it appears that a key ingredient to success will be change management. As one customer said to me:

Oracle NetSuite overhauls user experience, introduces AI-driven updates - SiliconANGLE

Oracle NetSuite overhauls user experience, introduces AI-driven updates Oracle Corp.'s NetSuite subsidiary today announced a major overhaul of its cloud enterprise resource planning suite at its SuiteWorld conference, introducing NetSuite Next, a new version of the platform that embeds conversational artificial intelligence, agentic workflows, and natural language search. The company also announced additions to its SuiteCloud platform, new subscription metrics for finance professionals, and a strategic partnership with financial operations provider Bill.com LLC. The company said NetSuite Next is the most significant user experience change in the product's history. It's based on Oracle's Redwood Design System, a common approach to user interface design that Oracle uses across its applications and cloud services. The upgrade also integrates Ask Oracle, a natural language assistant, into the core interface. "Ask Oracle isn't just a chatbot; it's actually your navigational tool," Craig Sullivan, senior vice president at Oracle NetSuite, said in a briefing. "It helps you find anything inside the application, anything within your dataset, and to navigate to where you need to be to get the information you want." Ask Oracle provides contextual responses, explanations and reasoning steps behind its outputs. "We're always making sure that you understand where the data is coming from and how the AI has reached its conclusions," Sullivan said. The new version also introduces narrative insights, which translate data into plain language explanations. Narrative summaries identify correlations and trends from NetSuite's unified data model to help users more easily spot opportunities and risks "These aren't just regurgitating numbers," Sullivan said. "It's actually using AI to interpret data in the context of the business and make these recommendations for what you might choose to do." Another addition is the AI Canvas, a collaborative workspace for scenario exploration. "We're providing AI as a collaborator that not just surfacing insights, but interacting with you," Sullivan said. NetSuite Next also incorporates agent-based workflows, which deploy AI agents to automate tasks such as reconciliations and period-close processes. "We're providing the ability for you to be on top of the status of your books constantly," Sullivan explained. Autonomous Close can display both actual and projected outcomes from NetSuite records, reducing closing schedules to as little as a few days. Customers can transition to NetSuite Next without needing to migrate existing customizations. The rollout is expected to begin in North America within 12 months. Oracle also announced new AI capabilities for its SuiteCloud platform, which enables developers and partners to extend the ERP system and integrate their own AI models, build agents and compose AI-driven workflows. The update introduces the AI Connector Service, which utilizes open standards, such as the Model Context Protocol, to link external AI assistants and models with NetSuite data. New SuiteAgent frameworks allow customers and partners to build custom AI agents. "With the SuiteAgent framework and toolset, customers can create their own agents and tailor the behaviors just as they have done with other aspects of NetSuite," Sullivan said. Complementary toolkits and AI Studios give administrators direct control over prompts, narrative generation, and workflow automation. For subscription-based companies such as software-as-a-service firms, Oracle introduced NetSuite Subscription Metrics, a module designed to enable chief financial and revenue officers to monitor recurring revenue, retention and growth. The dashboard reports on metrics such as monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, lifetime value and churn. Features include roll-forward reporting, cohort analysis heatmaps and AI-generated narrative summaries. The feature is intended to address the need for SaaS executives to monitor performance in real time, Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, said in a statement. "With Subscription Metrics, we're giving CFOs and CROs out-of-the-box metrics, actionable AI-generated narratives, multinational reporting and insightful visualizations in a unified dashboard," he said. The feature is available immediately to NetSuite customers at no additional cost, with AI narrative features to follow in the next 12 months. A partnership with Bill.com, a provider of accounts payable and receivable automation software, will integrate Bill's payment processing network into NetSuite Intelligent Payment Automation. That means customers can make vendor payments directly within NetSuite, supported by network of more than customers and suppliers. The platform will support instant activation and all U.S. banks. NetSuite, which Oracle acquired in 2016, has more than 42,000 customers in 219 countries. The new announcements come at a time when ERP providers are under pressure to modernize systems with embedded AI. Sullivan emphasized that NetSuite's approach to agents is intended to combine autonomy with oversight. "It's about putting the system to work for you while ensuring that you remain in control, have visibility into what they're doing, govern their behavior, give them constraints, approve limits and access limitations," Sullivan said. "It's all of the same things that you would give to your end users." Sullivan said the addition of agentic workflows should help NetSuite customers further accelerate closing cycles. "We're seeing that four-day close is quite a common timeframe," he said. "With autonomous close, we believe we can increase confidence in the numbers." NetSuite's AI models are drawn from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure partners including Cohere Inc. "Other large language models that are also part of the OCI stack will be talked about next week," he said. Finally, NetSuite announced updates to the SuiteCloud Developer Network partner program aimed at helping partners build and deliver AI-powered applications more quickly and securely. The centerpiece is the new SuiteApp.AI Marketplace, a dedicated channel for showcasing AI-enabled SuiteApps and planned to launch within 12 months. NetSuite also introduced new AI-specific SuiteApp badges that verify compliance with privacy, security, performance and design standards. For example, the "AI Elite" badge is designated for applications that run entirely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI services, while the "AI" badge applies to those leveraging SuiteCloud application programming interfaces or third-party LLMs. Partners will also gain access to expanded AI development resources, including tools for integrating external models through OCI, with data governance and security controls built in. NetSuite said several partners are already piloting AI applications. Avalara Inc. is embedding its tax compliance agent into NetSuite, while Contivio.com Corp. has launched an AI-powered interaction layer. Legion Intelligence Inc. has built finance-focused agents and Cauzzy Inc. is developing workflow automation bots.

