February 2, 2026

An Inside Peek at a Namos User Group Event

Author: Anna Sargent, Payroll Consultant, Namos Solutions

If you’ve ever wondered what a Namos User Group Event is really like, and what actually happens on the day, here’s an inside peek.

Our user group events are designed for our customers. They’re a space to step away from day‑to‑day delivery, connect with peers, hear directly from Oracle, and have open, honest conversations about what’s working, what is challenging, and what’s coming next. No sales pitches. Just practical insights, shared experiences, and meaningful dialogue.

Setting the Scene

The day kicked off with a welcome from Richard Clayton (Chief Operating Officer, Namos Solutions), who thanked everyone for taking the time to attend and set the tone for the event: the real value lies in the power of the user community, networking, idea‑sharing, and open feedback. Honest input (good, bad, or indifferent) is essential. As Rich put it, if we don’t listen to what users want and need, we won’t improve.

The agenda for the afternoon’s User Group was centred on Customer Success Navigator and AI. To get everyone thinking, the room was asked a simple but powerful question: “If you could replace any part of your role with AI, what would it be?”

With around 90% of AI projects currently failing because they don’t deliver real business value, the message was clear: AI must be purpose driven, and we must be wary of the difference between meaningful AI and what Rich described as “vanity AI.”

Customer Success Navigator – A Customer Perspective

The first agenda item focused on Oracle Customer Success Navigator (CSN), led by Sasha Phillips (Customer Engagement Director, Namos Solutions) and Nadia Martin, (Oracle Product Operations Manager, University of Greenwich).

While CSN is often explained from a partner or Oracle perspective, this session was all about the customer experience.

How CSN Works in Practice

Nadia shared how taking the time to familiarise yourself with CSN is key, particularly in understanding how it fits alongside business‑as‑usual activities. One of the biggest draws for the University of Greenwich has been the way CSN personalises content based on your profile and the Oracle products you use, and for them it has been an absolute gamechanger for managing their quarterly releases.

Key features highlighted included:

Ability to search for release items from across multiple releases (going back to 24A) far more easily than traditional readiness documents. This came across as a real standout capability, as you can find items without needing to know which release a feature belongs to. A huge time saver when looking for specific functionality or changes.
Multiple options for filtering items. For example, by release, impact, category (mandatory vs non‑mandatory), module etc.
Options to share items directly via email, which The University of Greenwich have been using to direct-share impactful items with Subject Matter Experts in their business.
The ability to tag items and add them to a Roadmap. Feedback from customers is often that they feel they aren’t always able to leverage the full benefit of new features as often they may not be ready to adopt non-mandatory features when the release drops but may want to come back to the feature in future. The ability to essentially bookmark these items into a Roadmap will support customers with this challenge.
Sorting and personalisation to tailor your review of new features, which can also be downloaded to Excel.
Certain key items linking to feature videos that provide an in-depth look at the new or changing functionality

Collaboration, Feedback, and Roadmapping

The second part of the session on CSN was delivered by Johnny Needham (Cloud Adoption Director, Customer Success Services, Oracle) and Pete Gutteridge-Paye (VP of Delivery, Namos Solutions).

Johnny offered valuable insights into what is coming next for CSN and demonstrated (live!) how Oracle are keen to collaborate with customers to optimise CSN, by taking feedback and suggestions from attendees in the room. There was discussion around future enhancements too, including:

Personalised milestone journeys
Improving CSN capabilities for managing projects and programmes. Johnny was keen to highlight that customer focus groups are influencing Oracle’s roadmap for CSN.
Roadmap automation, with releases updating automatically
Customer dashboards tied to production profiles
More granular, feature level permissions to support wider SME involvement
Enhanced notification frameworks
Industry starter configurations and AI driven recommendations
A consolidated FDI Adoption Centre to bring release readiness into a single view
The March 2026 major release, focusing on foundational improvements such as navigation and homepage enhancements

Johnny asked attendees who confirmed they are using CSN: “What has CSN done for you so far?”, the feedback was resoundingly that it was an improved way to manage and track quarterly releases, but also noted was: easier resourcing and clearer communication with senior stakeholders, it’s a tool that partners can easily pick up during QBRs, and improved collaboration with SMEs, reducing the risk of missing non‑mandatory but valuable features.

