Stop us if you’ve heard this before (and we know you have, because we’ve said it about a bajillion times): AI is the future of finance. That’s certainly true for Oracle NetSuite; the company announced yesterday that it was embedding a raft of Gen AI tools into its suite of products, including new financial exception detection, data analytics, and planning capabilities.
To understand how NetSuite is incorporating AI into its product line, how finance and accounting professionals might use it, and what the future of AI in finance and accounting tools could look like, CFO Brew spoke with Evan Goldberg, the company’s co-founder and EVP, the day after he announced the launch of the AI integration at the Oracle Netsuite SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
NetSuite introduced GenAI tools into its products last year. What have you learned about how users are using them, and how have you incorporated those lessons into these new tools?
The big revolution was large language models (LLMs), the ability to generate language, and those were the initial early wins, and they have been wins. We have something called Text Enhance, which allows you, inside NetSuite, to use LLMs directly, but have them be informed by the other data in NetSuite. So instead of going out to ChatGPT and writing this complicated prompt and copying all this data, it’s already preconfigured to know what data you want for that piece of information, so it writes something that’s much more useful out of the gate. For finance professionals, that can help with things like summarization of notes, summarization of reports.
We’re really attacking the financial professionals with this year’'s announcements, because we have something called the Financial Exception Manager, which uses AI to do what had to be manually done by people on the finance team. This is just another example of how, if you’re not spending a lot of your time drilling through a bunch of transactions to find exceptions, instead, the system is finding the candidates for you, and you just have to go through a few of them. That frees you up to do more strategic things. That’s what we’re going to see moving forward.
What do you see as the necessary skills that organizations and finance and accounting professionals are going to need to use these tools?
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Now, on the top of every NetSuite page, where you used to be able to search for customers and other information in the system you can ask more general questions. We’re really trying to make these AI capabilities a natural extension; [for example], the intelligent item recommendations just show up when you’re looking at a customer.
There’s definitely more sophisticated modeling that you can do. And for certain people, like financial analysts, they’re going to have to start to understand how models work and how you test them and how you create them. They don’t need to necessarily know how a neural net works, but they need to know the basics of how you get the most out of machine learning technology, because a lot of the things they were doing before, they’re going to want to use machine learning now.
It feels like we’re still in GenAI’s infancy. How do you see this impacting finance and accounting professions over the next five to 10 years?
I think it’s going to make it more accurate, and I think it’s going to make it more efficient. I think it’s going to allow everybody to uplevel their job, be more strategic in their role, and get more done. Everybody has their urgent list and their important list, and then their “could if I had time” list. And I think AI is going to let a lot of people get to the “could if I had time” list. That’s going to be great.
What do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions that people have about this technology and what it can do?
I think the fact that it so eloquently answers your questions, that’s the danger, that you may put too much credence in what’s coming out of the system. I think there’s a lot of work going on explaining what the sources are for that information. We’re certainly very much looking at that kind of approach. It’s not a panacea. You can’t apply it to everything and just expect it to be great. I think you gotta test and you gotta measure…Test and measure is the key way to avoid going down rabbit holes.