NetSuite Next Unveiled: Conversational AI and Agentic Workflows to Transform How AI Works for Your Business

The conversation around Artificial Intelligence in the business world is reaching a fever pitch. We hear about groundbreaking models, complex algorithms, and futuristic possibilities. But for many businesses, the practical application of AI within their day-to-day operations remains elusive, often feeling complex, disjointed, or lacking the necessary trust and integration. How do we move beyond the hype and make AI a truly seamless, reliable, and value-driving partner in our work?

Enter NetSuite Next. Announced today at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, Oracle NetSuite, the #1 Cloud ERP with embedded AI, is introducing a significant evolution of its platform. NetSuite Next isn't just about adding a few AI features; it's a fundamental reimagining of how businesses interact with their core systems. By deeply embedding advanced Conversational AI and proactive Agentic Workflows across the entire suite, NetSuite Next aims to make AI a natural, intuitive extension of how companies already operate, automating tasks, unlocking insights, and enabling faster, more confident decision-making.

"NetSuite Next puts AI to work for businesses, making it a natural extension of how they already work," explained Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite. "It allows users to discover patterns in their business and interact with NetSuite in their own words, all while understanding the individual context of each user, so it can provide answers and actions that deliver immediate value."

This isn't about replacing humans; it's about augmenting their capabilities. Let's dive deep into what NetSuite Next entails, explore its groundbreaking features, and understand how this evolution promises to redefine the role of AI in driving business success.

The Challenge: Moving AI from the Lab to the Ledger

For years, the potential of AI in business has been immense, but the reality has often fallen short. Businesses grapple with several key challenges:

Data Overload & Insight Scarcity: Companies are drowning in data but starving for actionable insights. Traditional reporting requires manual effort and often fails to uncover hidden correlations or emerging risks.
Repetitive & Complex Task Burden: Employees spend countless hours on manual, repetitive tasks (like data entry, reconciliations, report generation) and complex, multi-step processes (like payment proposals or supplier selection) that drain productivity and introduce potential errors.
Fragmented AI Tools: Often, AI capabilities are bolted onto existing systems or exist as separate tools, requiring users to switch contexts, learn new interfaces, and manually transfer data, hindering adoption and efficiency.
Trust & Explainability Gap: The "black box" nature of some AI systems makes it difficult for businesses to trust the recommendations or actions, especially when dealing with critical financial or operational data. Auditability and understanding the "why" behind an AI's output are crucial.

NetSuite Next is specifically designed to address these core challenges by weaving AI intelligence directly into the fabric of the ERP system itself.

Introducing NetSuite Next: An Evolution Built on Trust

Crucially, NetSuite Next is presented as an evolution of the existing platform, not a disruptive replacement. This is a key message for NetSuite's vast customer base.

Seamless Transition: Existing customers can activate NetSuite Next features "with the flip of a switch," without requiring complex data migrations or disrupting existing customizations, workflows, or partner applications built on the SuiteCloud Platform.
Foundation on OCI: The entire platform is powered by the robust, secure, and AI-optimized Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), providing enterprise-grade performance and reliability.
Grounded in Your Data & Controls: Every AI insight and action within NetSuite Next is grounded in the customer's own unified data model and governed by their existing roles, permissions, and security policies. This ensures that AI operates within the established business rules and maintains data integrity and confidentiality.
Explainable & Auditable AI: NetSuite emphasizes that the AI is designed to be transparent. It can explain the "how" and the "why" behind its answers and actions, ensuring users can trust the output and maintain control.
Modern User Experience: The platform incorporates Oracle's modern Redwood Design System, providing a clean, intuitive, and collaborative interface.

This foundation of trust, security, and seamless integration is what makes NetSuite Next more than just a collection of features; it's a strategic shift towards making AI a reliable co-pilot for every user.

The Core Interaction: "Ask Oracle" – Your Conversational AI Assistant

At the heart of the new user experience is Ask Oracle, a powerful natural language assistant embedded throughout the NetSuite suite. Think of it as having an expert analyst built directly into your ERP, ready to answer questions, perform tasks, and provide insights using everyday language.

Natural Language Interaction: Users can simply type or speak their requests in their own words. No need to navigate complex menus or remember specific report names. Examples could include:

"Show me our top 10 customers by revenue in the last quarter."
"What's the status of purchase order #12345?"
"Analyze sales trends for Product X in the Northeast region."
"Create a draft invoice for Client Y based on their last project."

Contextual Understanding: Ask Oracle understands the user's role, permissions, and the context of the page they are currently viewing. This allows it to provide highly relevant answers and actions tailored to the individual user's needs and authority.
Beyond Simple Answers: Ask Oracle doesn't just provide data; it offers:

Visualizations: Generating charts and graphs on the fly.
Interactive Content: Allowing users to drill down into the data or ask follow-up questions.
Reasoning: Explaining how it arrived at an answer, building trust and understanding.

Action-Oriented: Users can directly instruct Ask Oracle to perform tasks, such as creating records, updating fields, or initiating workflows.
Extensibility: Crucially, Ask Oracle works seamlessly across all customizations and extensions built on the SuiteCloud Platform, including partner applications from the SuiteCloud Developer Network. This ensures a unified conversational experience across the entire business ecosystem.

Ask Oracle promises to democratize data access and analysis, empowering every user, regardless of their technical expertise, to interact with NetSuite more intuitively and efficiently.

Automating Complexity: Agentic Workflows Take the Wheel

While Conversational AI transforms how users interact with data, Agentic Workflows transform how complex processes get done. These are proactive, AI-driven workflows designed to automate multi-step, often tedious tasks that traditionally require significant human intervention.

