Summary: Zoe is Zone's agentic orchestration layer. Customers will engage with Zoe AI agents, like Subscription Intelligence. Use this article to find answers to frequently asked questions about Subscription Intelligence, the Zoe AI agent for ZoneBilling.
Other articles:
- Zone Control Center FAQ
- AP Intelligence FAQ (ZoneCapture & ZoneApprovals) - coming soon!
- Cash Intelligence FAQ (ZoneReconcile) - coming soon!
Costs & Query Tracking
Is Subscription Intelligence a free tool within Zone Control Center?
ZoneBilling customers have access to Subscription Intelligence, with their current ZoneBilling account, and this includes a fair usage ceiling to protect against overuse and abuse of queries. ZoneBilling customers may opt to pay for a higher number of queries.
All users will be notified when the company has reached 50% of their query usage for their plan, whether the free tier or another.
If you have questions about your own usage or your company’s use, please contact your administrator.
Are Subscription Intelligence queries tracked for each customer or for the company?
The queries used on any Zoe AI agent (including Subscription Intelligence) are tracked at the company level. All customers will be notified next time they use Zoe once their company has reached 50%, 80%, 90%, and 100% of their queries.
How can I track how many Subscription Intelligence queries I have used and if my company needs to upgrade to a paid tier?
Subscription Intelligence use is measured by the total number of queries made. In other words, every time you hit “enter” or “return”, that counts as a query.
At this time, we do not provide a dashboard to track your query use as an individual or a company.
A notification will pop-up once a company/account has used 50% of their queries. (This includes customers using the free tier.) This notification will be shown to all users when they open Subscription Intelligence. Another pop-up will show at 80%, 90%, and then 100%.
If you want to upgrade your account, please connect with your administrator and/or your Zone account team.
What happens if I run out of queries and will I be informed about this?
Yes, a notification will pop-up if you run out of queries and you will no longer be able to submit new queries. This will prevent unforeseen charges.
Please contact your administrator and/or Zone account team to talk about adding queries to your company’s accounts.
Use Cases & Metrics
What are some best practices for using Subscription Intelligence?
Subscription Intelligence is currently unable to provide business metrics but is able to provide operational metrics. Read more about the metrics Subscription Intelligence is currently able to use here.
- Always use date ranges, which are critical for filtering and also speed up response times.
- Bill Date is the key field used to determine when charges are scheduled.
- When writing inquiries, be specific; clear, focused questions product better results than broad questions
- Review queries for unexpected responses to ensure Subscription Intelligence used your data in the way you expected
- Ask follow-up questions to refine responses and summarize results in the way that’s most useful to you
- Start fresh if needed: Most context resets with each new chat, so if the interpretations of your questions have gone in a different direction than you wanted, start a new chat to reset contextual settings.
- Ask what Zoe remembers: Zoe creates a notebook about you that remembers key information. You can add to this by asking her to remember your preferences, workflows, role, etc. However you can also ask Zoe what she remembers about you and then delete or adjust that information periodically. Each users will manage Zoe's memories from their interactions.
What are some use cases for Subscription Intelligence?
Zoe is designed around the questions your team already asks every day, just without the manual reporting. Common use cases include:
- Identifying overdue balances and outstanding invoices
- Reviewing upcoming renewals and subscription timelines
- Understanding charge activity and billing schedules
- Investigating billing gaps during month-end close
- Surfacing items that may need attention before operational reviews
- Exporting billing data for further analysis in spreadsheets or BI tools
- Identifying high-risk and high-usage customers
- Identifying customers at risk of churn
- Drilling down into subsidiary hierarchy without running reports
- Running leakage analyses
- Identifying late payment risks
What metrics can and can't I use with Subscription Intelligence ?
The current scope of Subscription Intelligence is limited to operational metrics and will not include business metrics or data visualizations. This is because the use of business metrics is too variable across companies to provide a consistently accurate experience for our customers.
Future enhancements will include a ‘customized KPI’ feature, which will allow customers to define their own metrics for use.
Subscription Intelligence can currently use the following operational metrics:
- Subscription Intelligence uses specific fields sourced from Saved Searches on Charge records to provide real-time snapshots of a subscription's financial status:
- Amount Billed: The total sum of charges that have successfully been placed on NetSuite transactions.
- Amount Pending Billing: The total of charges from past periods up through today that have not yet been invoiced.
- Future Billing: The total of charges that have Bill Dates scheduled after the current date.
- Amount Forecast: The overall forecasted value of upcoming charges.
Context & Queries
Will Subscription Intelligence use previous engagement with a customer for contextual awareness or context management?
Yes, but in a two different ways. With a single session or “conversation”, Zoe will remember each interaction, making it easy to follow-up.
Most of the contextual awareness will reset each time a new chat is opened - unless customers ask Zoe to remember critical information such as preferences, account specific details, or workflows.
A customer’s chat history does not need to be cleared to “reset” the contextual awareness for each new session or conversation.
