Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld 2024 Recap: AI-Driven Features, New UI and More

SuiteWorld 2024 was packed with new product announcements, major AI enhancements and updates to many platform features. If you’re looking for a recap of the highlights, here’s what I learned while there.

NetSuite’s annual client conference was themed “All Systems Grow” and focused on tools and strategies to help clients’ drive revenue growth. Artificial intelligence (AI) was a major theme with AI features being added to many areas of the platform. This was the largest SuiteWorld in many years with more than 8,000 attendees packed into Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas.

Here are the key highlights I noted from keynote presentations, sessions and the exhibitors expo.

New user interface (UI): Codenamed Redwood, the new UI is here! I’m a big fan of simple, common sense UI which NetSuite has always maintained. The new UI builds on this approach and brings a clean, new and still common sense screen design and user experience. From my hands-on experience in the NetSuite Demo Den, the new UI seems to make finding the most relevant data much easier. 

Ask Oracle: This new button will make natural language requests possible and give you meaningful insights without technical expertise. Using this AI-driven feature will allow you to type something like “all orders over $5000 in NY with an open status” to immediately see results. No need to create a saved search! Other examples included asking if there was enough inventory to launch an upcoming marketing campaign, and another asking for insights on what may have contributed to a recent spike in sales.

SuiteProjects Pro: SuiteProjects and OpenAir will be joined together to deliver streamlined management for consulting and services based businesses. If you’re not familiar with these features, SuiteProjects is NetSuite’s advanced project module for project accounting and management. It provides project budgeting, profitability reporting, resource management and allocation, task and milestone management and multiple, automated billing features. Open Air is NetSuite’s advanced time entry and expense management application. “Pro” will bring these two together in a more streamlined manner with a new, common user interface.

Financial exception management: While NetSuite has deployed many automated features to streamline financial processes such as Bank Match for transaction mapping and bank reconciliation, NetSuite will continue to enhance automation so the system identifies various financial discrepancies. 

NetSuite Connector for Salesforce: While NetSuite has a full-featured CRM included in the platform for marketing automation, sales management and customer service, some clients still prefer or have heavily invested in Salesforce for CRM. NetSuite has added to its collection of NetSuite Connectors and will be releasing “NetSuite Connector for Salesforce.” This is a pre-built, two-way integration between NetSuite and Salesforce. NetSuite team members I spoke with stated the release is expected in early 2025. Pricing hasn’t been announced, however, most Connectors are reasonably priced at just a few hundred dollars a month.

NetSuite Prompt Studio: This new platform tool will improve results and enable “training” of NetSuite’s generative AI features. One use for this tool is defining more tailored “prompts” to the AI features released last year for generating text such as sales descriptions on item records.

A few other updates:

• NetSuite’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tool gains AI enhancements enabling generative financial narratives to make monthly and quarterly board reports much easier for finance teams. Results include financials, narratives and graphs.
• NetSuite Planning and Budgeting (NSPB) and SuiteAnalytics will also gain generative AI features and predictive capabilities
• NetSuite will gain HIPAA compliance which will be welcome news for industries including healthcare
• For those using NetSuite’s Ship Central feature within their warehouse operations, a company logo can now be placed on the Ship Central shipping label
• The new SuiteProcurement makes indirect purchasing much easier and includes initial integrations with large suppliers such as Staples and Amazon Business
• Oracle Code Assist for SuiteScript provides developers a coding assistant when writing scripts.

A few impressive stats were shared:

• 83% of Forbes Cloud 100 companies use NetSuite
• NetSuite now has over 40,000 clients in 219 countries

Want to stay ahead of the curve with NetSuite’s latest features? Contact Red Dog Advisors to see how these innovations can drive growth for your business.