Oracle NetSuite’s Goldberg: autonomous AI next applications phase

Where do you think we are in terms of the narrative of AI in the business world now? We’ve had conversations about this before, including one about AI as a ‘sleeping giant’

I consider it very early days still. There have been tremendous advances that have allowed us to do things such as NetSuite Text Enhance and now are allowing us to do things like the Suite Analytics Assistant. So, the first phase was generating text. Now, it’s having human conversations to use the tools that we already have in our suite.

And then the next step will be autonomous activity to do things for you, to find things for you proactively, and that’s going to revolutionise business applications, in some sense making large parts of it disappear, which is a good thing.

The things that will get surfaced to you will be [what] you really need to see or to do, and that’s only going to be to people’s benefit because our users spend a lot of time in NetSuite – sometimes that’s productive time, sometimes that’s time where they’re just feeding data to be in the system. They have to spend time with the system to get the benefit and to get the return on investment of their time.

But if they didn’t have to spend the time at all, that would be even better. So, that’s where we want to go and it will fundamentally change how these systems look and what it is to use them. Everything is going to be much different.

Does that fit under the category of agentic [AI]?

That’s what it’s being called right now, and you can add a lot of agents, but I think it’s still going to be NetSuite,

Are you happy with the term ‘agentic’?

That was not really an English word a year ago, so it’s not my favourite word. But if that’s what everybody uses to describe it, then I’ll use it to describe it. I feel it really appeals to the technical side of things, but I’m not sure it means much to the average user? An agent could be a spy or a travel agent – I mean, it just doesn’t mean that much.

Or a contact centre agent, an actual human being

And people understand what those agents mean. But I’m really focused on the end result, on how the user benefits, and not as much on the “inside baseball” terminology. That’s why I love the terms “advice and assistance”, because that’s what everybody can relate to.

Tell me about this anything-as-a-service [XaaS] ERP launched this year, NetSuite XaaS Edition. It seems to be intended for high-growth SMEs that are using hybrid business models, including marketing and selling products and services together. But we have heard similar things from NetSuite before

What, did you talk to Zach Nelson [a former chief executive officer of NetSuite]? He said product companies are becoming service companies and service companies are becoming product companies. Well, we like to read our own good messaging. We recycle as much as possible: it’s our sustainability strategy!

He was very prescient about that, and you see it in a more recent generation of companies, especially over the past five years. Whoop is a good example – and a NetSuite customer. They have a health wearable that tracks all your activity.

 “I’m really focused on the end result, on how the user benefits, and not as much on the ‘inside baseball’ terminology”

Evan Goldberg, Oracle NetSuite

Their founder, Will Ahmed, is a young entrepreneur. He started this company from the ground up, he thought of as pan-category, as a hybrid. He wants the consumer to have an Apple-type experience. Apple is the prototypical ultimate hybrid company. They build incredible software, they have lots of services that they sell, and they do incredible manufacturing. And I think that’s the model for young entrepreneurs right now: “How do I become the Apple of X?

This next generation of entrepreneurs do not think in traditional categories. These companies like Whoop that make a wearable, they have accessories, they have a service, and you have to buy the service to use the product, the product is not useful without the service.

It’s all your fault [as journalists] because you guys communicate so effectively on the values of selling subscriptions and “as a service” that I think everybody, every business, is like, “I need to do that.” There’s nothing better than a recurring revenue stream to get the gift that keeps on giving.

Coming back to agentic AI, I’ve spoken to Steve Miranda at Oracle about their Agent Studio product, part of Fusion Applications. What do you see as the similarities and differences between Oracle here and Oracle NetSuite?

They’ve dived very deeply into agents. We work closely with their AI team. So, we’re doing some things that are different, and we’ll pass on our results to them and they’ll pass on their results to us and hopefully we’ll take the best of both. I think it’s good that we’re taking a bit of a different tack and then we can merge over the long run in terms of what makes sense to do in both places.

There is, between NetSuite and Fusion, a lot of things that are very similar between a 5,000 person company and a 500 person company, and then there’s a lot of things that are different. We can do a better job in finding the things that are similar and collaborating. Steve Miranda and I are close.

So, there’s a lot of opportunity there. It’s just that obviously we each have our own lists, and so sometimes that collaboration doesn’t get the attention it should, but I certainly intend to do more of it over time.

Is there anything analogous to Agent Studio at NetSuite, which is primarily about the orchestration of agents?

Not yet, but we’re looking closely at it. It is an interesting approach that they’ve taken and we are paying close attention to it. So, you might see something like that from us. But we’ve got to make sure that, for our users, it’s not so highly technical.

Companies that use Fusion have more resources, real experts who are able to build some of this stuff, and our customers have an admin or maybe a small admin team that do lots of different things, so that’s what we’re going to have to figure out.