NetSuite Next: The Logical Evolution of ERP in the AI Era
- Niv Nissenson
- Oct 13
- 2 min read
NetSuite has unveiled NetSuite Next, its most ambitious AI update yet — a new generation of the platform that embeds conversational AI, agentic workflows, and natural language search directly into the suite. According to Oracle NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg, the goal is simple: make AI a “natural extension” of how businesses already work.
If you’ve been following TheCFOai.com, we’ve already covered three of NetSuite’s earlier AI showcases, each demonstrating steady progress toward deeper AI integration. NetSuite Next feels like the logical next step in that journey: a move from features enhancements to a AI-native ERP experience.
What’s New in NetSuite Next
NetSuite describes this release as collaborative, insightful, adaptive, and trustworthy:
Ask Oracle (Conversational AI Assistant) – Users can now search, navigate, analyze, and act across NetSuite using natural language. It provides context-aware answers, visualizations, and reasoning that explains the “how” and “why” behind each response.
AI Canvas – A new workspace where teams can analyze data, brainstorm solutions, and trigger “agentic workflows” visually.
Narrative Summaries and Insights – Automated explanations that proactively surface correlations and trends across the suite.
Agentic Workflows – Proactive AI-driven automations for tasks like payment proposals, vendor selection, reconciliations, and supply chain operations. Users can choose to approve decisions or let agents act autonomously.
Document and Knowledge Integration – AI models can now extract and validate data from invoices, contracts, receipts, and other unstructured sources, turning isolated documents into actionable workflows.
Why ERPs Have an AI Advantage
This move underscores a critical truth about enterprise AI: data quality and structure matter more than algorithms.
ERPs like NetSuite already sit on clean, standardized, relational data models, meaning the insights and recommendations generated by AI are inherently more reliable than those derived from pieced-together API connections across disparate systems.
While “bring-your-own-AI” strategies (like the MCP connector NetSuite introduced earlier this year) offer flexibility, NetSuite Next represents the internalization of AI, embedding LLM natively, where the data already lives and governance already exists.
That’s the real advantage. Instead of connecting multiple models and tools through APIs and hoping they interpret data consistently, NetSuite can deliver AI insights that are context-aware, permission-governed, and grounded in unified data.
