SuiteWorld 2023: NetSuite's day-two announcements

We can expect a jam-packed agenda today at SuiteWorld 2023, and the opening keynote session will likely include a raft of new announcements from NetSuite. Stay tuned!

The conference floor is already lively here in Caesars Forum, where the keynote is set to kick off in just over an hour.

This morning's theme is 'SuiteUp', a phrase used throughout the conference this year to describe powerful new innovations across NetSuite's product offering.

We'll be hearing lots on this from Evan Goldberg, EVP and founder at NetSuite. Other speakers set to take the stage include Kimberly Deobald, chief revenue officer at Avalara, Natalie Laackman, CFO at MedSpeed, and Martin Kon, president and COO at Cohere.

Generative AI is of course a headline-grabbing topic right now, and it's a safe bet that we'll hear news around it during the keynote. This is the moment for NetSuite to lay out its approach to generative AI.

We'll be bringing you all the announcements as they're made, so stay tuned.

There are just five minutes until the keynote is set to start, and the hall is already packed with attendees. This year's keynote will take place in the round it seems, with the audience grouped around the stage on all sides.

'25 years of NetSuite' is displayed prominently throughout the hall, and we can expect to celebrate this milestone in the keynote itself.

The conference floor is electric, with club beats playing over the speakers are complemented by a waveform visualizer shown on the arrow-shaped screens that surround the crowd at the edge of the hall.

"While it's no longer the 90s, please silence all modern mobile devices," we've just been told. Perhaps we're celebrating 25 years through a trip back to 1998 first thing.

We've started with a statement of mourning for the lives lost in Israel and Palestine, and the condemnation of terrorism. The hall has observed a moment of silence.

The keynote has begun, with a dance piece set to the sound of dial-up — a flashback to 1998, with the launch of NetLedger.

We've been shown a montage of key moments in NetSuite's corporate history, and are now focusing on the future of the firm, with the slogan 'SuiteUp'.

We've been introduced to EvanGPT, the 'new' EVP of NetSuite, in the first generative AI joke of the day.

EvanGPT has thanked the "liquid mercury sponsor", Salesforce - and with that, NetSuite EVP Evan Goldberg has rushed onto stage to turn off the chatbot for now.
"It's hallucinating again!" he's said, and has moved on with a human-led conference instead.

Goldberg is focusing on where NetSuite has come from, noting how it was the first company to pursue cloud computing. Beyond cloud, Goldberg says that since 1998 the firm has moved onto delivering the most comprehensive suite possible.

Promising to bring customers the most sophisticated AI anywhere, Goldberg says that by the end of the year, all NetSuite customers will be running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which will allow them to take advantage of the platform's AI offerings.

"This time is as revolutionary as that time 25 years ago, when we introduced the cloud. AI appears to be a quantum leap to doing more with less."

Goldberg promises today's announcements will help firms achieve more, while spending less. 

More on that term 'SuiteUp now. 

"It's continuing to automate, connecting more of your business, bringing additional functions into the suite for better insights and better efficiency."

Goldberg says customers who use NetSuite Planning and Budgeting are growing sales transactions three times faster.

We’re starting with an announcement on financial departments.

Modern financial departments in a fast-growing company have an explosion of processes and demands. It’s hard to keep up.”

To meet these needs, NetSuite is bringing its automation technologies and new modules under the new category of NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

The new category brings automation tools, all informed by the data across a costumer’s environment. It can be used to help build a plan, and uses AI to continuously monitor plans and forecasts.

“We’re bringing data science to the finance organization, without having to hire data scientists or become a data scientist yourself. Just plug it in.”

EPM can also automate financial close management, reducing time spent on tasks such as task assignment data and validation approval.

Across the EPM category, NetSuite seeks to help customers automate the entire process from planning to account close, tax accounting, and narrative reporting.

For more on EPM, read our full coverage here.

We're moving at pace through a slew of AI announcements. Goldberg has announced new AI features for Bill Capture in AP Automation, which can now draw details from documents using context clues from previous documents.

We're also hearing more about NetSuite Benchmark 360, which uses an anonymized aggregate of customer data to compare their benchmarks against competitors in the same sector or region.

