What's next for NetSuite? CEO Evan Goldberg fields the questions at SuiteConnect NYC

Approximately four months ago, at its Fall 2025 show in Las Vegas, NetSuite unveiled a flurry of announcements and shared how the product line would evolve in the years to come. AI was a very big part of that show. That event featured:

• The AI capabilities that are being incorporated into the NetSuite architecture and applications
• The ways that NetSuite is leveraging hardware, applications, infrastructure and AI capabilities from its parent firm Oracle
• Why the Ask Oracle AI interface will appear everywhere in the NetSuite applications
• Etc.

At that time, diginomica’s Phil Wainewright crafted a fulsome accounting of all of the news from that show. That review can be found here. At the same time, I also penned a lengthy assessment of NetSuite’s progress and what we can expect to see going forward.

Recently, NetSuite hosted an event in New York City that provided some updated information. That event reinforced many of the themes and announcements from last Fall’s conference. NetSuite did have a couple of product announcements at this latest event, but mostly the NYC event added more color and context to their products and plans. For example, we heard more on their AI-assisted smart financial close and their AI-powered joint solution with BILL.  Additionally, we heard about:

• NetSuite Next’s Ad Hoc Dashboards
• Autonomous Close with Close Manager & Exception Management
• Advanced Planning
• Profitability and Cost Management
• Analytics Warehouse Visualizations
• Narrative Insights
• Subscription Metrics
• AI Connector Service
• And more

We also got some time with the founder of a NetSuite customer, called happy, a coffee beverage producer. (As someone who drinks Dr Pepper, I can’t tell how happy stacks up as a beverage but their serial entrepreneur CEO was a delight to listen to...)

Goldberg on the record

We also got a chance to quiz NetSuite’s top executive Evan Goldberg. That interaction was the highlight of the day for me. Here are my picks for Goldberg's most interesting observations/comments, beginning with the question of whether AI will trigger reductions in user count and what the possible impact would be on NetSuite revenues? Goldberg said: 

What we showed today, that's going to increase the number of people that want to use NetSuite within a company. It's like I don't have to do any training. I don't have to learn a complex ERP system. I can just go in and start asking it questions about my part of the business. That's actually going to increase the number of users. Everybody's going to want to use these systems to help them in their job.

But are current NetSuite prospects and customers ready and able to take advantage of AI generally and specifically NetSuite’s AI solutions? This one got a mixed response from the CEO: 

Well, some maybe more than others…people that are really familiar with using these generative AI tools are probably going to be more successful initially because we're using the same technology under the covers. And those of you that have used gen AI  know that you get better at formulating prompts, getting the right response and being able to get successes out of more use.

That will be true for us, but we're trying to continually make the experience more intuitive embedded directly in workflows. So, I don't think it's necessarily technical proficiency in a classic sense that's going to make companies/customers more successful as they adopt this or even be pro-active about adopting it. I think it's more about mindset – the ones that lean in and experiment will be more successful initially.

How radical will the new NetSuite Next, "the biggest update of NetSuite since we founded the company" , according to Goldberg, take things?

A lot of NetSuite Next works exactly like existing NetSuite does as it’s designed to be an extension of how you already work.  All the screens, the pages, they're the same. All your customizations, they just work. Customers have already invested knowledge in NetSuite so NetSuite Next builds on what they know and trust. It's the new things-  accelerating processes with agentic workflows, introducing conversational intelligence with Ask Oracle and embedding AI in ways that simply weren’t possible before - that's where you're going to really see the value.

Switching to NetSuite Next is not automatic , he explained: 

Customers have to request the preview. When it comes time that you can switch, the admins have to say it's okay for their users to start switching now. So, they will have control over that process. Maybe it will be a little more user-driven because we're going to give users the ability to basically alert their admins that they would like to try NetSuite Next. Admins will see the demand if it's not coming through emails, Slack, or whatever. But ultimately, the admin has control over that…There will be a lot of control that admins have about who within their organization switches to Next and at what time. But again, it’s still NetSuite. It's still all your customizations. And the other thing is that it's a lot easier for employees to figure out how to do things in NetSuite Next.

