Our Take on NetSuite AI and ML Strategy
As the hype around AI reaches its peak, numerous well-known technology companies are eagerly capitalizing on the trend. From IBM’s AI-focused US Open advertisements to Microsoft and Google’s race to establish dominance in the field of generative AI, it seems that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. However, one notable exception to this trend is Oracle. Surprisingly, the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” are conspicuously absent from Oracle’s front-page copy. Yet, Oracle has a long-standing history of leading the way in machine learning and AI solutions for enterprises. In 2018, Forrester Research recognized Oracle as a leader in Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning (PAML) solutions, awarding them the highest average offering score and the highest possible score for their solution roadmap. Oracle even offers a 28-hour certification course on Machine Learning. It’s intriguing to ponder why Oracle doesn’t emphasize its AI and ML capabilities as much as its competitors, despite its evident expertise in the field.
This raises a question: why does Oracle not showcase its AI and ML capabilities in its enterprise software suites to the same extent as its competitors, despite its evident expertise in the field?
Scalability and Trust Is Prioritized Over Hype
To truly understand Oracle NetSuite, it’s helpful to draw parallels with Apple. Just as Apple’s iPhone dominates the North American smartphone market, NetSuite boasts a massive userbase, with 63% of tech companies that have gone public since 2011 relying on its infrastructure and software suites for their day-to-day operations. With such a significant responsibility to their customers, both companies prioritize thorough testing, security, and scalability before rolling out new features. This cautious approach is particularly crucial in the realm of generative AI, where language learning models (LLMs) can make conclusions based on limited context, potentially leading to inaccurate inferences. As thousands of industry-leading companies depend on NetSuite’s data, any inaccuracies could have dire consequences if implemented on a large scale.
Existing AI/ML Capabilities Already Baked Into NetSuite
While most other companies in the NetSuite ecosystem may not be emphasizing their ML and AI capabilities to the degree that Plative is, it’s worth noting that NetSuite itself has integrated scalable, trusted, and secure ML and AI into its products and applications, with even more advancements in the pipeline.
The Virtual Support Assistant AI chatbot in SuiteAnswers revolutionizes customer support by instantly addressing commonly asked questions. Powered by AI, it draws data from thousands of FAQ and knowledge-base articles in NetSuite, ensuring accurate and efficient responses. This intelligent assistant engages in conversational interactions with users, asking probing questions to provide the most precise solutions. These AI technologies act as invaluable workhorses, optimizing business operations by saving time, enhancing data reliability, and seamlessly following established rules and processes.
NetSuite Bill Capture, currently available in North America and soon to be launched in Europe, harnesses the power of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Machine Learning (ML) to effortlessly identify fields and values from PDFs or images. It then extracts and records this information on a bill record in NetSuite. Although this feature is commonly used for bill capture, its versatility extends to various other use cases such as document management and contract lifecycle management. It can efficiently summarize contracts and extract essential contract data from PDFs, seamlessly populating NetSuite records. At Plative, we have the expertise to extend this functionality to cater to diverse industry-specific requirements.
The NetSuite Supply Chain Control Tower leverages the power of AI to conduct simulations that monitor inventory levels and forecast the impact of modifications to elements like bill of materials or production processes. With the help of predictive risk tools, planners can analyze supply and demand intricately, leading to a reduction in bottlenecks during production.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse takes the Suite of products to new heights with its AI-driven capabilities. Augmented analytics, a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP), empowers users to effortlessly generate analytics and visualizations on the fly by simply typing in natural language queries. Furthermore, users can convert analytics into natural text, transforming graphs into compelling narratives for management reports. This powerful feature enhances the usability and impact of NetSuite’s analytics capabilities, making data-driven decision-making even more intuitive and effective.
Extending NetSuite’s Capabilities With Custom Generative AI Solutions by Plative
In our relentless pursuit of innovation, Plative’s Generative AI practice has been dedicated to developing practical and incredibly powerful solutions for NetSuite. One remarkable example is our Saved Search GPT, a groundbreaking feature that allows every NetSuite customer to transform their Saved Searches into a dynamic GPT chatbot. This empowers users to engage in natural conversations with their NetSuite data, drastically reducing the time spent searching for information and maximizing efficiency on the platform.
Additionally, we have introduced FileBot, a game-changing tool that enables NetSuite users to effortlessly upload any file, whether it be a PDF, PNG, or any other format, and instantly create a chatbot capable of answering any questions related to the uploaded file. This feature proves invaluable when navigating through extensive vendor contracts, enterprise service level agreements, and more, saving users significant amounts of time and effort.
Forward-Looking: Oracle and NVIDIA’s Strategic Partnership for AI
Together, NVIDIA and Oracle have been serving enterprises for years, providing accelerated computing instances and software through OCI. This powerful partnership is now expanding, aiming to accelerate AI-driven innovation across various industries, enhancing customer experiences and boosting sales.
The NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a widely adopted software in the NVIDIA AI platform, offers essential processing engines for every step of the AI workflow, including data processing, AI model training, simulation, and large-scale deployment. By leveraging NVIDIA AI, organizations can develop predictive models to automate business processes and gain valuable insights rapidly. This versatile platform supports applications like conversational AI, recommender systems, computer vision, and more. In the near future, a new release of NVIDIA AI Enterprise will be accessible on OCI, ensuring customers have easy access to NVIDIA’s secure, scalable, and accelerated platform for end-to-end AI development and deployment.
Furthermore, Oracle is now providing early access to NVIDIA RAPIDS™ acceleration for Apache Spark data processing on OCI Data Flow, a fully managed Apache Spark service. Data processing is a critical workload in cloud computing, and OCI Data Science is poised to support this demand by offering support for OCI bare metal shapes, including BM.GPU.GM4.8 with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs across managed notebook sessions, jobs, and model deployment.
Excitingly, NVIDIA Clara™, a healthcare AI and HPC application framework for medical imaging, genomics, natural language processing, and drug discovery, will soon be available. Additionally, Oracle and NVIDIA are collaborating on AI-accelerated Oracle Cerner offerings for healthcare, covering analytics, clinical solutions, operations, patient management systems, and more.
Assess Your AI Readiness
No matter which features your organization is most eager to embrace, it is crucial to begin by preparing your enterprise data, integration strategy, and implementation approach. This will ensure that you can fully leverage the advantages offered by these solutions. At Plative, we have developed a complimentary AI Readiness assessment that will evaluate your company on a 5-step staircase. It will provide you with a summary of findings and a roadmap spanning 12-24 months, enabling you to transform your organization from an AI novice to a true disruptor using NetSuite’s robust platform and other enterprise technology. To learn more about this assessment, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.
