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SuiteWorld 2025: NetSuite Next aims to transform business through AI
Next generation of leading Cloud ERP system embeds conversational artificial intelligence and agentic workflows across the suite to show how AI, in particular Chat GPT, can take businesses to a new level
Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider NetSuite has unveiled Next, its future platform designed to put artificial intelligence (AI) to work for businesses by making it what the Oracle company said would be a natural extension.
NetSuite Next was unveiled at SuiteWorld 2025 in a keynote by company founder and executive vice-president Evan Goldberg, who said the theme for the user and partner event was “no limits”.
The product was described by its maker as being “collaborative, insightful, adaptive and trustworthy”, through built-in “powerful and practical” AI capabilities, including embedded conversational intelligence, agentic workflows and natural language search capabilities.
The overall result, said NetSuite, was that the new platform could handle repetitive and complex tasks so that businesses can achieve outcomes faster, more intuitively and with greater confidence.
“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,” said Goldberg.
“Every insight and action is rooted in data and governed by the existing roles, permissions and policies our customers depend on,” he said. “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.”
As he was unveiling the system, Goldberg noted that the company had built the original NetSuite not by copying what it had done in the past, but by reimagining what a modern business system could be. The fundamental advance was the cloud, so people could run their business anywhere, anytime, in real time, making faster decisions with lower costs and less stress to deliver.
Three pillars
Goldberg said NetSuite was formed on three pillars: the suite, industry functionality and the platform, and he insisted these fundamentals were as relevant as ever right now.
“All of these three pillars together unlock something incredibly powerful, a system that’s unified in real time and ready for now in the era of AI,” he said. “These pillars make NetSuite the perfect vehicle for businesses to unleash the power of AI. Now, you’ve heard the buzz over AI constantly over the past few years, but maybe you’re still wondering, is it right for your business? Will it help or make things more complicated? Where can you have the most impact? How do you move fast and not break things?
“The same principles that made NetSuite a cloud pioneer make it ideal for AI, because we centre NetSuite on the transaction, which is the atomic unit of business,” said Goldberg. “AI doesn’t just guess. It starts from the source because your data is unified. AI understands your full context because your vertical needs are met.
“AI sees deep into your business, not just the surface, and because we build a platform, AI has everything it needs, and it grows with you,” he said. “This approach of breadth, depth and extensibility… that’s what we call the harmony of workflows. Information and people that work together when your data and processes are in one place.”
Powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and grounded in users’ data and existing controls, NetSuite Next combines a unified data model with explainable, auditable AI, and the Redwood Design System.
Basic functionality of NetSuite Next includes AI Canvas, an embedded collaborative workspace enabling users and teams to analyse problems, brainstorm solutions and trigger agentic workflows all from a visual workspace. Narrative summaries and insights offer automated explanations, available in record forms, reports and other pages across the suite. The summaries and insights feature highlights correlations and trends from the unified data model so users can spot opportunities and risks before they become issues.
AI-driven workflows can be used to automate tasks such as payment proposals, supplier selection, reconciliations and supply chain operations. The agentic workflows give users the choice to approve key decisions or allow agents to act autonomously.
Range of sources
Large language models extract and validate information from a wide range of sources, including invoices, contracts, receipts, PDFs, policy manuals, training guides, customer testimonials and purchase orders. This, said NetSuite, reduces manual work and improves the accuracy of insights by enabling the platform to read, interpret and act on that knowledge, producing actionable workflows.
At the core of the product’s user experience is the Ask Oracle natural language assistant, which enables users to search, navigate, analyse and act across the NetSuite dataset. It can deliver context-aware answers, visualisations, interactive content and reasoning that can explain the “how” and “why” behind every response and, claimed NetSuite, enable users to more easily collaborate with NetSuite.
Ask Oracle also acts across customisations and extensions built on the SuiteCloud Platform, including partner applications available in the SuiteCloud Developer Network, to provide a unified experience and contextual insight across the suite.
Talking with Computer Weekly about the technical development of NetSuite Next, Gary Wiessinger, senior vice-president of NetSuite application development, Oracle NetSuite global business unit revealed that the platform is the culmination of a combination of initiatives and priorities that have all come together, some of which go back 10 to 15 years. One example cited in the technology architecture regarded the platform’s analytics engine.
“We have right now, in essence, two generations of analytics engines,” he said. “We have a successful, existing one that uses something called Saved Search, and ad hoc reporting called Saved Search. We replaced it with a better generation. We had a hard time getting people to stop using the current one because it’s so good, and using the new, even better one. We have a number of those technologies.
“Then with Oracle, we saw the Redwood design system, and this reimagined the user experience that they were creating, and we said, ‘That’s the future, we need that’. And we saw AI coming in, and we basically combined all of those and said, NetSuite Next is going to be our way of getting all of our customers onto the latest technologies.
“We don’t force it,” said Wiessinger. “[Users] can use the legacy technology and then adopt the newer technologies at their pace, but we emphasised the latest technologies within [for example] the Redwood design system, and AI-centric [processes] and agentic workflows. It’s not the end, but it’s the culmination of a bunch of work and the start of a bunch of additional work. It’s the biggest thing, the biggest announcement we’ve ever made.”
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NetSuite Next will be introduced over the course of the next six months and, interestingly, activated at the flick of a switch from classic NetSuite users’ portals as a “seamless” upgrade – and at no extra cost to existing users. The idea, observed Goldberg, was that the new platform wasn’t just a business system, it would be a business partner.
Goldberg predicted the upgraded system would be used very broadly, but even if it changes the company’s cost structure, it would not be a “great concern”.
The great concern was users trying the new platform, using it and giving the company feedback on usage so it can be further enhanced. Goldberg was confident that there would be new companies that go directly into NetSuite Next over the course of the next 12 or 18 months. He also stressed that existing NetSuite users would see all of their existing customisations and practices available in the new platform, and be able to adopt and adapt existing practices methodically.
Concluding, Goldberg stressed that the company was using the technology as a force multiplier that unlocks the power of a system that was built for the current moment where business meets AI.
“This is not technology for technology’s sake,” he said. “These are real tools solving real problems. You go from gut and guesswork to AI-driven insights so you can act with confidence. You have control across all of your processes. You have the agility to transform as you grow. You have productivity through smart automation. With NetSuite as your single source of truth, now supercharged by AI, there are no limits to what you can achieve.
“NetSuite Next puts AI to work for your business by making a natural extension of the way you already operate with powerful and practical AI capabilities built in, not bolted on,” said Goldberg. “It’s a new way of working where you express what you need in natural language, and the system connects you to the right data, the right context and the right actions. This is not a copilot: it’s the jet engine.”
