NetLease - AI Sidebar IT Security

Overview

The NetLease AI Sidebar is an optional AI-powered assistant embedded within the NetSuite interface. It assists users in creating and updating lease records by analyzing uploaded lease documents and suggesting field values, and can answer questions about the lease record in context. This article summarizes the security profile of the AI Sidebar feature for IT and security teams evaluating it for use within their organization.

All AI processing is routed through a single external endpoint: the Netgain LLM Gateway. The NetSuite SuiteApp does not communicate directly with any AI model vendor. The gateway authenticates the request, applies usage limits, and routes it to the configured model provider. The current model configuration is Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 as the primary model for all sidebar agents.

Feature Enablement and Access Control

The AI Sidebar is an opt-in feature and is not active by default. Two things must be in place before it is available to any user:

1. A NetSuite administrator must check the AI Assistant setting on the NetLease Global Settings record. This setting is unchecked by default.
2. The account must complete AI setup, which provisions gateway credentials (client ID and secret) stored on the Global Settings record. These credentials are held server-side only and are restricted to specific NetLease server scripts — they are never sent to the browser.

Once enabled at the account level, access to the AI Sidebar is governed by standard NetSuite role and permission controls. Only users who have access to Lease records within NetLease will encounter the AI Sidebar. No separate role or permission is introduced specifically for the AI Sidebar; it inherits the access controls already applied to the lease workflow. 

While most actions performed by the AI will execute under the requesting user’s own NetSuite permissions, server tool Suitelets and some other scripts use “Run as Administrator”. So it is possible for a user to not have access to “lease payment” record for example and the tool to still read from it as an administrator.

Any sidebar user can open a Field Settings panel to adjust which non-restricted fields the AI can read or write. These adjustments are stored in the user's own browser (localStorage) — they are per-user, per-browser preferences, not an account-wide policy.

What Data Is Sent to the Netgain LLM Gateway

All AI Sidebar traffic flows over HTTPS from the user's browser to the Netgain LLM Gateway, authenticated with a short-lived access token issued through the user's NetSuite session (see Considerations below). The following categories of data are transmitted:

Documents. Files the user uploads — and files already attached to the lease record, if the user selects one for analysis — are transmitted to the gateway unmodified. No OCR or document processing occurs in the NetSuite account; document parsing happens within the gateway before content is provided to the AI model. Document extraction is not limited to a fixed handful of fields: the extractable set matches the Write-level fields on the lease record (roughly forty header fields, including lease name, lease type, vendor, currency, commencement and end dates, incremental borrowing rate, initial payment amounts, incentives, residual guarantee, payment frequency and timing, and uplift terms) plus payment schedule lines.

Conversation messages. Anything the user types into the sidebar is sent to the gateway, and conversation history is retained there (see Data Retention).

Lease record data. The AI reads the open lease record through a controlled set of tools (for example, reading current field values, payment schedule lines, or dropdown options). These tools execute in the user's browser against the record on screen, and their results are filtered by the field access tiers before transmission: only fields at the Read or Write level are ever returned. Restricted and None fields are removed in the browser and never reach the gateway. There is no user- or administrator-facing setting that disables record data sharing while the sidebar is in use — the field access tiers control which fields are shared, and disabling the AI Sidebar is the only way to share none.

Whitelisted server tool results. On existing lease records, the AI can invoke a small set of specific server tools (for example, retrieving the lease's amortization schedule). These execute inside NetSuite under the requesting user's own permissions, and only their results are shared.

User identity. The user's email address is sent to the gateway to create and retrieve their conversations, and the NetSuite account ID is used for authentication and routing. No NetSuite password, session cookie, or other credential is ever transmitted.

Optional NetSuite connector. The sidebar offers an opt-in, per-user OAuth connection that lets the AI call NetSuite query tools beyond the open lease record (used, for example, to look up chart-of-accounts values). This is off unless the individual user explicitly connects it, and everything it can access is bounded by that user's own NetSuite permissions. Organizations that do not want this capability should instruct users not to connect it and not include the OAuth permissions on user roles; it is not enabled by the AI Sidebar setting itself.

Field Access Levels

The AI Sidebar enforces a four-tier field access model that controls what the AI can see and modify on a lease record:

Custom fields added to the lease record (by the customer's own administrators) are automatically discovered and made available to the AI at the Write level by default. Organizations that add sensitive custom fields to the lease record should review this behavior and adjust field access in the Field Settings panel accordingly.

Data Retention and Storage

• Uploaded lease documents: Files processed by the AI Sidebar can be saved to the NetSuite File Cabinet and attached to the lease record. For lease records this option defaults to on; the user can deselect it at upload time, in which case the file is not persisted in NetSuite. Independently of this option, the file is transmitted to the Netgain LLM Gateway for processing.
• Data retained on the gateway: Uploaded documents and conversation messages are processed by the Netgain LLM Gateway. Conversation history is retained for 24 hours and then expires.
• Data sent to model providers: The gateway routes requests to Anthropic (Claude) and Oracle GenAI. Under both providers' standard API terms, submitted data is not used to train their models by default. Organizations should review the current data processing terms of both providers against their own requirements. 
• Browser-local data: The user's browser caches a short-lived gateway access token and the user's Field Settings overrides in browser localStorage. Lease documents and conversation content are not persisted in the browser.
• Telemetry and feedback: If a user submits feedback from within the AI Sidebar, a feedback record is transmitted to the Netgain telemetry endpoint. The account ID, user email, sidebar agent and mode, and feedback text are all included in the transmission. No lease document content or personal financial data is included in feedback submissions.

Considerations

• The AI Sidebar operates within the authenticated NetSuite user session. To communicate with the gateway, the browser is issued a short-lived, scoped access token by a NetLease server script; the account's gateway credentials (client ID, secret, and product key) remain server-side and are never exposed to end users.
• The AI's reach is limited to the lease record in context, the fields permitted by the field access configuration, and the specific whitelisted tools configured for that screen — all executing under the user's own NetSuite permissions. The AI has been instructed not to browse the NetSuite account at large and to limit all interaction to NetLease and lease accounting. Be aware that Netgain does not control the AI specifically though and if given a valid reason, it could attempt to write queries to access information outside the scope of NetLease records, for example Vendor Bills.
• All AI-suggested field values are presented for review before being applied. The confirmation step shows each field's current value alongside the proposed value, warns when a non-empty value would be overwritten, and lets the user include or exclude each field individually before anything is written to the record.

Limitations/Callouts

• Netgain does not control the data retention or processing policies of the underlying model providers (Anthropi or Oracle GenAI).  Organizations in regulated industries or with strict data residency requirements should independently review those providers' terms before enabling this feature.
• Enabling the AI Sidebar at the global configuration level makes the feature available to all users who have access to Lease records. There is no mechanism to enable the feature for a subset of roles without customizing NetSuite role permissions on the underlying record types.
• Field Settings adjustments are stored per user, per browser. They are a convenience control, not a centrally administered policy.