At this week’s NetSuite SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, NetSuite founder and EVP Evan Goldberg (pictured) fielded a press and analyst Q&A covering the company’s evolving AI offer, including the obstacles that had to be overcome to make it work. Here are the ten areas covered.
-On integration and connectors with other suppliers’ products, such as a new connector with Salesforce, he said: “It’s an acknowledgment that there are thousands of Salesforce customers out there that need to use both our products, and there will be more products like that out there.”
-In terms of the effect of AI and bots on the jobs of admins, he said there should be no fears. “They won’t be out of a job any time soon. We’re using AI to help configure NetSuite, admin is key to proceed. These tools will make admins more productive.”
-On data centre capacity being ramped up over Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions to help deliver a wider AI-driven product suite: “It’s not instantaneous to spin out a NetSuite data centre, it has to be methodical. India and Brazil are being added to the footprint, but it won’t be until calendar 2025 when they go live.”
-On the relevance of all this AI activity on SMBs: “It’s about price performance management. Large customers like using NetSuite Text Enhance to produce branded content, which is now being improved with AI, and it will also help SMBs in this area.
“We want AI to appear in a natural way, sometimes more analytics will help larger companies, but smaller companies increasingly have a lot of data to mine too.”
-How about evolving AI needs: “AI can make the users more curious, as to how they can make the most of their implementations, including looking at what other firms are doing with the tech.”
-AI languages: “As a global company we have to consider what languages are used in our products. There are many different LLMs, and they can support different languages. With our Text Enhance product, it is now available in Japanese.”
-Getting quality AI answers: “Typical answers can be given out without differentiation being built in. Our systems are being tailor-made to different use cases and industries, to get those different tailored results.”
-How to track AI software business performance: “We are working on improving our measurements on behalf of customers – where are recommendations going wrong, and not improving sales, for instance? We can and are aiming to make recommendations better.”
-The changing velocity of software and how can customers keep up: “We track user usage through OCI environments, and have added AI playbooks to help them get the best out of their software.
“The acceleration of technology needs the acceleration of support for some customers.”
-Dealing with the risks of AI development: “We use OCI generative AI environments, and users are not allowed to leave those environments without management permission. And we also use anonymised data.”
Goldberg added: “The way we’re going to implement product enhancements, and everywhere we handle data, is to use the highest standards of industry security.”
That’s the ten.
