SuiteWorld 25 - the customers speak! Let's hear from two of them

AI is supposed to make organizations' business operations more efficient, and more effective. But as with all change, incorporating AI into a business is throwing up some interesting issues.

At SuiteWorld 25, NetSuite customers EALgreen and Amatheon Animal Health described the impact of their AI powered systems and discussed issues like the importance of good governance, and communication. They had much to say.

EALgreen

Chicago-based non profit organization, EALgreen tries to provide access to education via a circular economy model. Its small team of 12 does this by converting donated excess and obsolete corporate inventory into financial aid for college students. This is done either by donating equipment to colleges, and using the saved funding for tuition fees, or selling old equipment for recycling the raw materials.

Claudia Freed, President & CEO, said the transition to NetSuite, and the use of AI-driven predictive analytics is helping to improve its social impact, leading to a 55% increase in the number of scholarships it grants. Freed explained it took EALgreen about two years to make the financial decision, as a small non-profit, to move to NetSuite:

We transitioned to NetSuite from five different systems, all completely not connected to one another. It took about 18 months to implement, and within a year, we were running SuiteCommerce.

Over the last three months, the organization has used practical AI applications by enhancing its SuiteCommerce Advance with features like intelligent item recommendation, and text enhancement, Freed said:

You can see the acceleration. It is very, very, very easy to adopt these new AI tools, and we have been prototyping MCP in helping us identify products that are donated to us in order to generate social impact. Our hope is that we can continue to expand the brain of our organization and the analytics with this implementation of technology.

In the non-profit arena only about two percent of organizations feel ready to use AI, according to Free. But for EALgreen it is a priority. It relies on corporate philanthropy, so its supply chain is active in reverse logistics. According to the US National Retail Federation, that market is worth approximately $848 billion. Freed said:

What we hope to achieve with AI is to continue to be an innovator in this space for social impact, and become more predictive. We rely on companies facing issues of inventory management. So we want to be able to consider what the external factors are in helping us predict that. For example, are weather patterns, or issues related to demographics affecting it? That macro data is going to be much more relevant for us as we're able to enhance our predictive analytics.

Freed argued  that internal communications are crucial to successful adoption:

Our purpose is to generate as much value, both from a sustainable perspective to avoid landfill, and from a social impact perspective. But the data can be overwhelming, so we created a policy for AI, then we went to role model what we are actually prototyping, and made very careful selections, because you can spend a lot of time testing things and getting nowhere. We have also shared with the organization the fact that this is a safe environment in which to learn. It's also important to look at the human side, not just the skill base.

Since it was founded in 1982 EALgreen has awarded $40 million worth of scholarships. Freed went on:

This comes from products that would have gone to landfill, and we have been able to convert them into scholarships. That is why we need SuiteCommerce Advance, because we have to tailor how to present an item on the shopping scale to show a scholarship component.

Since EALgreen adopted NetSuite, it has seen an increase year on year of 55% in the number of scholarships granted to students, and since it was founded over 30,000 students have received financial aid to help them stay or complete college, with Freed herself  the first recipient of a scholarship. Freed added:

We have a run rate of 1000 students every year, and as of last week, we were already at almost 800 so we're scaling rapidly, with about 13% growth.

Amatheon Animal Health

Amatheon Animal Health is a Miami, Florida based pharmaceutical distributor for the veterinary industry. It is a prescription drug wholesaler, selling pharmaceuticals to end user veterinarians. It uses NetSuite to manage its finances, track orders from sales to shipping, inventory management, customer records and sales orders and ecommerce.

David Yankana, Director of Operations at Amatheon Animal Health, said the organization's operations are being fed by communications platform, Contivio, which integrates with its NetSuite based CRM, and the implementation has allowed real-time visibility into its entire operation and supply chain:

We use a contact center solution specifically built on layers of AI. Having all our records pushed back to NetSuite is one thing, but then having those records automatically transcribed, and being able to use GPT developer keys, are the kind of things providing immediate value from a sales enablement and operations perspective.

Amatheon is also using NetSuite for inventory management and predictive analysis. Yankana explained:

Right now we're leveraging almost exclusively through Contivio for CRM insights around AI, and information about customer patterns. These insights allow us to query specifically around deliverability and warehouse challenges, as well as allowing us to streamline processes.

But Yankana said working closely with business users and building governance frameworks is critical to the success of these projects, especially in a highly regulated environment like pharmaceuticals:

You have to leverage the subject matter experts and functional managers to be able to help you navigate the nuances of each use case, especially as it has to do with a very complex, convoluted regulatory structure that pharmaceuticals reside in.

He went on:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been something that we really try to build a governance framework around internally. What use cases are going to be most important for somebody to have access to this? Should we have a little bit more of a hybrid approach or standalone AI based on the specific roles?

According to Yankana, the company is trying to future proof operations using AI to gain insights into its extensive data. Like finding customers that need more attention by giving specific insights on how many times was the word warehouse mentioned in a customer conversation, or how many times a specific product was mentioned:

When you have 10,000 customers, and 2500 products on the shelf at any point in time, it's a lot to try and pin down.What I'm taking away from SuiteWorld this year is how we can build some of those insights and start to extract even more value using AI insight.

But building an internal governance program has been critical, according to Yankana:

The governance framework that we've done is really role based permissions right now. I think what we're looking at is the kind of framework where we can look at inventory turnover, and the cycle patterns of that inventory moving off the shelf. If something has been longer than 90 days on the shelf that probably is something that we want to, you know, proactively, start to move off quicker.

My take

Customer voices are always the loudest - and most important!