In a tech week dominated by AWS’ Re:invent, Oracle Corp.’s NetSuite quietly announced NetSuite Next, an overhaul of its venerable business management platform that marks a transformation to generative artificial intelligence (AI).
NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg told attendees of SuiteWorld that the initiative began well before the current AI boom, about five years ago, as NetSuite approached a milestone in its history.
“We (executive team) realized that at approaching 25 years old, it was a good time to look at retooling NetSuite for the future,” Goldberg said. “We wanted to have a robust foundation so that NetSuite would be as vital in 25 years as it was at the time.”
The cornerstone of NetSuite Next is Ask Oracle, Oracle’s enterprise AI assistant, which replaces traditional point-and-click navigation with conversational AI. The integration represents a multi-year collaboration between NetSuite and Oracle that has evolved alongside rapid advances in natural language processing and large language models (LLMs).
What sets NetSuite Next apart from typical genAI applications, the company claims, is its ability to work directly with structured business data rather than simply generating text, images, or video. Goldberg compared the shift to the early internet’s evolution from static information display to interactive cloud applications.
“I think there’s an evolution now of generative AI in general moving away from just being an engine for text or image or video, but actually starting to be able to interact directly with structured data and databases,” Goldberg explained.
A key feature is Suite Agents, which lets users create business automation through natural language descriptions rather than traditional programming. Users will describe desired functions in plain language, and the system will automatically generate the necessary code.
“Agents are going to be built from prompts,” Goldberg said. “You’re going to say here’s the description of the agent. And then the agent knows how to turn that into SuiteScript or turn that into JSON or XML or REST or whatever else it needs to do.”
Despite the fundamental reimagining, the transition won’t require extensive migration efforts. Goldberg said users can begin using NetSuite Next next year by “basically flipping a switch.”
In an unusual move, NetSuite announced the platform six to 12 months before general availability. The company plans to offer preview mode within months and is actively soliciting feedback from its community of 8,000 SuiteWorld attendees.
“This is a conversation nobody can say with any confidence they know how the AI age is going to evolve, and so we’re all inventing it together,” Goldberg said.