As Johnny neatly summarised, there are three ways to manage releases:

Sophisticated management via DevOps methodology
Spreadsheets
Hopes and prayers

The overwhelming feeling in the room was that CSN will provide support for organisations at each of these maturity levels, with customers able to choose the features of CSN that are useful to them now in their current state.

Pete then walked attendees through using AI assist in CSN by giving a live demo, taking (some very challenging!) questions from the audience to test the functionality. AI Assist in CSN is an embedded, generative‑AI–powered guide that answers natural-language questions. The AI can make personalised, context‑aware recommendations and supports roadmap planning, milestone tracking, feature analysis, and best‑practice adoption—all directly within the main Navigator interface, imbedded in these pages: Home page, Feature Innovation, Oracle Modern Best Practice, Adoption Roadmaps and Cloud Quality Standards.

AI Assist was tested with queries including:

“What’s due this month?”
“Which items have QBR tags?”
“What new features in 26A include privilege changes?”
“Identify mandatory features and add items to Roadmap plan”
“Produce a summary of this feature that I can share with stakeholders”

Pete gave some tips and tricks for using AI Assist in CSN:

Be clear and specific – provide as much detail and context as you can to improve the quality of response
Break down complex requests into smaller, sequential requests

AI in Practice – Beyond the Theory

Next up, Sharon West (Principal Solutions Engineer, Oracle) took a broader look at AI across Oracle HCM and then Dipak Patel (Business Development Director, Namos Solutions) led the group through productive round-table discussions on questions that focused on ‘AI in the real world’.

Sharon gave an in-system demonstration of some different AI use cases in HCM, including candidate suggestions, job description creation, AI-Assistant created journeys, and how AI Agents can be used in conjunction with Activity Centers.

A consistent theme emerged: what are the applications of AI in Oracle that will truly add value for customers in their business-as-usual. Sharon was keen to point out that what is value to one organisation won’t be of value to another, so the message is clear: take the benefits from the bits that will add value to what you do and leave anything that doesn’t add value for you!

Shortly after, the session divided into breakout groups to discuss key questions on AI use cases, adoption and challenges. Each group consisted of customers from a mixture of organisations and fields, Namos consultants and representatives from across other functions in Namos (for example, HR), who added their valuable take on what AI adoption looks like inside an Oracle Partner Organisation.

Questions positioned to the group centred on:

AI in the Workplace
What Pain Points Can AI Resolve Today
No Limits / Blue‑Sky Vision for AI

Key themes emerged from across the groups, with customers wanting:

Radical reduction in admin, in areas including service desk responses, approvals, reconciliations, fraud checks and data validation.
Data quality you can trust — “exception‑only” operating model.
Governed AI: accuracy, explainability, Role Based Access Control, usage policy, human‑in‑loop, inclusivity.
Data Quality & Purging automation (esp. for Recruiting Candidates and document/data retention) with rules & context checks.
AI validation accelerators for Payroll, Data Subject Access Requests and HESA
Predictive analytics for emergency services & workforce trends.

As well as positioning some fantastic ‘real-world’ use cases, the discussion was hugely beneficial as it allowed customers to have face-to-face time with each other to compare operating models, approaches and challenges. Namos consultants also got to give out some hints and tips (both AI and non-AI!) to customers on any existing pain-points.

Why Namos User Group Events Matter

The day rounded off with well-earned drinks, refreshments and a good old chat. For us at Namos this is one of our favourite parts of the day, getting to know our customers better and checking in on anything and everything (professional and personal!)

Namos User Group events aren’t about presentations for presentation’s sake. They’re about: