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.

Change management

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.

My take

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:

I’m already thinking creatively about new roles in the business. Like what the purchasing team will do once most mundane jobs have been automated. We have to start being creative and thinking about these things now.