We’re now being shown a customer video, focusing on the role NetSuite has played in supporting MedSpeed, a firm that is working to transform same-day delivery for medical couriers.

Here to explain more is Natalie Laackman, CFO at MedSpeed.

"The big idea for us was same-day logistics in the medical industry, that's thousands of transactions per day - millions actually. Time and miles is cost, so as we leverage those costs we asked "could we develop a better solution?"

Goldberg prompts Laackman on NetSuite's recent work with the firm on sustainability.

"The big idea from NetSuite was to pursue the electrification of our fleet. We have over 2,000 vehicles, it will take a while for us to get all of this figured out, but we have been rolling out electric vehicles and charging stations. 

"And we could quickly use NetSuite to track the total cost of ownership of the fleet, and be able to effectively communicate to the clients that are demanding electrification and sustainability metrics."

We're switching tack now, to a focus on growth.

"There's more to life than belt-tightening," Goldberg says while acknowledging that manual processes are currently preventing many firms from effectively expanding.

A third of NetSuite's customers across 219 countries are operating in muiltiple regions, and Goldberg says NetSuite is committed to helping these firms handle their subsidiaries and do more with less.

E-invoicing is just one way that customers can do this, Goldberg says. Today NetSuite is announcing NetSuite Electronic Invoicing SuiteApp.

Tax compliance software provider Avalara is partnering with NetSuite to help companies meet e-invoicing mandates for 2030.

Here to explain more is Kimberly Deobald, chief revenue officer at Avalara.

"Our expertise is understanding these tax compliance requirements, and actually working with governments to make sure we're helping to set those requirements."

The goal, Deobald says, is to take the strain of tax off the table so that business leaders can focus 100% on growth. We've been promised a more in-depth look at e-invoicing in tomorrow's product keynote.

EvanGPT is back briefly, to clean up Goldberg's grammar - a tease of an upcoming feature.

For now, we're focusing on NetSuite Pay, a new product that works to automate payment systems including credit cards and bank transfers.

"Take the focus away from time-sucking tasks," Goldberg says, circling back to the theme of focusing on growth.

On the same note, NetSuite is launching Field Service Management, a product that helps workers in the field communicate with the back office and reduces "chaos" in scheduling and dispatching.

It's been created through the acquisition of Next Technik, which has closed today.

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is also getting a raft of new features, with new AI-powered predictive analytics based on pre-built machine learning models.

Goldberg says customers will also now be able to embed analytics directly into dashboards, "in front of users that can actually act on them".

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse users will be given 40 free connectors, which the system can automatically convert into business intelligence, alongside a host of new visualizations such as charts, pivots, and heat maps.

Here to talk about how their firm has embraced NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is Jeff Hampton, head of reporting and analytics at leading US fine wine marketer Terlato Wine Group.

Hampton says before NetSuite, the firm relied on a maddening mix of Microsoft Access, Excel, and pivot tables which led to duplicate sets of information and a lack of clarity on insights.

Through NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, his team has been able to put actuals next to budget in one dashboard, and pursue growth and greater productivity in a way they never previously could.

Terlato Wine Group is only a year into NetSuite, and Hampton says that he's always discovering new and exciting modules and features within the system.

"We have implemented demand planning, we're scratching the surface on OCR, and building workflows to ensure continued data validation. With four updates per year with NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, I'm always discovering a new feature we can leverage."

Goldberg has been joined by a wacky waving inflatable tube man, with circus music as a backing, as he rattles off some "crazy deals" to celebrate the firm's 25th anniversary.

To deliver more value for customers, NetSuite is also releasing Customer 360, which tracks behavior and provides more visibility over customers using automation and AI.

It can summarize and sales and key metrics such as actual order values, and show an overview for payments and credits.

Moving onto AI in more detail now. Goldberg acknowledges that NetSuite already uses AI in products such as Planning and Budgeting, but that going forward the firm will be introducing the technology more and more.

This won't, of course, just be 'traditional' AI. He's going into more detail on generative AI now.

In line with this, Goldberg has announced Text Enhance, which can be used to generate copy anywhere inside NetSuite’s products. It's powered by a model from the AI firm Cohere, whose president and COO will be on stage soon to explain more.

