SuiteWorld 25 - NetSuite Next 'fundamentally re-imagines' the user experience for the AI era

Cloud ERP vendor Oracle NetSuite is signaling the end of the point-and-click era of business software with the launch today of NetSuite Next, a new AI-driven, conversational user experience that will roll out to customers in the coming year. 

Other announcements to coincide with the opening of the vendor’s annual SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas today include AI enhancements to the SuiteCloud platform, a new metrics tracking and analysis product for subscription businesses, and intelligent billing automation in partnership with payment specialist Bill. Enhancements to support for developers have also been announced.

While NetSuite Next makes a big change to how users will interact with the app, the switch to the new experience will involve no changes to the underlying data, processes or any customizations and extensions customers have added. 

Nevertheless, it’s a historic step for the vendor, says Craig Sullivan, GVP of Product Management, and a veteran of NetSuite’s 27-year history:

This is a big announcement for us. It's going to be, in essence, the biggest change in NetSuite in those 27 years, the most significant update for our customers in those 27 years.

We've fundamentally re-imagined NetSuite for the AI era. Crucially, NetSuite customers can switch to NetSuite Next with the press of a button, without having to migrate or disrupt their existing customizations. And there's a lot of capabilities within NetSuite Next where we're bringing AI both into the user interface as well as embedding agentic workflows across the entire suite that will transform how AI works for businesses.

Natural language assistant

A core part of the new user experience will be the Ask Oracle natural language assistant, through which users can in their own words do searches, get things done, or request analysis and actions based on the NetSuite dataset. The assistant is able to provide interactive content and visualizations along with explanations of what it's displaying and how it arrived at each response. Other components include:

• AI Canvas — a visual workspace embedded in NetSuite, where users and teams can share and collaborate on issues and analysis and trigger agentic workflows.
• Narrative summaries and insights — automated explanations that accompany records, reports and other pages in the NetSuite app, including proactive alerts to correlations and trends in the data, so users can spot opportunities and risks before they become issues.
• Agentic workflows — proactive, AI-driven workflows to automate complex tasks such as payment proposals, vendor selection, reconciliations, and supply chain operations. Users can choose either to retain human-in-the-loop approval or have agents act autonomously.
• Document and knowledge integration — generative AI-powered extraction and validation of information from a wide range of sources, including documents such as invoices, contracts, receipts, PDFs, policy manuals, training guides, customer testimonials, and purchase orders.

NetSuite wants users to see its new assistant as a collaborator that supports them with insights. Sullivan explains:

A key aspect of this is this notion of narrative insights, where based upon the questions asked and the location in the product you are, NetSuite Next will provide a natural language summary of the information that is most important for you to understand, and help you evaluate and explore proposals for how to make changes that will better serve your business.

In that, NetSuite Next is a collaborator. It allows you to not just receive information and insight, but actually through the new AI Canvas experience, actually collaborate with Ask Oracle, based around your business's data, to explore what-if and scenario planning outcomes...

It's a participant in the decisions that you make for your business, helping you really understand what's going on in order to make those best decisions going forward.

Agentic workflows

An example of the agentic workflows being built into NetSuite Next is the autonomous close, where the network of agents constantly work throughout the accounting period to identify exceptions and potential errors, or to surface accruals for action or even automatically enter them, depending on the permissions set up. All of this is co-ordinated by the Close Manager agent, which provides a visualization of all of this activity so that the user can have confidence that everything has been done correctly when the time comes to confirm the close.

The new interface continues the integration of NetSuite into Oracle's underlying architecture. As well as the Ask Oracle assistant, the overall look and feel is based on Oracle's Redwood design system, while all of the generative AI capabilities are powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Equally important, though, is the underlying NetSuite dataset, which the Ask Oracle pane can draw upon at any time if users want to view the source data for its responses. Sullivan comments:

A key tenet of what we're doing with NetSuite Next is ensuring that the trust that we've earned with our customers over almost three decades of helping them succeed and run their businesses carries forward into this new AI age, such that they can fully understand where the insight is coming from, and how the the AI has reached its conclusion.

New enhancements to the SuiteCloud platform include a connector service that uses Model Context Protocol and other emerging standards to be able to connect NetSuite data into external AI models and services that customers may be using, and frameworks that customers and developers can use to build and deploy their own custom agents on the platform and monitor their operation. One of the advantages of using agent workflows over traditional automations is that they are able to adapt to changes over time without needing reprogramming, for example if a credit limit policy changes then the agent will recognize the change and act accordingly in response to that new information.

Other new tools for developers include AI toolkits that expose NetSuite’s own AI services, AI assistants that help developers and admins with coding and workflow automation, and a range of AI Studio offerings that give customers tools for controling AI behavior within their own NetSuite implementation.

My take

A big step for NetSuite but an inevitable one as the vendor adapts to the opportunity and challenges that AI brings to established enterprise applications. We'll have more from our team on the ground at SuiteeWorld during the week.