NetSuite’s big artificial intelligence play exposed

IBM has Watson, Salesforce has Einstein, Infor has Coleman, SAP has Leonardo, Oracle has the Autonomous database, and finally, NetSuite has an answer.

Leading cloud ERP vendor NetSuite has announced that artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are coming to its suite of business applications.

They're calling it the world's first intelligent cloud suite.

NetSuite has built its success around providing a wide-ranging suite of business applications around its core accounting system. This suite approach means that its customers often have CRM, eCommerce, inventory management, human resources and numerous other critical sets of data inside the NetSuite platform. This they believe will make their artificial intelligence technologies even more useful, accurate and powerful than it's competitors.

NetSuite believes their new technology will deliver insights, automation and intelligent interactions quickly to it's more than 40,000 customers worldwide.

"A pioneer in the cloud, NetSuite has long been a leader in providing powerful business intelligence across its suite," said Jim McGeever, executive vice president, Oracle NetSuite. "With new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities within NetSuite, we're equipping our customers to understand not only what's happened with their business, but what will happen in the future and how they can stay ahead."   The artificial intelligence and machine learning has been built natively into its suite of business applications.

Up until now, customers would use traditional reporting or business intelligence (BI) systems to analyse historical data. Now the AI tools can take this data, analyse it and either pro-actively make decisions or just proactively recommend courses of action.

You're also not restricted to the AI analysing ones NetSuite data, but data from other systems can also be incorporated into the machine learning.   "A future where AI drives new business models is quickly becoming the present," said R "Ray" Wang, principal analyst and founder, Constellation Research. "Having business applications that can deliver predictive, prescriptive and automated outcomes is going to be an imperative for businesses that want to grow and succeed in the years to come."   The new artificial intelligence and machine learning based capabilities enable businesses to glean better insights, drive efficiencies by further automating processes and determine the next best action with predictive actions. The intelligent cloud suite can deliver benefits to business users across the organisation.

"Data is the new gold. With NetSuite, we have real-time insights and visibility into all of our key performance indicators, enabling us to make lightning fast decisions," said Tony Drockton, Founder and CEO of Hammitt, a Los Angeles-based luxury accessories brand. "Building in intelligence and automation will make using NetSuite easier and more powerful than it already is.

Practical examples:

Finance and Procurement Professionals: AI and machine learning enables finance professionals to improve audit risk analysis, analyze past payment history with vendors and customers and enhance cash flow predictions, a key pain point for growing businesses.

HR Professionals: AI and machine learning enables HR professionals to create profiles of the best candidate based on existing top performers, predict high performers who might be a flight risk and better automate employee self-service by identifying what questions employees might have based on role, time of year or other factors.

Supply Chain Professionals: AI and machine learning offers supply chain professionals the potential to not only identify risks or potential upcoming problems in the supply chain but, as it learns, provide potential solutions.

Manufacturing Professionals: AI and machine learning helps manufacturing professionals optimize labour schedules in the warehouse based on past performance or predicted demand and identify machinery in need of maintenance before it becomes a problem.

Commerce Professionals: AI and machine learning helps commerce professionals significantly boost searchandising and improve online sales and conversions by serving up products customers are more likely to buy based on key indicators such as past purchases, search history and results of similar buyers.

Customer Services Professionals: AI and machine learning provide customer service professionals with more accurate results around total customer lifetime value by using predictions of costs to the support organization, anticipated satisfaction and information on a customer's likelihood of renewal.

Marketing Professionals: AI and machine learning help marketers improve campaign optimization by identifying what type of campaigns lead to a conversion with what frequency and what type of sale based on demographics, a profile within the customer base, and activity on the website, at events or other available data points.

Sales Professionals: AI and machine learning for sales teams support intelligent interactions guiding agents through the sales process, personalizing it for the prospect, the product and upsell, and cross-sell opportunities.