What can Zoe "remember" between conversations?
Zoe builds a personal notebook about each customer, including preferences, account specific details, and workflows. This means that you don't need to re-explain their setup each time they start a new chat. And answers are tailored to your preferences.
Zoe can remember key things such as your role and responsibilities, preferences for answer format and detail level, quirks about your setup, and the type of work you complete.
How can I help Zoe remember information?
While Zoe will pick up on patterns and draw her own conclusions, you can help control what she remembers by asking her to remember critical information during a normal conversation. Her memory is yours to manage, so if your role changes, preferences shift, or responses aren't quite what you're expecting - ask "what do you remember about me"? Then correct anything that's off by asking to delete specific memories or clear everything and start fresh.
Does Subscription Intelligence have contextual knowledge around different NetSuite and ZoneBilling data fields?
Subscription Intelligence was built with an understanding of NetSuite and ZoneBilling data architecture. Find more information under architecture.
When customers engage with Subscription Intelligence, the implementation documentation, field types, and field names are used to provide context in addition to the innate Netsuite and ZoneBilling schema used to build Zoe.
How-To Questions
Is there a way to remove inquiries or chat history?
Yes, within the Subscription Intelligence chat, there is an option to delete all history. At the top of the chat the most recent inquiry is listed, click the carrot ‘V’ to open a view of all inquiries.
Note Zone retains queries and responses for 90 days before automatic deletion and if required, your company may officially request a manual deletion.
Can anyone else in my company see my inquiries?
No, within a company, no one can view the Zoe queries from other employees.
Queries and responses are retained in Zone’s AWS for 90 days before automatic deletion, however if a company requires an earlier deletion, the data may be manually deleted from AWS.
Why can I only use Subscription Intelligence within Zone Control Center?
Subscription Intelligence is part of Zoe by Zone, our agentic orchestration tool built on Zone’s unified platform, Zone Control Center.
To use Subscription Intelligence across ZoneBilling, make sure to open ZoneBilling portlets within Zone Control Center using the side navigation tool. This will allow you to open Subscription Intelligence on the pages you need.
What "counts" as a query for Zoe AI Agents?
We have defined a query as any time you submit a question to the Zoe AI Agent, regardless of the response.
Can I turn off Zone Control Center and/or Zoe?
Yes, Zoe can be turned off by your ZoneBilling administration within the ZoneBilling main configuration settings. If Zoe is turned off, customers can still use Zone Control Center. However, if Zone Control Center is uninstalled, Zoe cannot be used. This is because Zoe is only available on the Zone Control Center unified platform.
A ZoneBilling administrator can turn off Zoe for the entire organization (Zoe can not be turned off for a single user) by navigating to Settings by clicking on “Settings” at the bottom of the left bar menu. Select “Company Setup” at the top of the Preferences side bar menu. In the middle of the screen, use the drop down for “Enable Zoe AI for my organization.” Select “Do not allow”.
Can I turn off Zoe AI Agents for a single user?
No, Zoe AI Agents are turned on (or off) for the entire company. However, only users with the required permissions can use the Zoe AI Agents like Subscription Intelligence (see details here).
Trusting Subscription Intelligence
How trustworthy are Subscription Intelligence responses?
Zoe by Zone is an agentic orchestration layer, meaning she uses a fleet of agents to answer your questions, however, questions can often be interpreted differently. When using AI, always verify critical information independently.
Subscription Intelligence is Zoe's AI agent for ZoneBilling.
To help provide trusted responses, Subscription Intelligence offers these three methods to validate responses:
- Subscription Intelligence uses deterministic AI rather than generative AI like ChatGPT or Claude. Deterministic AI operates using defined rules and structure, which provides consistent and accurate responses to queries. This means that Zoe AI Agents are less flexible for a friendly chat, but significantly more trustworthy as a source to query about your data.
- Subscription Intelligence will ask clarifying questions when an inquiry may be interpreted in different ways.
- In addition to providing a short response to each inquiry, Subscription Intelligence provides an extended summary which often includes information about limitations and explanations for terms being used.
- When Subscription Intelligence is unable to answer a question, she tells you directly and suggests other things she can help with.
- Subscription Intelligence is ‘explainable AI’, which means that after the response to each question, she provides a Suite QL query, which shows how she executed her analysis to provide a response. This helps customers validate that Subscription Intelligence is using their data the way they expect.
- Subscription Intelligence was built for ZoneBilling customers, using foundational NetSuite and ZoneBilling data, information, and logic.
Why did the same question provide two different responses?
There are several possibilities why this may happen.
- Responses from Subscription Intelligence may vary if they were asked on separate dates because both ZoneBilling and Subscription Intelligence use real-time data, meaning that the data is continually updating. For example, if the inquiry refers to overdue bills, this number may change as bills are paid throughout the day or as more bills get added.
