Oracle Corp.’s NetSuite today announced a host of new product updates and features, with many of them unsurprisingly focused on artificial intelligence.
The new offerings are based on Oracle’s existing AI capabilities, which have been embedded into NetSuite to enhance various aspects of the platform, around procurement, project management, user experience and more. They were unveiled at NetSuite SuiteWorld, which is an annual event that’s part of Oracle’s broader Oracle Cloud World conference taking place in Las Vegas this week.
Though Oracle is best known for its database services, NetSuite has become an increasingly important aspect of its business, providing a cloud-hosted business management platform that’s popular with enterprises.
The software-as-a-service offering’s core functions are built around enterprise resource planning, and it extends into multiple adjacent areas, such as customer relationship management, human resources, payroll and e-commerce. NetSuite is used by more than 40,000 organizations globally, providing a suite of applications for managing finance and accounting, inventories, orders, procurement and more.
The common denominator around today’s updates appears to be that NetSuite is trying to leverage generative AI to help customers become more productive and generate more insights to improve business efficiency.
NetSuite already supports generative AI capabilities to summarize and enhance texts, but with today’s enhancements, it’s also looking to support organizations with better, AI-driven insights that have been embedded across its entire suite of tools. The company said it’s looking to help customers increase their business efficiency and achieve their goals faster, with new offerings such as a digital assistant in NetSuite Analytics.
Those insights will include things such as detecting anomalies in financial statements, and also recommendations to decision-makers, backed up by generative AI-powered tables, charts and reports.
In addition, NetSuite is introducing more AI for developers with the launch of Generative AI for SuiteScript API. This helps make it easier to create and deploy AI capabilities based on NetSuite application programming interfaces and embed them into existing applications and websites.
Oracle Code Assist, a generative AI coding tool, has also been extended to SuiteScript, the programming language for building extensions on the NetSuite platform. With this, developers writing extensions for NetSuite should be able to work much faster, but automating code creation and fixes.
The new NetSuite Prompt Studio extends the existing Text Enhance offering, enabling users to refine the quality of AI-generated content it creates by configuring the format, tone and level of creativity, the company said. It brings customers more control over generative AI prompt configuration to enhance productivity.
The company also announced NetSuite SuiteProcurement, which is a new offering that’s said to simplify order and procurement processes at Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage, so customers can more easily manage and track orders and payments through those platforms.
Another interesting capability looks to be the NetSuite Connector for Salesforce, which paves the way for automated data exchange between NetSuite and Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. Previously, this wasn’t so easy to do, as customers had to integrate the two platforms manually. By automating this integration, customers will be able to synchronize data across NetSuite and Salesforce and gain more insights into details around orders, customer information, fulfillment, invoices and payments, the company said.
The integration with Salesforce is interesting because NetSuite also offers its own CRM functionality, though it is not as extensive. But although Salesforce might be considered a rival, the integration allows NetSuite to play a more central role in enterprise business management by providing them with a more complete view of what’s happening in their organization.
NetSuite founder and Executive Vice President Evan Goldberg (pictured) said NetSuite aims to be the foundation of business growth, providing a platform and a data model that evolves and expands to meet the needs of its customers.
“We continue to extend NetSuite’s capabilities to further strengthen that foundation,” he said. “As customers scale their businesses on NetSuite, AI innovations and workflow optimizations help them gain intelligent insights, improve productivity and simplify collaboration.”