We're being shown a demo now, in which Text Enhance produces a purchase description based on some simple prompts. It can also be used to produce a sales description, using a slightly different input to produce more form-appropriate output.

This is based on training, to ensure the model draws context from the right places to inform its output.

"The really cool part is you'll be able to control that, you can manipulate the prompts with which we produce the text."

For more information on NetSuite Text Enhance, read our full piece on the announcement.

Goldberg says that across NetSuite's value streams, the firm will be introducing more and more AI.

We're being shown a demonstration video for the fictional company Wyra (a returning name from last year's conference).

In the video, a user named Finley can use natural language prompts to ask NetSuite questions about a discount amount. The system responds with a recommended discount, with a graph to back up the projected outcome of the campaign.

Another user receives an alert that Finley has created a sales campaign, and see the automatically-produced projected sales and profit 

"This isn't just AI creating some recommended text," says the voiceover.

"It's a full service sales campaign assistant."

Across the approval process, NetSuite automatically produces data to show outcomes for the campaign, and even caps the plan with an AI-generated email preview based on the wording and information contained within previous emails.

In another demo, operations manager Cameron is shown that a critical order is being delayed due to weather, and the system has automatically anticipated that the storm has caused a road blockage and presented alternative suppliers for the order which can be accepted directly within the dashboard.

Based on Cameron's previous activity, NetSuite has allocated inventory. Using natural language inputs, Cameron can ask NetSuite to prioritize inventory allocation to those affected by the delay and to produce an email explaining the situation.

Cameron is also shown using NetSuite's AI to produce a job posting, complete with a description and hiring justification (complete with graph) for his higher-ups.

After sending the post off for approval, Cameron can also check candidates that have been sorted in order of compatibility for the role using generative AI. In the same window, he can generate email responses to all the candidates.

We're shown a different scenario in which NetSuite's AI explains and visualizes a cash risk for a CFO named Parker.

He can see the cause - Finley's sales campaign, which is going to cause a spike in customer demand that will harshly precede customer payments. Within the suite, Parker can simulate the outcome of paying one of the vendors at 60 days rather than 30 days to alleviate the issue.

Goldberg says many of the capabilities we've been shown are being worked on by hundreds of people, and that these will be brought to life by NetSuite's AI partner, Cohere.

Here to explain more is Martin Kon, president and COO at Cohere. He's starting by talking about the company's founding story, with co-founder Aidan Gomez having been an author on the paper that coined the term 'transformer' and led the way on generative AI.

Kon moved to Cohere earlier in 2023, having previously worked at YouTube as CFO. He says the company's generative AI work is groundbreaking.

"In terms of the interactions between humans and computers, this is the biggest change between - certainly - the smartphone, and I would say the Mosaic browser."

Kon says that the enterprise potential with generative AI is huge, despite the focus thus far having been largely on consumer apps like ChatGPT.

Before NetSuite, Kon says Cohere has a "hodgepodge" of apps through its growth. The firm has raised $150 million and has grown 89% in a short span of time.

"We're already excited about Planning and Budgeting, how we're quickening our close, how we do analytics and reporting," says Kon.

"NetSuite can grow with us, and we're really excited about that."

Kon is laying out the differences between various AI models, such as lexical search versus transformers. Combined, these can be used to draw context from natural language, and to power both generation and search functions.

Cohere is working on a number of these areas, including the burgeoning field of retrieval augmented generation, with a number of the leading names in this industry working at Cohere.

Retrieval augmented generation allows developers to ground models in data such as a customer's NetSuite data, which reduces hallucinations and enables users to access up-to-date data, with citations.

Kon says embeddings are an exciting area going forward, and that they will be key to levraging the technology while maintaining Cohere, Oracle, and NetSuite's core focus on data security.

Cohere is also committed to cloud agnosticism, allowing customers to use data from across their environment while keeping it where is sits and ensuring it is not leaked.

Generative AI is very demanding on compute, and the cost of deployment is a concern that will have to be addressed going forward, says Kon.

