A Conversation with Mr NetSuite, Evan Goldberg

At SuiteConnect London I had the chance to talk to Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP at Oracle NetSuite. I asked him to explain NetSuite briefly, as though on an elevator ride. Goldberg replied, “NetSuite is everything you need if you’re a fast-growing business, all in one place. We give you great insight, control, collaboration, agility and productivity to help you achieve your dreams as quickly, easily and painlessly as possible.”

What is his vision for NetSuite?

“The vision is that entrepreneurs can achieve their business objectives with the help of our technology much more easily.”

“Entrepreneurs have a dream, they have a North Star that they’re trying to achieve with their business. It’s very easy to get mired in the details and to spend a lot of time on manual, repetitive tasks. Not getting great information about your business and lacking the information you need to make great decisions, [or] to lose control of your business as it grows.

“To not be able to change when the conditions change in your business and all of these things technology can help with. We can’t help you actually build your product. But we can remove many of the obstacles that keep you from reaching those goals as quickly and easily as you’d like.”

On doing things differently

Goldberg agreed that the vision had not changed significantly when the company was first started. Was there anything that Goldberg would do differently if he were to start the business again today?

“I’d use AI everywhere. If I were starting NetSuite today, we’d have zero NetSuite customers. So much of what we’ve done over the years has been learning from our 43,000 customers in so many different industries all around the world. It is fundamentally what separates NetSuite from other organisations.

“In that sense, it would be the same. We would spend a lot of time learning from our customers, acquiring new customers, helping our customers grow on NetSuite. There’s no substitute for that, and AI can’t do that. AI can write the code. But what code to write, what problems to solve, that comes from experience over years of thousands of customers.”

What are your customers’ challenges today?

“In many ways, they’re very similar. A lot of our customers are grappling with AI, but it’s not their most important challenge. Their most important challenge is similar to what they had before. There are obviously macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges. I’ve talked a little bit today about the impact of tariffs and disruptions like that. 

“It’s been continuous ever since COVID. I think businesses’ ability to adapt is probably the biggest challenge that they’ve had, as things are changing so much faster than they ever did before. Adaptability is the name of the game.”

On Integration

You just launched the latest iteration of your integration platform, the NetSuite AI Connector Service. How do you see the wider IPaaS market evolving now?

“There is no doubt that AI makes integration a lot easier. It’s probably the biggest advance in integration. People said, web services, REST, and all those are great protocols, but this is not a protocol. This is intelligence that can adapt your integrations as they change. They can figure out what went wrong when it doesn’t work.

“It is going to be easier to integrate systems, and yet, it’s still going to be the case that AI is going to be able to understand your data better, if it’s in one schema, it’s in one place, a customer means one thing, a sale means another thing.”

He added, “That’s always been the problem with different systems, and AI will help with that, but that discontinuity is what we try to avoid in your core operations with NetSuite being a single data model across finance, operations, HR, commerce, etc.”

It is no surprise that Goldberg advocates for the single platform, but he did acknowledge that organisations may now be tempted to have a proliferation of applications.

“It could make what we call the hairball problem worse. If it’s too easy to integrate, you’re going to use too many applications, and then you’re going to see the downside: individual departments making decisions about what applications do in silos, and IT has to stitch it all together. That’s not a recipe for success.

“You need IT, the Finance organisation, and every function working in concert to make these decisions across the organisation, saying, let’s standardise on these key applications. We’ll use them across departments, so that we have the best data about our business and we’re not constantly trying to mash up these incompatible databases.”

The impact of Autonomous Finance

During the keynote, Goldberg differentiated between a co-pilot and an autopilot. Co-pilots sit alongside the human, making suggestions, and autopilots can take over the work. As autopilots improve, will we reach a point where the finance department has only a single human?

“I don’t know. How employment is going to play out is a very difficult question to answer. Because, if you look at historical precedent, it can work in both ways. I do think that one of the great benefits of AI is that it allows people to spend less time on their urgent list and more time on their important list.”

