7 hot takes on AI from SuiteWorld.

Opportunities for AI.

NetSuite has partnered with AI and LLM powerhouse Cohere to build new product features into its ERP. The stated goal of this partnership is to “have AI everywhere throughout the Suite do more, faster than ever before.” NetSuite sees opportunities to make its product better by using AI technology to improve:

• Analytics and insights.
• User experience.
• Customizations.

At Airbase, we’re also focused on AI as a way to create a better, more valuable product for our customers and are pleased to have deployed some initial capabilities with an ever-growing roadmap and a fast-growing team of AI developers to support our vision. One of the key takeaways from SuiteWorld is that software companies that are slow to incorporate this user-friendly technology into their products will fall behind.

Of course, actual implementations are still scant, but there was plenty at the conference about what the future might hold. The promise of AI to garner productivity gains, reach new markets, and enable employees and customers to access data for making better decisions with better insights was trumpeted in several sessions.

Attitudes towards AI.

There were comparisons to other “generational innovations” like the iPhone and the Mosaic browser that have brought significant changes to how we all engage with technology, do our jobs, and live our lives. I attended the AI sessions and had a chance to talk to several other attendees at the conference about the fast-approaching AI revolution in accounting software.

Far from some frightening overlord coming to take jobs and tell us all how to live, the attendees that I spoke with were optimistic about how AI could transform the way we interact with technology. In fact, I would say that the attitude I saw most is that automation is core to how we do our jobs, and the better it gets with AI, the more productive we can all be.

AI use cases you can see today.

In the sessions I attended, it was clear that there are significant AI use cases today to support further automation, gain greater control, and mitigate risk. NetSuite claimed to have over 80 features in planning or production that use AI. They are focused on rolling these out in 4 categories shown below:

1. Specifically, when it comes to planning and budgeting, NetSuite has seen an increased requirement for agility and so has focused on using generative AI to monitor forecasts and budgeting, and for data analytics. This shifts the function of planning and budgeting from an event-based one to an ongoing activity, and it’s easy to see by anyone responding to the past three-year rollercoaster economy how that shift drives incredible business value.

2. NetSuite has rolled out an AI-powered help center where, using Cohere’s LLM models, users can just ask a question or describe what they wish to accomplish within NetSuite, and they’ll get a ChatGPT-type explanation.

3. The real power and primary focus is on using AI to predict certain outcomes or behaviors by pulling data together from across various systems and sources. For example, not only will NetSuite recognize a slowdown in sales, but it will suggest what you could do to remedy it (in the example, it was to provide discounts to specific customer segments but not others). Faster, better insights are a big promise of AI.

4. NetSuite has begun the process of including AI capabilities into cash management to not only predict cash positions but also suggest ways that a finance team could make adjustments to improve cash management (e.g., identifying where to negotiate better terms on specific transactions).

5. NetSuite is also working on ways to use AI to power insights from internal NetSuite data of all users. Their Benchmark program will let users see how their operations stack up to others and even suggest ways to improve against lagging scores. Having a closed system that generates useful, clean, reliable data for all users of that system provides the essential fuel needed to generate valuable insights.

6. NetSuite has embedded AI into the expense reporting process to read transaction details from a receipt and predict the spend’s purpose. Brex displayed a similar AI function in their presentation, where they can capture data from specific types and sizes of card spend and populate that into an expense report. Airbase also uses its version of generative AI combined with OCR technology and ML to pull data from receipts, populate that data into the transaction record, and automatically fill in the purpose in the memo field. Right now, these are small demonstrations of how companies that create accounting software are beginning to incorporate the functionality of generative AI into their software.

7. An area not covered by our friends at NetSuite but an area of laser focus at Airbase as a procure-to-pay solution is using generative AI in fraud and risk mitigation. The AI tools we use to deeply scan invoices, identify anomalies, flag transactions, and evaluate vendor payment details help keep our customers safe from the ever-present risk of vendor fraud. It’s estimated that mid-market companies lose $300,000 on average to vendor fraud each year.

You can take this job and…

It could be that AI is arriving on the scene to save the day just as humans abandon accounting work. There is growing evidence that fewer talented, smart, motivated people want to enter into the accounting profession, knowing they can just get bogged in low-value manual tasks, transaction coding, tedious reconciliations, and painful closes.

I know that I lost interest in the chaos of accounting closes and made a shift to Airbase, where I could use the value of my accounting background to bring a better approach to capturing, controlling, and recording transactions to others. Automation elevates the role of the accountant and shifts the focus from being controlled by the data to controlling it. AI goes a step further and turns every accountant and finance professional into a data scientist. With easy conversational access to information, insights, comparisons, and alternative actions, finance teams can move faster to build better businesses — to contribute as a human and not as a cog in a data entry process.

A future we can all embrace.

The controllers I spoke with at the conference were eager to further improve automation. All the other far-fetched future stuff is nice to hear, but their expressed wish was to leverage AI more to automate existing processes.

It’s been just under a year since ChatGPT shocked us all into recognition that we’re not in Kansas anymore, and this major conference for accounting and finance pros was teeming with talks and talk on the topic. One of the hallmarks of AI technology is its exponential growth trajectory. This means that companies can build and deploy new AI-driven solutions so much faster than we’ve ever witnessed from other innovations. Because of this, my prediction is that next year, SuiteWorld won’t be about the promise of AI but about the wholesale implementation of it by NetSuite and by many of NetSuite’s partners like Airbase. Watch this space!