Goldberg acknowledges this, and the pair note that Oracle's supercluster approach to AI will help manage this strain for customers.

Going forward, Kon says that we can inform our actions based on the mistakes of the cloud era. Some firms spent too long analyzing the potential routes, while others just picked a route and started down it with the goal of picking up experience along the way.

It's this second approach that Kon says he admires in both NetSuite and Cohere's response to AI.

"Starting with something that you do now at scale, in production, learning how to do this in your data environment, that's what can separate the winners and the losers."

In a nod to NetSuite's 25th birthday, Kon says that this is a mirror of the cloud approach that NetSuite pioneered in 1998.

In a final "crazy deals" segment, Goldberg has advertised a raft of deals and employees have scattered 'SuiteUp' bucks around the hall.

We're finishing by giving EvanGPT one final chance.

The chatbot has urged attendees to stop by the demo floor - no more hallucinations or mentions of Salesforce.

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of SuiteWorld 2023. This morning's product keynote is titled 'Unleash the Suite', and will focus on innovations such as AI and improved user experience, and how these can help customers make intelligent business decisions.

It's just one hour until we'll hear from Gary Wiessinger, SVP NetSuite application development, as well as a number of product experts from the firm, who will lay out a vision for the future of the suite.

Stay tuned for all the latest as it develops.

The hall has a decidedly... aquatic theme this morning. Perhaps we'll hear more on this soon. The keynote begins in just five minutes.

As the hall fills up, we're being treated to "Around the World" by Daft Punk - the fish on the screens are hopping in tune.

And we're off, with a short humorous video showing Gary Wiessinger, SVP NetSuite application development, flashing back to 1998 in another 25th anniversary celebration. 

Wiessinger has been time-warped to a "world devoid of NetSuite, where companies don't have a way to become more productive, save money, and still achieve growth."

Time travel fun, complete with Evan Goldberg in a wig.

And with that, Wiessinger takes to the stage to explore the theme 'Unleash the Suite'.

Wiessinger says NetSuite now has more than 3,300 people working on its product, who have helped deliver 20 new modules in the past year. The growth has been necessary, with customer sales transactions up 20% year on year, and customer searches now at one trillion per day. 

"There are hundreds of unicorns running NetSuite. The hottest investment right now is generative AI, and more than 50% of venture AI startups are running NetSuite."

Wiessinger will explore NetSuite's advantage in three categories: Experience, AI, and Suiteness.

Wiessinger is going into more detail on 'doing more with less', first set out by NetSuite EVP and founder Evan Goldberg yesterday.

It's not just about efficiency gains, he says, but being proactive.

"We don't only answer questions you ask, we're answering questions you didn't know that you needed to ask. We don't only help you solve problems you're aware of, we're identifying problems before you do. And we don't only help you take actions you want to, we proactively suggest actions to take."

Wiessinger says that the UI redesign that NetSuite has committed to, which is based on Oracle Redwood design, will help customers in all areas.

We're onto AI now, with Wiessinger stating that NetSuite has 80 different features and solutions that use AI currently in development, and that there will be more detail on this later.

He acknowledges that there's been a huge hype curve for AI, but that NetSuite is well-positioned to deliver for you. The answer, he says, is "Suiteness".

Suiteness is our third category for today, and a returning theme from last year's conference. It's a term that relates to the full-suite capabilities of NetSuite, and the gains the firm says are only possible with a system that combines data across departments instead of separating them into siloes.

There are over 2,000 connections across NetSuite's full suite, which Wiessinger says helps employees work better together and empower firms to adopt new solutions in the most effective way.

"AI is a subset of the broad field of data science. Data science, unsurprisingly, is all about the data, and NetSuite has the data for your whole business," Wiessinger says.

"With that data, NetSuite can leverage AI in more powerful ways than point solutions can."

As an example, Wiessinger talks about Benchmark 360, NetSuite's new product that allows firms to compare their metrics against competitors using all of their data.

He also highlights Customer 360 and Intelligent Cash Management, which leverage AI to help customers obtain insight into their entire customer relationship and inventory. It's capable of producing detailed projections, and recommending steps for optimization.