Goldberg sees a future in which finance teams will focus on strategic finance objectives rather than on manual processes such as closing the books. AI can take these over. He believes that the finance team’s expertise and analytics capabilities can be useful all over the organisation.

He does not believe shrinking the finance team is the best approach. However, companies do need to reconsider what they want their finance people to do today. Goldberg noted, “I think it’s going to lead to a lot more important finance work getting done across the organisation. Again, history has shown that it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen with employment in any particular area that’s impacted by technology.”

Will we see new organisations emerging with a finance department of one?

“I think that’s true for the mandatory compliance functions. I absolutely agree with you. Now, whether that’s all you want ultimately out of your finance department as you build your company. So many companies that I see are still not leveraging their NetSuite data as well as they could.

“It’s people with financial backgrounds who can be some of the best people; if you put them in the context of sales or manufacturing, they can have a huge impact on the efficiency of those operations. The role of a person trained in finance is going to differ, but you may look at your company after you’ve grown it and say, ‘Oh, I actually do have a bunch of finance people, but they’re working on really important things, not on mandatory compliance things.’”

On AI and its direction

I asked Goldberg what customer insights around AI have surprised him most over the last year.

“Finance departments are adopting these MCP tools really rapidly. They’re having AI write code to help them accomplish some of their tasks.

“In the past, they couldn’t even imagine that they could have a programmer that could automate things for them. It was so far down the list of things the IT department was going to do that they didn’t ask them. Now they have a agent at their beck and call that can do it for them. I’ve been really surprised by how they’ve been taking advantage of that.”

Even if they do not have to code. Do finance people need to understand prompt engineering to achieve this?

“Even prompt engineering is a discipline that, as the systems get better, you don’t even need to do as much of that anymore. The whole purpose of our AI Connector Service Companion is so that you don’t have to do nearly as much prompt engineering to get the right answer.”

The future of UI

On stage, Goldberg had earlier explained NetSuite’s inside/outside approach to the user experience. Users can leverage AI from within NetSuite and NetSuite from within an AI platform such as Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT. The user interface of the future is likely to be a natural-language interface, and while systems of record such as NetSuite will remain important, users are leaving behind traditional menus and screens.

The next generation of NetSuite which delivers this flexible UI and much more, is NetSuite Next. Early customers (in beta) have been excited about the platform, and NetSuite itself is already using elements of NetSuite Next.

Goldberg explained, “NetSuite Next is intrinsic in what we’re doing to address a lot of these questions, like what does a finance person do in the future? With AI agents helping with anomaly detection and letting them close, they’re not going to be working nearly as much on close. So what are they doing instead? 

“They can use the tools in NetSuite Next to provide financial advice and analytics for parts of the organisation that maybe they were not as involved with. That’s one of the ways things are happening at NetSuite itself. We’re using our strategic finance people in ways that we never would have done, say, five or 10 years ago.”

How is AI reshaping NetSuite itself?

“We are heavy users of coding agents. We’re heavy users of many AI capabilities. I think every single role at NetSuite is being significantly changed. Similar to other organisations, we think we’re going to be able to get to a lot more things that were further down in the list that we didn’t think we were going to get to for a very, very long time.”

The Book question

What’s the latest book you read?

“I’m reading the companion book to the Ken Burns series on the American Revolution (The American Revolution: An Intimate History, Amazon Aus, UK, US). The other book I’m reading is called Beyond the Beats (Amazon Aus, UK, US), a history of rock and roll and 15 drummers. I don’t generally read business books, I listen to podcasts, and I read a lot of business articles. Reading, for me, is much more of a leisure activity.”

What’s the podcast you would recommend?

“Well, I love Hard Fork, which is the New York Times tech podcast, because that’s how I keep up with the kind of macro things that are happening in the AI industry.”

And finally, a tip

What advice would you give founders building a SaaS platform who intend it to last more than 20 years?

“I would say, love your customers and learn from your customers. That’s the thing that AI can help you with, but it can’t do for you.”

Why can’t AI do it for you?

“Most people would still prefer to talk to humans.”

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