The Agent conversation

Should users, consultants, IT or NetSuite build intelligence into the agents? How about built-in intelligence in longer agent to agent workflows? Goldberg's view: 

You know, we realize that a lot of the intelligence in the system has to be built into the agents. You can't just sort of have this generic all-knowing thing.  When it comes to dealing with the complexity of business and where you have to do real work, you can't be mostly right. You need these agents that are really tuned to be accurate and, to the largest degree possible, mistake-free.

Customers will have to adapt to changing business requirements. How, and should this logic exist in AI Agents, traditional applications, etc. and how will the code be generated? As per Goldberg: 

Every time your company changes, you're going to have to have a system trying to figure out, ‘Oh, what's the best way for us to handle this?’ One approach is to vibe-code it and see if it works and then try it again, if it doesn’t. Or the alternative is you click one checkbox in NetSuite and it says now I need advanced procurement. I think that's always going to be a better alternative for every company. I mean, not just companies in the industry but also for low-tech companies today. Having structured capabilities that are already embedded in the application rather than reinventing them each time will be faster, safer and more scalable for all types of companies.

Oracle's role

In all this, is Ask Oracle the key trigger for these agent and multi-agent workflows? Goldberg explains: 

Ask Oracle becomes sort of an orchestrator of those agents rather than doing the work itself. So, when you ask Ask Oracle to do something, it can say, ‘oh, I have an agent to do this’.

Goldberg also clarified if users will interact directly with agents and some agents will act on a user’s behalf without user prompting and some agents will trigger other agents to execute:

You can talk directly to the agent, but those agents are going to need to work together within NetSuite, and some of those agents are going to have to work with agents outside of NetSuite. We're definitely trying to do a crawl, walk, run kind of approach.  I think our partners and our more sophisticated customers are the ones that are going to push the envelope and try things. They will come back to us with feedback on what works and what still needs work.

AI is moving so fast, and businesses are trying to figure out how to harness it. And even the minute you do figure out how to harness it, something new comes out. When we have AI building AI, it's going to be maybe even more dramatic. I don't have all the answers, but what we do have is 43,000 customers, a lot of whom are very proactive about using AI. We built our company on people being early adopters because they were the early adopters in the cloud. I think our scale is our strength there.

New application ideation

The opportunity is now on offeer to come up with all-new applications that no-one ever envisioned before because they weren't economically or technically viable at the time. That begs the questions of how NetSuite is coming up with those, and what is the primary research engine or innovation it's using? Goldberg responds: 

You can write the code really fast now. But having users use it, give you feedback, figure out what part of it works, what doesn't, what you should be adding, what you shouldn't be adding, etc. That kind of thing is still going to take time and customer feedback. A lot of building great technology is about choosing what not to add. This idea that magically a company with three developers is going to be able to build a system that's as wide-ranging and complex as NetSuite and have it work perfectly the first time is unrealistic. (emphasis added 

But AI does give us the opportunity to build things more quickly, that's for sure. And we'll still have to go through that whole process of making sure we build the right things, but it will definitely make it easier to get that first version built as we'll be able to get more productivity out of all of our engineers. Our partners will be able to build SuiteApps way easier. It’s also going to get better for our SDN partners that don't have the resources of NetSuite. 

I think the partner solutions that come out of AI-powered coding are going to be incredible. We have partners that specialize in an industry and while they are busy implementing customers, they would love to take a lot of what they do and just build it into a software product that they can sell and then implement. 

This will change how NetSuite is used because it's going to be used much more heavily than ever before (even though it's already used very heavily). I think it's super-exciting. I don't know what's going to transpire from this but it's going to be a different velocity and a different sort of breadth of more vertical solutions and more niche applications.

Building an app, a true app on top of NetSuite, rather than just like adding things in the NetSuite system - an app that uses NetSuite as its core repository of data - is definitely going to get a lot easier.