In the same way, Intelligent Cash Management can create accurate and insightful cashflow predictions, and even produce recommendations for hiring plans or product promotion.

Here to talk about practical AI uses is Allison Auclair, GVP product management and commerce. Auclair says that AI can help deliver customer experiences that customers didn't even know they wanted.

"There's nothing worse than an experience that seems like it's personalized, but it just misses the mark because you don't have enough information."

To show how NetSuite is fixing this concern with AI, we're being shown another demo featuring the fictional firm Wyra.

NetSuite's upcoming AI features within CRM, SuiteCommerce, CPQ, and SuiteBilling can provide product recommendations including the exact configuration.

In another future-facing demonstration, we're shown an example in which Customer 360 and generative AI flag a customer opportunity, automatically creates a quote, and launches a configurator with the customer's choices already preselected. The system can automatically recommend a discount that meets the customer's budget, to ensure maximum profit at the same time as customer satisfaction.

Next, we're looking at how AI and suiteness can help customers to create and deliver products and services.

"We know that when you're better connected as a business, you can be smarter and more agile in response to those disruptions.

NetSuite is bringing limited licences to NetSuite Warehouse Management, which will boost employee access to NetSuite by giving them access to only the specific functions they need and without the need for a full subscription.

In Supply 360, production managers can see a visual overview for potential manufacturing issues.

Auclair says that revenue impact can be broken down by component, to help managers prioritize their actions. She says it's a great display of suiteness, as the AI system can draw data from across a customer environment to give context on the revenue and time to delivery impacts of any decision, which can be used to give suggested steps.

More detail now on Field Service, a product announced yesterday that gives field technicians a purpose-built app for tracking their schedules and team, and allows managers to track their workers in the field with service analytics and maintenance scheduling.

When a manager goes to schedule a job, they can see a map with a list of available technicians projected against their schedules to ensure they can quickly hire the right people for the job.

The field technician will subsequently receive a notification offering them the job and real-time directions to the site where the job is taking place. The app will automatically record the time and warranty for the job.

Technicians can also track the materials they used through the app, and fill in an e-signature for the job through the app. Auclair says this will ensure smooth delivery of services, and reduce dispiutes.

We're moving onto hiring and empowering employees through NetSuite, and here to explain more is Hanif Ismail, VP product management, HCM.

Ismail says AI can "dramatically" improve productivity, and help address workforce challenges in the US especially.

To illustrate his point, we're being shown a demo of Workforce Management. Through the dashboard, a CFO can see that a specific site is over its budget due to unexpected overtime. He can then reach out to the site manager, who can build a schedule in the dashboard with employees color-coded by availability, cost, with a live count of whether the schedule is in budget.

The manager can also assign an open contract to a job, and go through employee responses to see which ones will keep the cost within budget.

We're now being shown "the future" of autonomous payroll, another future-facing AI assistant.

The AI bot can automatically reach out to leaders with anomalies it has detected based on historical data. In the example, it has found employees whose overtime was never approved by their managers, and recommends the leader manually approves the payments because it is aware both of the relevant managers are on paid time off.

In another example, the AI assistant is able to recommend specific product strategies from a catalog in order to meet a custom revenue goal.

It's time to move onto optimizing profits and budgets, and we're being joined by Craig Sullivan, GVP product management international, to give us the full picture.

He says this is the moment "we've all been waiting for", to laughs from the crowd.

Sullivan is digging into detail on Enterprise Performance Management, with a demo in which a financial manager can look at the performance of a specific subsidiary, and then use Planning and Budgeting to see intelligent predictions broken down by product line.

The generative AI can produce a visualization for the projection, and the user can set new baselines for forecasts going forward to track changes.

Sullivan says that since last year, customers have benefitted from AP Automation, and he's excited that this year NetSuite has announced Bill Capture as a standalone product to help more customers onto that automation journey.

He's showing us a demo in which a manager can procure devices for a new hire through SuiteProcurement. NetSuite will then compare this to the budget and approval limit for these items. 

Later, on the manager dashboard, the manager can confirm the order and have it automatically paid through the system.

We're returning to an example from yesterday, in which Cash Management flags a potential cash risk based on customer demand.