What Makes Them "Agentic"? Unlike simple automation rules, these AI agents have a goal and can make decisions (based on predefined rules and learned patterns) to achieve it.
Examples of Agentic Workflows:

Payment Proposals: The AI agent analyzes outstanding bills, payment terms, and cash flow forecasts to suggest an optimal payment run, prioritizing critical vendors or maximizing early payment discounts.
Supplier Selection: Based on criteria like price, delivery time, and historical performance, the agent can recommend or even autonomously select the best supplier for a purchase request.
Reconciliations: Automating the matching of transactions between bank statements and general ledger entries, flagging discrepancies for human review.
Supply Chain Operations: Proactively identifying potential inventory shortages based on sales forecasts and lead times, then drafting suggested purchase orders.

User Control Remains Key: A critical aspect is that users retain control. NetSuite Next provides the choice: users can review and approve key decisions suggested by the AI agent, or, for more routine tasks, they can allow the agent to act autonomously within defined parameters.

Agentic Workflows aim to free up valuable employee time from complex but repetitive processes, allowing them to focus on more strategic, high-value activities that require human judgment and creativity.

Deeper Understanding & Collaboration: AI Canvas and Narrative Summaries

NetSuite Next introduces two innovative features designed to help users make sense of data and collaborate more effectively.

AI Canvas: This is a visual, collaborative workspace embedded directly within NetSuite. Think of it as an intelligent digital whiteboard where teams can:

Analyze Problems: Pull in data and reports identified by Ask Oracle or Narrative Summaries.
Brainstorm Solutions: Use AI prompts and collaborative tools to explore potential actions.
Trigger Agentic Workflows: Initiate automated processes directly from the visual workspace. AI Canvas acts as a bridge between insight and action, facilitating data-driven brainstorming and decision-making within teams.

Narrative Summaries & Insights: Instead of just presenting raw numbers, NetSuite Next uses AI to generate automated, plain-language explanations directly on record forms, reports, and dashboards.

Proactive Insights: These summaries don't just describe the data; they proactively highlight correlations, trends, anomalies, and potential risks or opportunities hidden within NetSuite's unified data model.
Early Warning System: By surfacing these insights automatically, the feature helps users identify potential issues (e.g., a declining sales trend for a key product, a customer nearing their credit limit) before they become major problems.

These features aim to reduce the cognitive load required to interpret complex data, making powerful insights accessible to everyone and fostering a more data-literate and collaborative organizational culture.

Unlocking Unstructured Knowledge: Document and Knowledge Integration

A vast amount of critical business information is often locked away in unstructured documents – invoices, contracts, receipts, policy manuals, training guides, even customer testimonials. NetSuite Next leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to unlock this knowledge.

Intelligent Extraction & Validation: The AI can "read" and understand a wide variety of documents (PDFs, scanned images, etc.), extract key information (like invoice amounts, due dates, contract terms), and validate it against data already in NetSuite.
Reducing Manual Effort & Errors: This significantly reduces the need for manual data entry, saving time and minimizing costly errors.
Transforming Documents into Action: Beyond simple data extraction, the AI can interpret the meaning and context of these documents. It can understand a policy described in a manual or recognize a commitment made in a contract. This allows NetSuite Next to incorporate this unstructured knowledge into its insights and even trigger relevant Agentic Workflows based on document content (e.g., initiating a contract renewal process based on terms extracted from the PDF).

This capability turns static, siloed documents into active, integrated parts of the business workflow, creating a more comprehensive and intelligent operational picture.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What exactly is NetSuite Next? Is it a new product?

NetSuite Next is not a separate product but an evolution of the core NetSuite platform. It represents the deep integration of advanced AI capabilities (Conversational AI, Agentic Workflows, etc.) across the existing suite. Existing customers can enable these features without migrating.

2. How is "Ask Oracle" different from other AI chatbots?

Unlike generic chatbots, Ask Oracle is deeply embedded within NetSuite. It understands the user's specific role, permissions, and the context of their work within the ERP. Crucially, it's grounded in the company's own unified data and adheres to existing security policies, making its responses and actions highly relevant and trustworthy for business use. It also explains its reasoning.

3. What are "Agentic Workflows"? How are they different from regular automation?

Regular automation follows simple "if-then" rules. Agentic Workflows are more sophisticated. They are AI-driven agents given a goal (e.g., "optimize payment schedule") that can analyze data, make multi-step decisions, and proactively execute complex tasks, often with the option for human approval at key points.

4. Is my company's data safe when using these AI features?

Yes. NetSuite emphasizes that all AI functions within NetSuite Next operate on the secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and are strictly governed by the customer's existing data, roles, permissions, and security policies. The AI accesses only the data the user is already authorized to see.

5. How difficult is it to transition to NetSuite Next?

According to Oracle NetSuite, the transition is designed to be seamless. Customers can enable the new features "with the flip of a switch" without disrupting existing customizations or requiring complex data migrations.

Conclusion: Putting AI to Work, Intelligently and Reliably

NetSuite Next represents a significant leap forward in making Artificial Intelligence a practical, powerful, and accessible tool for businesses of all sizes. By moving beyond standalone AI features and deeply embedding Conversational AI and Agentic Workflows into the core ERP platform, Oracle NetSuite is delivering on the promise of AI that works for the business, not just alongside it.

The focus on seamless integration, grounding in existing data and security, and providing explainable, auditable results addresses the critical need for trust and reliability in enterprise AI. Features like Ask Oracle promise to democratize data access, while Agentic Workflows offer to automate complexity and free up human potential for more strategic endeavors.

This evolution isn't just about adding intelligence; it's about making that intelligence a natural, intuitive, and indispensable part of the daily workflow. With NetSuite Next, the future of AI in business looks less like a complex technological challenge and more like a collaborative, efficient, and genuinely intelligent partnership.