There are some in the software space who are opining that new AI apps now have the ability to make an individual employee 10 times more productive than they are today. But the only way that works is you've got to be able to surround them with a whole bunch of new things that haven't existed before and where agents are doing all the back-end actions supporting them. These new apps can be big long multi-threaded chains of agents, some with circular loops and the like. What this may imply is that we're about to see a proliferation of new agent-based, headless, composable applications. 

So, how does NetSuite monetize that, assuming that it will create these and make them available? Goldberg says: 

Well, our focus right now is on getting the users the functionality that is going to help make them more productive, automating things, giving better insights, and making it easier to adapt NetSuite.

Our number one job is to give AI power to as many of our users, have them use it effectively, and give us feedback on how we can make it better. Do that loop for a while and sort of see where things turn.

Pricing in an age of AI 

Along with parent company Oracle, NetSuite has made core AI capabilities a piece of the application tech stack at no additional cost and only charge extra for some special AI functionality when warranted. The question now is whether that is that going to change with NetSuite Next? Goldberg says that nothing has changed in terms of how NetSuite prices: 

We're trying to build a system for the long haul, which means we’re focused on delivering the most value for our customers. Our approach is making it quicker and easier for customers to adopt AI in an environment they know and trust.

In terms of implementations, his thinking is clear: 

Customers want implementations to be of course fast and cheap. With AI, there really is an opportunity for the data import and integrations that you need to build to be easier and cheaper. That's why we're announcing this AI powered integration platform because that's what people are going to expect in the future.

Customers have systems they've built themselves for their internal operations and integrating those systems into NetSuite should now become way cheaper and easier. AI has given us the power to compress timelines. For example, we can reduce 60-day implementations down to 20-day implementations and put thought about how to decomplexify all of that. That’s a good thing as customers are increasingly going to expect it and AI gives us the tools to deliver.

AI also changes how we manage projects. We can now capture and retain information so that we have a clear record of what our customer asked for and what success looks like. It's very much about really understanding what customers want and understanding what the users want. That context can be all summarized and always stay front and center throughout the implementation.

My take

Given that this was a smaller, more local event than SuiteWorld, I didn’t get as much of an opportunity to mingle with customers. One that I did connect with was absolutely giddy re: (1) its  use of NetSuite to date, and, (2) excited about how the applications are being enhanced with generative, algorithmic and agentic-AI capabilities. This customer singled out NetSuite’s AI assisted closing process as one area he really wants now. All-in-all, customers, partners and prospects seemed quite happy at the event (even though the snow outside wasn’t quite as magical as a movie might portray it could be).

Founder software executives, like Goldberg, always have a different, longer-term and more strategic perspective than professional managers brought in in later years at competitors. Goldberg clearly understands where AI and other advanced technologies are taking NetSuite’s solutions and he also really understands the financial, operational, practical and technological challenges his customers and prospects face. As a result, I found his approach to rolling out AI capabilities to be realistic and pragmatic.

I suspect that in future NetSuite interactions, we’ll want to probe more on matters like:

• Radically, reimagined work that triggers significantly more complex workflows than what’s possible or available today
• How NetSuite will educate prospects in the future (e.g., I just heard a systems admin using a competing solution argue that with AI, ERP doesn’t need an audit trail. I swiftly refuted that and got the CFO involved at that publicly traded firm. But this example just goes to illustrate that what buyers ‘think’ about AI may not be correct, appropriate or risk-free.)
• How will NetSuite compete and/or co-exist with startup firms offering all-new AI based apps that aren’t necessarily similar in scope to the more rigidly defined applications of yore?
• Etc.

Given the speed with which the AI world is changing, we might need another briefing from NetSuite and Goldberg in another four months or so. I’m already pondering what those announcements will cover. Until then….

(This article is a companion to one recently crafted by Jon Reed. Peruse both of these pieces to get a more complete read on NetSuite’s latest news.)