Ask Oracle Custom Instructions and Chat Controls

Ask Oracle custom instructions save guidance for your user and current role, with a 4,000-character limit and validation before saving. Use them for recurring responsibilities and response preferences; use prompt context, skills, agents, and documents for specific requests. Conversation controls let you refine answers, resume discussions, and review how responses were produced.

How Do Custom Instructions Apply to Your Chats?

Custom instructions provide ongoing response guidance for your current role. Rather than explaining your responsibilities or preferred presentation in every conversation, save those preferences once. Ask Oracle then applies the saved guidance when responding in your chats.

Instructions are specific to both your user and your role. For someone working under multiple roles, the practical implication is to review guidance for each relevant role rather than assume one set of instructions applies everywhere. Instructions describing one person's responsibilities should not be treated as an account-wide standard.

The documentation describes how these controls work but does not identify when custom instructions or the surrounding conversation features were introduced.

How Do You Save Custom Instructions?

1. Open Settings in Ask Oracle.
2. Select Add custom instructions.
3. Enter or update your response instructions.
4. Save your changes.

Useful guidance describes your work responsibilities, recurring business context, or preferred answer format. For example, you might request a concise explanation followed by a table when comparing information. Treat this as a preference to review in the resulting answer, not a guarantee that every request can be fulfilled.

After saving, try a representative question and check whether the response reflects your preferences. If the instructions no longer suit your work, update them or delete them and save again.

When Should You Use Context, Skills, or Agents Instead?

Custom instructions are ongoing guidance. Context supplies reference information for a prompt, skills add instructions for specialized or repeatable tasks, and agents provide capabilities for supported business workflows. Keeping these purposes separate helps avoid putting temporary record details into instructions intended for every chat.

Add specific reference context

To attach context before sending a prompt:

1. Open Ask Oracle and select the + icon below the input field.
2. Choose whether to add context, apply a skill, or work with an agent.
3. Search for an item, such as a record, report, or saved search.
4. Add the item, enter your prompt, and submit.

Context can also include uploaded files or an @ mentioned agent or skill. Ask Oracle uses the selected material to interpret and answer the request. You can add up to five context items per chat.

Select information deliberately: context helps identify the information Ask Oracle should use and makes context-sensitive requests more predictable. Persistent instructions can describe how you prefer an answer presented, while selected context identifies reference material for the request.

Apply repeatable business guidance

Select Add context, skills, and more, choose the option to apply a skill or work with an agent, select one, and submit your prompt. Review the resulting answer.

Skills guide specialized or recurring questions. Examples include payment prioritization with ranked reasoning, close-readiness checks, overdue accounts receivable analysis, liquidity reviews, and executive sales briefings. In accounts payable, skills can support vendor-credit application and identify bill-handling bottlenecks. In receivables and close, they can highlight collections targets, blockers, and higher-risk items.

Ask Oracle skills are distinct from SuiteCloud Agent Skills, which are platform-agnostic skills designed for third-party coding assistants such as Codex, Claude Code, and Cline.

Check agent access and availability

Agents can find information, analyze data, and help complete supported workflows. Some capabilities operate within Ask Oracle without appearing as separately selectable agents. Others are available on specific NetSuite pages or may guide you to a page where a task should continue.

Availability depends on account setup, enabled features, installed SuiteApps, permissions, and the page in use. Agents use data available to your role; they cannot access records, reports, pages, or actions that your role cannot access. Do not treat custom instructions as a substitute for the required access.

Some agent capabilities are available only in NetSuite Next, which is being made available in phases. In-app notifications indicate account eligibility. Agent responses can contain errors or omissions and do not replace NetSuite records, reports, approval workflows, or your review of results.

How Can You Include Documents?

Before uploading, verify with your administrator that Document Insights is enabled for your role. Also check that you have File Cabinet upload access. Prepare one supported document per chat turn.

Supported extensions are PNG, JPG, JPEG, PDF, TXT, CSV, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, MD, and MARKDOWN.

Open Add context, skills, and more, select Attach file..., and browse to the document. If Ask Oracle reports that the document type is unsupported, select a document with a supported extension and try again.

Submit a request to summarize the document, extract information, or answer a question about its content. Review the response and ask follow-up questions as needed.

Keep the two documented limits distinct: document preparation calls for one supported document per chat turn, while the context limit is five items per chat. These limits use different units and should not be presented interchangeably.

How Do You Refine and Resume Conversations?

Follow-up prompts can request more detail, a shorter answer, additional criteria, or the same information as a table or chart. Ask Oracle may offer options when it needs clarification or recommends a next action. Selecting an option submits your response and continues the chat.

Keep each conversation focused on one topic. Continue an existing conversation when you want to work with its previous messages and context. Start a new conversation when changing topics or retrieving current source data.

Reopening behavior depends on elapsed time:

If you collapse Ask Oracle or switch chats while a response is in progress, a notification appears when the response is ready. Open that notification to return to the updated chat. Ask Oracle also notifies you when it requires approval for an action.

How Do You Find, Pin, and Review Chats?

Ask Oracle keeps conversation history for 90 days. Open Your chats, then scroll through the list or search using part of a chat title. Clear the search field to see all chats again, and open the conversation you want to continue.

Search matches titles only, not messages or other chat details. A term remembered from an answer is therefore useful for this search only if it also appears in the chat title.

For frequently used conversations, open the chat's actions menu and select Pin. Pinned conversations appear at the top in Pinned chats, with the most recently pinned first. Select Unpin to return a conversation to its normal history position. The pinned section disappears when it is empty.

Use Show explanation to inspect additional information about how Ask Oracle answered, including available data sources and processing details. If the answer is unexpected, use the feedback icons and describe the response problem. Your prompt and the related answer are already logged, so the feedback only needs to explain the issue.

Who This Affects

• Ask Oracle users: Maintain instructions for the relevant user and role, attach specific context, and distinguish continued discussions from requests for current source data.
• Administrators: Help verify Document Insights enablement for a role and investigate access prerequisites such as File Cabinet upload access.
• Finance and operational teams: Evaluate skills for recurring AP, AR, close, liquidity, and sales questions, while reviewing recommendations before use.
• Technical support teams: Consider account setup, features, SuiteApps, permissions, and page context when investigating agent availability. Distinguish Ask Oracle skills from SuiteCloud Agent Skills.

Key Takeaways

• Custom instructions apply to your user and current role, allow up to 4,000 characters, and undergo validation before saving.
• Use context for reference information, skills for repeatable task guidance, and agents for supported workflow capabilities.
• Document questions require Document Insights for your role, File Cabinet upload access, and a supported document type.
• Chat history lasts 90 days. Search matches titles only; pinning keeps frequently used conversations at the top of history.
• Review agent responses before use, and start a new conversation when you need current source data.