Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a great way to improve the way you run your operations by increasing efficiency and unlocking information in new and undiscovered ways. And that’s exactly what NetSuite is aiming to help businesses achieve. Founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite, Evan Goldberg, spoke at a press conference during SuiteConnect London, discussing the benefits of automation and data integration to get the most from AI.
NetSuite is aiming to revolutionise the business user experience with AI. New features, such as NetSuite Text Enhance, and AI within NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, aim to assist and advise customers with insights from across their business.
Discussing how NetSuite’s AI-powered capabilities can help SMEs, Goldberg told Elite Business: “Small businesses are in the most need to do more with less. Because everybody in a small company is wearing tons of different hats and trying to do so many different things at once. If the system can bring expertise to those users in certain areas, then that can help. For example, if a business owner is summarising a customer issue record, NetSuite Text Enhance can help them increase consistency and productivity for that task by automatically bringing in relevant, contextual data when they’re using part of the system.”
Untangling Siloed Data to Harness AI
Small businesses may not know where to start with taking advantage of AI. But AI is all about the data, so the quality of data is essential for training AI models to recognise patterns and make accurate predictions. That means ensuring that operational data is centralised, accurate, relevant and on demand at all times. On the other hand, if a business has data spread across many siloed systems, it will require a lot of manual work even before a business can start taking advantage of AI. They will need to gather, organise, and transform that data before the AI can be trained on it.
This is where NetSuite – and its full suite – sees its competitive advantage, by giving customers a foundation to leverage AI.
“The best AI comes from the best data, and the best data comes from a unified suite,” said Goldberg. When business data is integrated, there is more for your AI to learn from and therefore, more insights it can give to your business, he explained.
Making AI Easy to Use
NetSuite’s newly announced AI-capabilities build on the features it has embedded throughout the suite for years. It has focused on making AI more accessible and easier for customers to use.
Speaking about NetSuite’s new AI advancements, Brian Chess, SVP of technology and AI at NetSuite, also told Elite Business: “We’re very much focused on making AI easy to use. If you’re a coder, you can do a lot of stuff in NetSuite, but you don’t need to be. You can use it all and can get great benefits out of NetSuite without being a data analyst or technically sophisticated.”
NetSuite AI uses data and automation capabilities from the suite to handle repetitive tasks and free up employees’ time to focus on other tasks. It also analyses data to provide insights to help leaders improve business outcomes and take advantage of growth opportunities. For example, NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), which is now available to businesses in the UK, brings together planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting processes from across the organisation. The AI capabilities within NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, part of NetSuite EPM, help finance teams by uncovering and highlighting trends, anomalies, and correlations, helping them improve and accelerate decision-making.
At SuiteConnect London, the message was clear – as a business leader, you can embrace the practical benefits and competitive advantage offered by AI, especially when it is used in conjunction with all your operational data. Businesses should always look at strategies or tactics that can drive their growth – whether that be capitalising on their top opportunities, expanding their offerings, getting more from existing technology, or building processes that scale. AI can be the key to unlocking these growth levers – empowering your organisation to decipher market complexities, understand nuanced customer dynamics, and thrive in a competitive landscape.
In the next article, we will look at how NetSuite customers are harnessing the power of the suite to fuel their growth journeys.
