Oracle NetSuite’s Evan Goldberg Outlines Vision for AI-Powered ERP as an Intelligent Business Partner
SuiteWorld 2026 keynote positions business context and human-defined controls as the foundation for AI that can act, not just answer
Evan Goldberg, founder and Executive Vice President of Oracle NetSuite, set out his vision for the next phase of enterprise software in a keynote at SuiteWorld 2026. Titled “The End of ERP – As We Know It,” the address argued that AI delivers real value only when it is grounded in how a business actually works and operates within the controls people set.
Context is the foundation
Goldberg said AI that can reason in general differs from AI that can support a specific operational decision, and that the difference is business context. A real business, he explained, is a connected system in which inventory affects finance, finance shapes pricing and pricing influences customer relationships and sales. NetSuite’s customer, financial, inventory, project and workflow data gives AI the context behind a number rather than the number alone.
From answers to action, within guardrails
Goldberg described a progression from AI that answers questions to systems that understand a situation, recommend next steps and increasingly act. Examples include helping finance teams investigate exceptions and helping operations leaders understand the effects of supply decisions before they become customer problems. He stressed that action remains bounded by the approvals and guardrails each organisation defines, and that users stay responsible for reviewing plans and approving actions.
“AI as the UI”
Traditionally, employees have had to find the right page, open a dashboard, run a report and interpret the results. Goldberg described a conversational model in which users state what they need and the system assembles the relevant information, proposes a plan and provides a workspace built for the task. The interface does not disappear, he said, but people no longer have to do the work of finding things.
Adoption and reported results
Goldberg said more than 13,000 companies are using NetSuite’s AI Connector Service, available through the Claude and ChatGPT marketplaces, with Copilot and Gemini coming soon. He cited customer-reported results including:
- Three times as many transactions processed with the same team
- Nearly 5,000 hours and $350,000 saved annually
- Data requests answered 76% faster
- More than 100,000 order-status updates automated each year
A call to act
Goldberg acknowledged that some organisations hesitate because of limited time, uncertainty about trusting AI or not knowing where to start. He encouraged businesses to move now, noting that Oracle supplies the AI models, infrastructure and engineering, while customers contribute practical experience of what works.