Business solutions provider Oracle NetSuite has gone all in on artificial intelligence, having adopted a philosophy of "AI Everywhere" that ultimately aims to make the technology so prevalent in its products and services that users will barely even think about it, becoming about as noticeable as the air we breathe or the ground we walk on.
"Our vision is that AI belongs everywhere," said Brian Chess, Oracle NetSuite's AI and technology lead, during the NYC SuiteConnect conference on March 28. "That doesn't mean it hides behind every button or dropdown, but it applies to every business problem that NetSuite hopes to solve, from acquiring customers to delivering products to hiring employees to optimizing action items."
Essentially, people will not think they're using AI but instead they're using NetSuite, which happens to utilize AI. He compared having a "chatbot with a cute name" built into a software application versus building AI into the core functioning of the solution itself. The former frames AI as something with "an identity of its own" which means "it's not really everywhere," while the latter conceives of AI as woven throughout the system. With this in mind, NetSuite does not view AI as a value-added accessory but as something that can increase the value of the entire product suite.
"Similarly, if you say, 'Here is what NetSuite costs and here is what NetSuite with AI costs on top of that,' you're not really saying, 'AI Everywhere.' If AI means NetSuite is more valuable, maybe we can charge more money for it, but it won't be like there's a NetSuite with AI and a NetSuite without AI. … We're not really thinking of cordoning the AI off into modules," he said during a press conference.
This also means it can be difficult to tell how many people are actually using NetSuite's existing AI-driven features. Because AI is embedded across the entire suite, said Chess, the company doesn't really categorize things as "AI" and "Not AI."
"We don't really internally divide things up that way. We probably could … but that would force us to name all the AI points and start adding up users," he said.
As of now, according to Chess, NetSuite collects little data in general that can be tied to specific users. It's mostly usage statistics to see how their products do overall.
"We keep track of statistics, how many customers have it, how many use it, what they're using it for, how often we suggest something, that sort of stuff we keep track of just to make sure the feature is on track. … Generally speaking, we do not collect customer data," he said.
Chess said Oracle NetSuite is especially suited to deliver on the philosophy of AI Everywhere. The nature of the company and the diversity of its customers means "we have a more complete picture of a business than any point solution could hope to offer" in terms of what companies need and how AI can help them. Further, Oracle being such a big company with so many areas of focus means it also has access to many areas of expertise that can add further insight.
"Oracle is a big place and NetSuite is an important part of the Oracle ecosystem, but it has a lot of other applications too — and we all trade notes," he said.
He added that its connection with Oracle also gives them access to the technological infrastructure to actually implement these AI solutions at scale in-house versus outsourcing somewhere else. May Lam, director of data science and program management with Oracle, noted in the presentation that the company is pursuing the ability for users to create custom AI models built on their local data sets, which will require generous use of this technological infrastructure. Chess said the company is currently marshaling its resources around this effort.
"There's a big internal effort right now to harness the infrastructure needed to support millions and millions of models," he said.
Yet ultimately, despite the philosophy of AI everywhere, Oracle NetSuite is aiming to have humans remain at the center of it all.
"We very much think we're taking a very human-centric approach to AI, where AI can provide insight to a human, can improve a human's productivity, but we still expect the human is there and the data that goes into the system is because a human wanted it to be there," he said.
So, in this regard, NetSuite is not pursuing "self-driving" AI. Chess, extending the metaphor, said, "We'll still insist you keep your eyes on the road." At least for now. When asked whether NetSuite would envision such AI in the future, he said there would be specific conditions before going down that path.
"The question is would there come a point in time where we say, 'Kick back and look at your phone and the car will take care of it.' From my perspective, the point when we would do that is when we would say the car is actually doing a better job than you will," he said. "On average, the car driving itself [would need to be] safer. Now, to come back to where we are now, would we reach a point in business software where we would say, actually, the system is good enough that you should let it take over for certain operations. I think the analogy holds well in that, yes, we would if we think that system is going to do better, on average, than having a person do it. So would we do it? Yes. But we've got to prove that the system on its own would be better."