SuiteWorld 25 - NetSuite Next 'fundamentally reimagines' the user experience for the AI era

Cloud ERP vendor Oracle NetSuite is signaling the end of the point-and-click era of business software with the launch today of NetSuite Next, a new AI-driven, conversational user experience that will roll out to customers in the coming year. Other announcements to coincide with the opening of the vendor's annual SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas today include AI enhancements to the SuiteCloud platform, a new metrics tracking and analysis product for subscription businesses, and intelligent billing automation in partnership with payment specialist Bill. Enhancements to support for developers have also been announced. While NetSuite Next makes a big change to how users will interact with the app, the switch to the new experience will involve no changes to the underlying data, processes or any customizations and extensions customers have added. Nevertheless, it's a historic step for the vendor, says Craig Sullivan, GVP of Product Management, and a veteran of NetSuite's 27-year history: This is a big announcement for us. It's going to be, in essence, the biggest change in NetSuite in those 27 years, the most significant update for our customers in those 27 years. We've fundamentally reimagined NetSuite for the AI era. Crucially, NetSuite customers can switch to NetSuite Next with the press of a button, without having to migrate or disrupt their existing customizations. And there's a lot of capabilities within NetSuite Next where we're bringing AI both into the user interface as well as embedding agentic workflows across the entire suite that will transform how AI works for businesses. A core part of the new user experience will be the Ask Oracle natural language assistant, through which users can in their own words do searches, get things done, or request analysis and actions based on the NetSuite dataset. The assistant is able to provide interactive content and visualizations along with explanations of what it's displaying and how it arrived at each response. Other components include: NetSuite wants users to see its new assistant as a collaborator that supports them with insights. Sullivan explains: A key aspect of this is this notion of narrative insights, where based upon the questions asked and the location in the product you are, NetSuite Next will provide a natural language summary of the information that is most important for you to understand, and help you evaluate and explore proposals for how to make changes that will better serve your business. In that, NetSuite Next is a collaborator. It allows you to not just receive information and insight, but actually through the new AI Canvas experience, actually collaborate with Ask Oracle, based around your business's data, to explore what-if and scenario planning outcomes... It's a participant in the decisions that you make for your business, helping you really understand what's going on in order to make those best decisions going forward. An example of the agentic workflows being built into NetSuite Next is the autonomous close, where the network of agents constantly work throughout the accounting period to identify exceptions and potential errors, or to surface accruals for action or even automatically enter them, depending on the permissions set up. All of this is co-ordinated by the Close Manager agent, which provides a visualization of all of this activity so that the user can have confidence that everything has been done correctly when the time comes to confirm the close. The new interface continues the integration of NetSuite into Oracle's underlying architecture. As well as the Ask Oracle assistant, the overall look and feel is based on Oracle's Redwood design system, while all of the generative AI capabilities are powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Equally important, though, is the underlying NetSuite dataset, which the Ask Oracle pane can draw upon at any time if users want to view the source data for its responses. Sullivan comments: A key tenet of what we're doing with NetSuite Next is ensuring that the trust that we've earned with our customers over almost three decades of helping them succeed and run their businesses carries forward into this new AI age, such that they can fully understand where the insight is coming from, and how the the AI has reached its conclusion. New enhancements to the SuiteCloud platform include a connector service that uses Model Context Protocol and other emerging standards to be able to connect NetSuite data into external AI models and services that customers may be using, and frameworks that customers and developers can use to build and deploy their own custom agents on the platform and monitor their operation. One of the advantages of using agent workflows over traditional automations is that they are able to adapt to changes over time without needing reprogramming, for example if a credit limit policy changes then the agent will recognize the change and act accordingly in response to that new information. Other new tools for developers include AI toolkits that expose NetSuite's own AI services, AI assistants that help developers and admins with coding and workflow automation, and a range of AI Studio offerings that give customers tools for controling AI behavior within their own NetSuite implementation. A big step for NetSuite but an inevitable one as the vendor adapts to the opportunity and challenges that AI brings to established enterprise applications. We'll have more from our team on the ground at SuiteeWorld during the week.