Instead of moving the payment dates to suppliers, as shown in yesterday's keynote, Sullivan takes us through alternatives recommended by the AI assistant, such as offering customers an alternative product. This will then trigger a comprehensive projection for where this places the firm - in this case, firmly back into the green.

Sullivan says there's lots to be excited about, and quips "if you can't make taxes exciting, you can certainly make them easier".

That's just what NetSuite has aimed to do with its new tax compliance localization for Brazil, announced yesterday. On the topic of localization, Sullivan also highlights new announcements for Spanish NetSuite customers, with both Customer Success and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse now available across the region.

Wiessinger is back on stage, with a promise to do more than just help customers optimize their processes.

"Craig showed you some of what we're doing to help specific countries, and I want to tell you more about what we're doing for your industries."

He says NetSuite has created additions for 14 verticals, and that these will now cater to companies offering hybrid services across various verticals.

Wiessinger says he is excited to announce new additions for healthcare, restaurants, and hospitality.

Starting with healthcare, in which NetSuite already has 2,200 customers, NetSuite is committed to delivering a wide range of value streams.

To give one example, Wiessinger is taking us through the new Compliance 360 dashboard. This uses AI to analyze anomalous activity such as an employee printing patient data, which can be problematic.

Alerts can be flagged to follow up on, and the system provides a visualization of key performance indicators for anything that could affect compliance, such as printing, users deleting records, or which patients have had the most records pulled.

Onto restaurants and hospitality, Wiessinger says NetSuite is committed to serving these industries "through the supply chain to the back office".

More on benchmark 360 here, with a demo looking at how the dashboard makes accessing KPIs easy. Users can compare themselves with anonymized competitors, and leverage actionable insights to see areas in which they could improve.

Wiessinger says NetSuite will continue to delve into technological innovations, and here to talk more about this is Ryan Grisso, SVP, product engineering.

"An elite team of hackers has targeted SuiteWorld. Wipe your devices, change your passwords, implement four-factor authentication as a minimum," he starts.

"False alarm people," he adds, and uses this as a segue for NetSuite's Hackathon for Good. This year, it's helped Capital Area foodbank, a non-profit in DC.

Now back onto the product details. Grisso says innovations have been announced across application, infrastructure, and development, as well as AI services and Oracle  hardware.

NetSuite's cloud lives inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and today more than 90% of NetSuite customers are running in OCI. Grisso reaffirms an announcement from yesterday: by 2024, that number will be 100%.

NetSuite now has 28 data centers around the world, having added two more in Canada this year to serve 3,000 customers.

Moving onto generative AI, Grisso announces NetSuite Prompt Studio, which will "let administrators put their hands directly on the controls of generative AI".

The aim for Prompt Studio is to help users avoid unwanted outputs, and help teach them how to get the best outputs with every prompt.

"They can provide as much or as little guidance as they require, and they can shape the output as needed for each individual use case. It's available everywhere text generation is enabled."

We're hearing even more on NetSuite Analytics Warehouse now, which Grisso says helps business leaders to generate "meaningful data storytelling for action".

We're being shown a demo in which a user creates a revenue model, and is given suggested visualizations based on this.

Grisso also expands on NetSuite's vision for generative AI for developers.  

"In our vision, an AI assistant offers developers contextualized assistance during all phases of the development cycle."

We're seeing another Wyra example again, in which the CEO sends a Jira ticket to a developer. It contains a request for an omni-channel marketing campaign in which first-time buyers are sent a discount email.

The text of the ticket can directly be used as the input, but Grisso says the CEO could just have easily used a Word document or email. Based on this, NetSuite AI generates code as a starting point for the developer, Polly.

As Polly combs through the code she is given recommendations for changes to the code. At all times, she has control over whether AI suggestions are applied, and at any time she can ask the AI to explain a section of the code.

Wiessinger is now back on stage to round out the keynote. "Unleashing the Suite is about NetSuite, but it’s also about you," he says, and expresses hope that yesterday and today have shed light on how customers can unlock value through the suite.

And with that, the day-two keynote is finished! We'll be bringing you even more coverage from SuiteWorld 2023 throughout the week.