With the introduction of NetSuite Next, Oracle has added some new features to improve how AI understands user customizations. This post – and more to follow – will focus on a specific AI feature. See our prior post for details about release 2026.2 or Download a Summary of the Platform-wide AI & UX Overhaul.
NARRATIVE INSIGHTS
If you’ve been paying attention to NetSuite’s AI roadmap, you’ve probably noticed the “Generate Insight” button popping up across more and more reports and records. That’s Narrative Insights, Oracle’s GenAI-powered feature that landed in 2026.1 and keeps expanding in 2026.2. As someone who spends every day building custom Suitelets and dashboards for clients, I wanted to break down what this feature actually does, where it’s useful, and where the gaps are.
What Is It?
Narrative Insights uses generative AI to produce plain-language summaries of the report or record you’re looking at. Open a supported report, click “Generate Insight,” and you get a dialog with a written analysis that includes trends, anomalies, risks, opportunities, or just a note that there isn’t enough data to say anything meaningful.
The summaries are dynamic. You’ll get different output each time you run it, even on the same data. The structure and depth vary depending on the report type and what’s in the dataset. Sometimes it surfaces something genuinely useful like a concentration risk in your A/R aging, or a margin trend in your income statement. Other times, the information is generic enough that you could have written it yourself in 30 seconds.
Insights are enabled by default under the AI Preferences page, and an Admin can toggle it off. The AI feature works across all NetSuite regions and system-supported languages, so there’s no geo-gating to worry about.
Where Can You Use It?
Currently, Narrative Insights only works on standard reports. Here’s the current supported list:
- Financial: Income Statement, Comparative Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Comparative Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement, Trial Balance, Budget vs. Actual
- Sales & Order Management: Sales by Item/Customer/Sales Rep (summary and detail), Sales Orders by Item/Customer/Sales Rep (summary and detail), Open Sales Orders, Sales Order Register, Open Return Authorizations, Return Authorizations Register
- Customers/Receivables: A/R Aging Summary, Customers by Sales Rep Summary
- Vendors/Payables: A/P Aging Summary
- Inventory: Inventory Activity Detail, Inventory Back Order Report, Stock Ledger
- Pipeline: Sales Activity by Sales Rep (summary and detail), Total Open Opportunities Detail, Total Open Estimates, Opportunities Won, Pipeline by Sales Rep Summary, Pipeline by Status Summary
- Marketing: Campaign ROI Analysis (summary and detail)
- Payroll: Payroll Summary, Payroll Liabilities
On the record side, you can generate insights on Inventory Items, Credit Memos, Customer Payments, Journal Entries, Customer 360, Invoices, Sales Orders, Estimates, and Cases.
What 2026.2 Adds
The 2026.2 release pushes Narrative Insights into a few new areas. Bank reconciliation now gets AI-generated summaries that flag unmatched transactions, aging items, and exceptions, which is actually useful during close. There’s also a new Intelligent Flux Analysis capability that drafts explanations for account balance variances on the Comparative Income Statement, pulling from the Intelligent Close Manager portlet. If you’re doing month-end close work, that’s a real time-saver compared to manually investigating every variance and writing it up.
Labor Cost Insights, another 2026.2 addition, combines payroll data with financials to generate summaries of labor trends, profitability, and workforce costs. Useful for services firms and anyone tracking labor as a major cost driver.
Narrative Insights is a solid first step, but it’s not replacing the custom reporting work we do for clients. The “standard reports only” limitation is significant. Most NetSuite users run heavily customized financial reports, and those are exactly the reports where AI summaries would add the most value. The fact that you can’t use this feature on a customized report means it’s most useful for quick, out-of-the-box analysis, not the deep reporting that drives real decisions.
I see real value in a few specific spots:
- A/R and A/P Aging – quickly surfacing concentration risk or aging trends without manually scanning the report
- Customer 360 – getting a one-click summary of a customer’s history before a call or meeting
- Bank Reconciliation (new in 2026.2) – flagging what needs attention during close
- Flux Analysis (new in 2026.2) – drafting variance explanations that would otherwise eat up hours of an accountant’s time
For anything beyond that, we’re still building custom Suitelets with SuiteQL queries, Chart.js visualizations, and, increasingly, the N/llm module and Anthropic API to deliver AI-powered analysis that actually fits the client’s data model. Narrative Insights gives everyone a baseline. Custom builds give you the edge.
Despite its limitations, Narrative Insights is worth enabling and experimenting with. It’s free, it’s already in your instance, and it takes one click. But don’t mistake it for a complete AI strategy. The real power is in combining NetSuite’s native AI features with custom integrations that understand your specific business.
The GYF ERP Solutions Group, an Oracle NetSuite Solutions Partner since 2014, provides a full complement of NetSuite AI Services. Please Contact Us if you need assistance with the new AI features or customizing your NetSuite system to maximize your technology investment.
Related Posts:
Release 2026.2 and NetSuite Next Introduce Advanced AI Functionality
