Accounting
Oracle NetSuite boosts AI capacity across product suite, announced at SuitWorld
Business solutions provider
“We are embedding AI-powered capabilities across the suite so customers are benefiting from it as soon as they log in. By ensuring AI is built into existing business processes and not bolted on, we are helping our customers achieve immediate value from the latest AI innovations at no additional cost,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, during the SuiteWorld conference in Las Vegas on Monday. “The latest updates build on the hundreds of new generative AI use cases we have added in the last year and will help our customers further increase productivity and gain more value from the suite.”
These AI updates give users the ability to automatically detect financial exceptions (NetSuite Financial Exception Management), query data via a generative AI interface (NetSuite Suite Analytics Assistant), gain more control over generative AI prompt configuration along the lines of format, tone and creativity (NetSuite Prompt Studio), embed generative AI capabilities into NetSuite extensions and customizations, build extensions and customizations through an AI code compassion (Oracle Code Assist SuiteScript optimization), and configure, optimize and create new AI-powered capacities throughout the suite.
Oracle noted that no customer data is shared with large language model providers or seen by other customers. To further protect sensitive information, role-based security is embedded directly into NetSuite workflows and only recommends content that end users are entitled to view.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse updates
Oracle NetSuite also announced a bevy of AI-related updates for its Analytics Warehouse solution. The latest updates provide new AI tools and models to help customers analyze data more efficiently and gain predictive insights to improve forecasting. Customers can now generate data visualizations and natural language insights based on a dataset’s attributes, measures and other points of interest; identify meaningful business drivers, contextual insights, and data anomalies through AI; directly query data through conversational interactions to produce insights and data visualizations; automate analysis through no-code models built for specific use cases that can predict scenarios, such as customer churn and inventory stockouts; automate algorithm selection and customizing modeling workflows; and access a collaborative interface to explore data visually and tailor machine learning models to address unique business needs.
“For growing businesses, making sense of data can be a time-consuming process that may require advanced data science and coding skills. With limited resources, many businesses are not able to invest in these skills and miss out on valuable data insights,” said Goldberg. “We’re dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes unlock the full potential of their data. The latest updates to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse will help customers automate data analysis and leverage AI to produce fast and meaningful insights that can help improve decision-making.”
Most of these new capacities are now available. The no-code AI models to automate analysis are planned to be available within the next 12 months.
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) updates
Oracle NetSuite also announced new AI-powered updates to
Users can create AI-powered narratives, explanations and visuals from financial and transactional data; identify patterns, trends, and anomalies and deliver detailed AI-generated commentary and narratives with the Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) Insights feature; quickly and easily understand the key factors behind AI-generated forecasts; and accomplish a variety of tasks using natural language conversations via an AI-driven interface.
“Finance teams often spend a significant amount of time gathering data and creating narratives to explain financial results, justify important decisions and forecast future growth. This can be a labor-intensive process that often diverts time away from more strategic analysis and slows down decision-making,” said Goldberg. “To address this challenge, the latest updates to NetSuite EPM help finance teams leverage powerful AI innovations to help increase efficiency, expand insights and enable more time to be spent on value-added activities.”
NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro planned updates
In addition, Oracle NetSuite plans to deliver a new AI-powered extension to its project management solution, NetSuite SuiteProjects.
Aimed mainly at project managers, the new capacities will include the ability to monitor the health of projects, anticipate and mitigate issues, and prevent delays by proactively calculating and analyzing project risks based on historical data and key metrics; access AI-powered staffing recommendations; use global search, role-specific and actionable task lists, and a visually engaging home page for key metrics, KPIs and charts; and provide a complete project-focused solution and per-user pricing.
“As businesses expand, their needs become more complex, and projects require more intentional monitoring and resourcing to maintain project profitability and meet key milestones,” said Goldberg. “NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro enables project-based businesses to take advantage of the latest advancements in AI to improve the speed of workflows and increase efficiency by automating staffing, scheduling, budget tracking, and billing.”
NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro enhancements are planned to be available within the next 12 months. Current OpenAir customers will automatically experience the benefits of SuiteProjects Pro.
Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite updates
Finally, Oracle NetSuite outlined major new AI capacities to the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite which are intended to help organizations optimize finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing and service. Oracle Cloud ERP now features predictive cash forecasting capabilities using AI models to create prescriptive and continuous daily, weekly or monthly cash forecasts; new narrative reporting capabilities through AI-generated financial performance narratives, variance explanations and commentary on trends impacting the business; and new automated transaction records in Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability which enable business leaders to use AI, classification rules, and sustainability metadata attributes to automatically create activity records and add transactions to a sustainability ledger.
Oracle Cloud HCM now features a “bespoke skills inventory” that lets users gain a complete catalog of their organization’s skills that is always kept up to date and can be modified or refined. HR leaders can also combine enriched skills data with data from across the enterprise and third-party sources.
Oracle Cloud SCM features a new smart operations workbench that helps organizations focus on issues impacting production goals by providing real-time insight into work orders and generative AI-powered shift reporting. In addition, new assisted authoring in Oracle Order Management enables users to leverage generative AI to develop order acknowledgement emails and order change history notes.
Finally, the new AI innovations in Oracle Cloud CX includes assisted authoring capabilities in Oracle Cloud CX, which helps sales teams efficiently engage with buyers by providing AI-generated answers to contract-related questions, emails and activity summaries, and executive summaries for quotes and proposals. In addition, new AI capabilities in Oracle CX Unity detect signals, based on role, title, and aggregated topic engagement, and provide next best action recommendations.
“We are the only enterprise vendor to offer a complete suite of business applications on a fully integrated technology stack — from hardware to database to applications — and an infrastructure that is trusted by leading AI providers and the world’s leading large language models,” said Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications development, Oracle. “This puts us in unique position to help our customers quickly and easily take advantage of the latest AI innovations. The new AI capabilities in Fusion Applications, embedded at no extra cost, will help our customers increase the speed and accuracy of business processes, accelerate decision-making and drive more revenue.”
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.
The
- ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
- ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
- ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
- ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.
The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the
In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an
The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings.
Trump has
Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.
Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an
The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.
Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist
Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time.
“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said.
One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load.
“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai.
Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies.
“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.
However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area.
“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai.
As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales.
“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai.
While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves.
“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”
Many Americans are worried about running out of money in retirement
IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts
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