The News: At SuiteConnect New York in late March, Oracle NetSuite announced that it had expanded the generative AI capabilities embedded within its ERP offering. NetSuite Text Enhance is now embedded across 200 fields within its finance and accounting, supply chain and operations, sales and marketing, and customer support processes, and is designed to improve efficiency and productivity. You can read the original release from NetSuite on its website.
Separately, NetSuite announced NetSuite Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector, which is designed to consolidate data from multiple NetSuite instances into a single NetSuite Analytics Warehouse environment, helping to improve decision-making, accuracy, and the speed of surfacing business insights. You can read more about this capability on NetSuite’s website.
NetSuite Announces Suite-Wide Expansion of Generative AI Capabilities
Analyst Take: Oracle NetSuite made two announcements at its SuiteConnect New York event in late March, focusing on embedding new generative AI features across its suite and introducing a new connector designed to consolidate data from multiple NetSuite instances. When considered together, the developments are designed to make it easier for organizations to access, interact with, and activate data held within NetSuite, with an eye on improving productivity, efficiency, and accuracy.
Embedding Generative AI Across the Suite
NetSuite has taken an interesting approach to incorporating AI, and specifically generative AI, into its suite. Instead of productizing and naming a generative AI assistant, it is simply embedding it into the platform and leveraging its functionality to make it easier, faster, and more efficient for users to input data or extract insights. The most recent announcement of the expansion of the Text Enhance feature, which was first announced at SuiteWorld in the fall of 2023, sees the functionality being embedded across finance and accounting, supply chain and operations, manufacturing, sales and marketing, HR, and customer support use cases.
Text Enhance incorporates assisted text authoring, content summarization, content automation, and the creation of use-case-specific content. The tool’s generative AI services are powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which hosts both pre-built and custom AI models.
There are a few critical takeaways from the announcement. First, NetSuite’s decision to embed AI and generative AI functionality into its suite ensures that it is a core functionality of the platform rather than an add-on to be monetized. While customers that build specific, custom modules that leverage generative AI in a unique or bespoke manner may incur additional costs, the majority of customers will be able to take advantage of generative AI functionality as part of their regular subscription fees. This setup enables more cost certainty, particularly as businesses scale, and ensures that there are not multiple functional tiers of the product with which to contend and manage internally.
In addition, ERPs are most functional when they make it easy to interact with data. Generative AI has become a true force multiplier, in that it is making it more intuitive and easier to both input and extract data and insights, and as such, NetSuite has taken the right approach by making this interface enhancement available to all users.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector
The second announcement from SuiteConnect focuses on NetSuite’s Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector. According to NetSuite, the connector is designed to consolidate data from multiple NetSuite instances into a single NetSuite Analytics Warehouse environment, thereby improving the accuracy and speed of insights.
This feature is particularly helpful for larger organizations (such as private equity companies, franchisors, and holding companies) that may have separate, individual instances of NetSuite and want to roll up that data in a concise and organized manner. According to NetSuite, the connector supports a single view across a company’s entire portfolio, which can help them identify issues and respond to opportunities across a consolidated data set, using built-in predictive analytics and AI capabilities.
Speaking at SuiteConnect, NetSuite founder and executive vice president Evan Goldberg repeatedly mentioned that the company is looking for opportunities to deploy all types of AI—not just generative AI—to help organizations unlock value within their organizations. While not discounting the transformative power of generative AI, Goldberg correctly noted that many of today’s business goals can be achieved by leveraging predictive and analytics-based AI, and that NetSuite would continue to take a broad view of incorporating all types of new technology to address the needs of its customers.
NetSuite Continues to Leverage AI Investments Made by Oracle
As an Oracle company, NetSuite is well positioned to leverage generative, analytic, and predictive AI across its suite. Because Oracle (through OCI) controls the entire AI stack, the company costs are far more controlled compared with competitors that must use outside vendors for AI training and inference tasks. Further, Oracle itself has taken a strict and robust approach to AI data privacy and security, which is (or should be) a key consideration for customers of any size that are evaluating ERP solutions.
NetSuite’s big challenge over the coming months will be to highlight the reliability and core functionality of its solution without being dragged into a feature set tit-for-tat. The company’s 25-year operating history and strong link to parent Oracle should provide a strong foundation upon which the company can build as AI evolves from a shiny new object on the application landscape into a core technology component.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Oracle Generative AI: Advancing the Frontier of Enterprise Innovation
NetSuite Unveils New Innovations to Improve Business Efficiency
New Licensing Model Announced for NetSuite Warehouse Management
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