- Responses may vary if Subscription Intelligence used different data to answer the questions. In this case, referring to the Query QL will help determine how Subscription Intelligence answered the question in both cases. This may occur if the question is worded differently enough to imply a new meaning. For example, asking the total number of unpaid bills vs. the total number of overdue bills. Alternatively, Subscription Intelligence may also interpret questions slightly differently in unique cases based on the context gained from previous questions. For example, if all previous questions referred to month-to-date data, then Subscription Intelligence may default the next question to using month-to-date data even if no date is provided. Whereas, in another instance, contextual awareness within a conversation may have led Subscription Intelligence to default to year-to-date data based on the previous queries in the conversation. In both cases, reviewing the Query QL as well as asking follow-up questions will help explain any differences.
Architecture & Security
What fields can Subscription Intelligence pull data from to answer inquiries?
Subscription Intelligence can pull data from any NetSuite records and ZoneBilling custom records that the user has permission to access. This includes customer data, subscription data, charge data, usage data, and ZoneBilling custom records, and more.
However, Subscription Intelligence is limited by each customer’s role and permissions. For example, if the customer has a limited view within NetSuite and ZoneBilling, then Subscription Intelligence is only able to use the information available to that customer given their role and permissions.
Subscription Intelligence agent is trained as a billing expert, with structured logic and billing context provide finance-grade results on billing and revenue recognition questions. Other Zoe AI agents will have logic and context within their subject matter areas, such as accounts payable.
What does Subscription Intelligence data architecture look like?
Subscription Intelligence will mimic the same data architecture used by ZoneBilling.
ZoneBilling manages subscriptions through a hierarchical record structure where Subscriptions contain one or more Subscription Items, which in turn generate Charges that lead to billing.
- Subscriptions: top-level record that tracks a customer’s ongoing service agreement, includes key dates like Start Date and End Date
- Subscriptions can include many subscription items: individual line items that define what gets billed, reference a NetSuite item record and include rate, quantity, and term information.
- Each subscription item includes a Rate Type which determines how charges will be calculated, such as fixed, one-time charge, usage/variable, and prepaid.
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The rate type for each subscription item determines the charges using the formula:
Charge = quantity x term multiplier x rate
What are the permissions for Subscription Intelligence and how are they enforced to mimic what users have access to within NetSuite already?
The data available to Subscription Intelligence mimic’s each customer’s access within NetSuite and ZoneBilling. Therefore if a user is limited by region or subsidiary or any other factor, the data available to answer each question will reflect those restrictions.
How was Subscription Intelligence built? Have technical architecture and data privacy regulations been included?
Subscription Intelligence was built using a Claude 4.5 via AWS Bedrock. To accurately interpret financial data, it utilizes a semantic intelligence layer that translates natural business language (such as "charge schedule", “charge type”, or "per term") into structured SuiteQL queries.
What is the technical architecture behind Subscription Intelligence?
The system architecture operates across two primary environments: 1) an interface embedded directly within each customer’s NetSuite environment via Zone Control Center. 2) a multi-tenant AI orchestration platform hosted on AWS regional infrastructure.
When a user submits a query, it flows from the conversational UI interface to the AWS-hosted Zoe AI agent (Subscription Intelligence), which constructs the appropriate SuiteQL and executes it against NetSuite. The agent retrieves the data, processes it through the LLM, and streams a conversational summary back to the NetSuite UI. If the query returns more than 15 rows of data, the complete dataset is exported to secure AWS S3 storage, allowing the user to download it directly as a CSV file.
What data and data privacy regulations are being followed?
- Regulatory Compliance: The system aligns with GDPR and other European data privacy regulations, and legal reviews include awareness of the EU AI Act. It is also compliant with SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II.
- Data Residency: AWS infrastructure is regionally deployed in the US (us-east-1) and the EU (eu-west-1) to meet data residency requirements, ensuring all processing and storage occurs entirely within the assigned region.
- No AI Model Training: Customer data and prompts are strictly prohibited from being used to train public or proprietary AI models.
- Enforced Role-Based Data Access: Subscription Intelligence enforces NetSuite's existing role-based access controls; users can only query data they are authorized to view. Furthermore, conversation memory is isolated per user and per role to prevent cross-contamination of restricted data.
- Authentication: NetSuite access credentials (bearer tokens via OAuth 2.0) are passed on a per-request basis and are never persistently stored by the AI agent.
- Data Retention: Zone enforces an automatic retention policy where conversation histories, operational logs, and S3 data exports are automatically deleted after 90 days. Customers can also request custom, shorter retention periods or ad-hoc manual deletion.
- Encryption: Customer data is protected by TLS/HTTPS encryption in transit and S3 server-side encryption at rest.
What kind of API is used and how do we know it's secure?
Zoe AI agents interact with NetSuite using API calls to an embedded integration that executes read-only SuiteQL queries via a RESTlet. The connection between the client's NetSuite environment and the Zoe AI platform utilizes a Secure API.
The system employs several rigorous measures to ensure this API connection and its data flow remain highly secure which can be viewed on the Zone Trust Center.