Live at SuiteWorld: Murph’s Opening Keynote Review

Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite, announced during today’s opening keynote at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas that 8000 were attending and thousands more were participating virtually. 

Goldberg reminded attendees that 27 years ago, NetSuite was the cloud’s first ERP, and that the product had been built on three pillars: Suite (focusing at the transactional level of businesses), Industry functionality (unified solutions for any kind of business), and the Platform (readily able to adapt to the needs of users).  That resulted in a solution that was unified, realtime and ready to Work.

Today, NetSuite is the perfect platform for AI. The same principles that made NetSuite perfect for the cloud, make it perfect for AI.

NetSuite’s ‘harmony of workflows’, which they refer to as “Suiteness”, apply to today’s AI environment. With AI, finance is bolstered by flagged anomalies with fixes made available to users. For Sales, users can receive early warning alerts about shifts in purchase patterns. Operations can be provided with proactive insights regarding supply levels and supply-chain issues. Service business users can gain instant context summaries allowing them to streamline or adjust to customer patterns. All made possible through Insight, Agility, Control, Productivity, and Collaboration built into the platform.

As a result, NetSuite has grown to supporting more than 43,000 businesses, 2 million users, 1.4 OneWorld users, 100K subsidiaries, 6.4B lines of transactions in December 2024. And, to continue meeting the needs of NetSuite customers and future customers, Goldberg announced that the future of NetSuite is NetSuite Next which is designed to be collaborative, insightful, adaptive, and trustworthy.

“NetSuite Next will be where your business meets AI.” By building in powerful and practical AI capabilities, including embedded conversational intelligence, agentic workflows, and natural language search capabilities, NetSuite Next handles repetitive and complex tasks so that businesses can achieve outcomes faster, more intuitively, and with greater confidence.   

 “NetSuite Next puts AI to work for businesses by making it a natural extension of the way they already work,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite.”  

With the latest AI innovations built in, NetSuite Next can deliver powerful insights as well as autonomously complete repetitive and complex tasks, all with enterprise-level reliability. Every insight and action is rooted in data and governed by the existing roles, permissions, and policies our customers depend on. It enables users to discover patterns in their business and engage with NetSuite in their own words, all while understanding an individual user’s context, so it can deliver answers and actions that provide immediate value.  

Goldberg also announced the next generation of the NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform, an extensibility and customization environment that enables organizations to adapt NetSuite to their unique business needs. Built on NetSuite’s unified data model and open standards, SuiteCloud now enables customers, partners, and developers to integrate leading AI models, design custom AI agents, and compose AI-driven workflows and experiences across NetSuite. 

 “It has always been important to me that NetSuite is flexible and adaptable so that our customers can support their unique and ever-changing business needs,” said Goldberg. “Today, we are taking that flexibility and adaptability to a new level. The new capabilities in SuiteCloud will help our customers and partners transform how AI works for business by giving them the ability to quickly and easily build AI agents, connect external AI assistants, and orchestrate AI processes.” 

Another major announcement during the opening keynote came when Goldberg presented  a new BILL-powered payment automation capability, which is embedded in NetSuite Intelligent Payment Automation to help NetSuite customers accelerate accounts payable processes, increase efficiency, and reduce risk. 

 “Accounts payable plays an important role in helping organizations manage cash flow, control costs, and build stronger vendor relationships,”  said Goldberg. “Our strategic partnership with BILL will enable our customers to optimize payment processes within NetSuite. It will also help us continue to extend the value our customers get from NetSuite Intelligent Payment Automation, one of the most advanced, AI-powered accounts payable offerings on the market.” 

Discussing the partnership, and payment optimization made possible by the incorporation of BILL within NetSuite, René Lacerte, chief executive officer and founder of BILL said, “This partnership marks an important milestone in our BILL mission to make intelligent finance more accessible to growing businesses everywhere—delivering innovation where they need it most, inside the systems they rely on to run their critical operations.” Lacerte went one to say, “As an industry leader in delivering AP automation to nearly half a million BILL customers, we’re proud that our powerful payment capabilities and extensive network are being embedded within the world’s #1 AI Cloud ERP—providing an entirely new way for businesses to pay faster, optimize cash flow and accelerate growth." 

When ask by Goldberg about the ‘synergy’ between the two products, Lacerte made a simple but very practical comparison saying that “the two products were like the marrying of chocolate and peanut butter.” In other words, a kind of ‘technological Reese’s Cup.’

If that doesn’t make you “hungry to learn more,” I don’t know what would. And, to learn more,  be certain to explore my Live at SuiteWorld features all this week.

By the way, following the Opening Keynote, members of the press were invited to a press conference with Goldberg for a question and answer session.  I had the opportunity to ask, “with the tremendous advances being made by NetSuite, and the willingness to change the branding to NetSuite Next, why didn’t you simply call the new platform ‘NeXtSuite’?” His reply was, “Good Question.”