Utilizing NetSuite AI capabilities in the real world

In the past year, NetSuite has released a variety of different artificial intelligence features and capabilities that help organizations improve efficiency and gain better insights across finance, operations and sales. Features within the NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and the NetSuite enterprise performance management (EPM) solution allow users to automate data creation and updates, data visualization, and reporting.

But how do organizations really benefit from these AI features? While companies are often impressed by what AI can do in NetSuite, they may not truly understand the benefit to their operations and the true return on investment.

Below are some real-world examples that will help you understand how NetSuite AI can provide value to your organization.

Accounts payable invoice processing

The days of downloading a PDF invoice that a vendor has emailed and manually entering data into the ERP system are long gone. These manual data entry tasks are tedious, time-consuming and can be riddled with mistakes that require corrections by accountants. Accounts payable (AP) automation solutions that have optical character recognition (OCR) technology have been around for some time, but integrating these systems into an ERP system can come with some problems.

If the integration fails, you run the risk of transactions not posting to your financials. Additionally, a separate AP system means that transactions like purchase orders and purchase order receipts cannot be utilized in the AP approval workflow. However, by utilizing AI capabilities within NetSuite Bill Capture, your organization can address several challenges, including:

• As a native module within NetSuite, Bill Capture provides all the automation needed to reduce manual data entry without ever leaving NetSuite.
• You no longer need integrations between NetSuite and another system or additional overhead to manage integration failures.
• Native ERP transactions like purchase orders and receipts can be utilized as part of the approval workflow for AP invoices.

Resolving financial anomalies and errors

Nearly every industry accountant has dealt with resolving financial anomalies and coding mistakes as part of the period-close process. While dealing with the pressure of closing the books quickly and producing financial reports for management, mistakes are uncovered that require critical thinking and collaboration with others to resolve. Often, these errors hold up the close—creating even more pressure and late nights for accountants.

With AI-driven Financial Exception Management in NetSuite, accountants no longer have to wait until the period close process to deal with these anomalies and errors.

Financial Exception Management provides:

• Real-time visibility into errors and anomalies directly on the dashboard
• Suggested actions to remedy the error based on previous transactions in the system
• Machine learning that adapts as more data is captured within NetSuite, leading to better anomaly detection and suggested resolutions over time

Visualizing data without report-building knowledge

Business intelligence tools do an excellent job of visualizing data from data warehouses or other systems. They can create impressive charts and reports that help executives gain insights into how their business is performing and where to focus their time and energy.

However, the ability to properly create datasets and build the reports and dashboards is a skill set that most executives do not have and most don’t want to learn. This creates a challenge—executives are reliant on a system administrator or other skilled resource to build new dashboards and reports whenever they want to visualize data differently. The entire real-time aspect of visualizing data is limited to just what has already been built.

With NetSuite Analytics Warehouse’s AI Assistant, executives can now use natural language queries through a chat to build charts and dashboards instantly. System administrators, product experts or consultants are no longer needed to build new reports and charts. Instead, users can generate the visualization they need and further refine it all through the chat function.

Automating data updates without logging into the ERP

NetSuite’s AI Connector service along with the RSM Copilot Agent for NetSuite both provide the ability for users to interact with NetSuite directly from an external AI platform (ChatGPT, Claude or Microsoft Copilot). But why get AI platform licenses for users that already have NetSuite licenses? Isn’t that just duplicating the costs for functions users could already do within NetSuite?

To answer that question correctly, companies must factor in the efficiencies gained by allowing users to use an AI platform instead of forcing them through the NetSuite user interface. Many NetSuite users don’t spend much of their day within the platform, they can forget how to do things correctly if they don’t regularly log in.

Users who do not spend much time in NetSuite but occasionally need to perform tasks in the system may struggle with remembering passwords or how to navigate NetSuite, how to fill out forms properly, how data needs to be entered into the system, what all the steps are to complete a process, etc. Organizations spend a lot of time addressing these issues through their system administrators, training and accounting cleanup.

By redirecting these users to leverage an AI platform, they can conduct their necessary processes through a natural language chat. For example:

• A sales representative can enter in a new lead or opportunity directly through chat, without logging in and remembering all the steps needed to fill out a new lead or opportunity form correctly.
• A chief financial officer can request a report or query through chat, instead of remembering how to build a report or navigate to one.
• A chief technology officer who must approve large IT expenditures can simply chat to see what purchases are pending their approval and approve directly through that application.

In addition to simplifying tasks for users, utilizing an AI platform also reduces the risk that users perform tasks incorrectly in the system, which generally leads to more cleanup by the accounting team.

By utilizing AI platforms to interact with NetSuite, you can get enormous time savings across your organization by simplifying the steps for the users, reducing administrative support and training, and letting employees spend more time working on improving the business and less time working in NetSuite.