NetSuite expands AI to enhance performance management, analytics offerings

Oracle NetSuite has announced a wide-reaching set of AI announcements across its enterprise planning and analytics portfolio aimed at improved data insights and reduced complexity.

Netsuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the firm’s all-in-one solution for planning, forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and more across financial processes, now uses AI to automatically generate ‘financial narratives’.

These commentaries on enterprise data can be used to identify and capitalize on chances for business growth, as well as to summarize recent financial performance and trends using securely stored financial data.

EPM users will also be able to raise insights on data using a new dedicated AI assistant, which uses natural language processing to respond to plaintext inputs.

“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,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president at Oracle NetSuite.

“To address this challenge, the latest updates to 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.”

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW), the firm’s data analysis solution, has also been filled with new AI-powered features rooted in new models designed to improve efficiency and lower the barrier to entry with AI.

Similar to the AI assistant in EPM, customers can pose natural language questions to the Oracle Analytics AI Assistant within NSAW and receive detailed answers rooted in their data. These can include visualizations like graphs, with NetSuite having noted the model involved can produce almost 50 different kinds of variations, including charts or data heat maps.

NetSuite made the announcements at SuiteWorld 2024, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, held this year alongside Oracle CloudWorld at the Venetian Resort. They were unveiled alongside a slew of AI offerings across NetSuite, including a new Prompt Studio which gives admins more control over AI assistant outputs.

Ease of use and better oversight

In a drive to meet the needs of customers with limited AI experience, NetSuite will also include ‘out of the box’ AI models within NSAW. These pre-trained models are centered on enterprise-specific use cases such as modeling customer decisions and inventory management.

A new function within NSAW called AutoML will automatically select the best algorithm and machine learning (ML) model to achieve the most useful data insights for customers.

“These tools make it easier and faster for customers to gain AI-powered insights, even with no coding experience,” said Craig Sullivan, SVP of Enterprise and International Products at NetSuite.

The goal of customers better understanding AI runs throughout the announcements made at the conference. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, a feature within EPM that automates budgeting and forecasting for finance teams and which is home to the new AI narrative feature, has been improved to justify its reasoning and prove its forecasts aren’t grounded in AI hallucinations.

“To help reach a better understanding of the output of the predictive models in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, we’re announcing new predictive forecasting explanations to give our customers a detailed description of how those models arrived at their conclusions,” explained Cabrera-Cordon.

“These are easy-to-read summaries of the input variables, the model’s behavior, and the impact of different data points on the final predictions. So more people within an organization can access and understand these insights giving more confidence and improving business understanding.”

EPM was rolled out across the EMEA region in April 2024, alongside sweeping AI updates for Analytics Warehouse. At its SuiteConnect London event, NetSuite emphasized how the solutions can be used to improve enterprise insights and productivity while noting that its ultimate goal is to integrate AI across its suite without dividing it into different AI products.

Reliant on the cloud infrastructure of its parent company Oracle, NetSuite uses large language models (LLM) produced by Cohere, which signed a partnership with Oracle in June 2023.

Cohere’s approach rests greatly on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), used to ground outputs in enterprise data to improve the accuracy and usefulness of AI outputs.