NetSuite Next lands in ANZ: Ask Oracle first, autonomous suite to follow

For most of its life, ERP has been where businesses recorded what already happened. Oracle NetSuite would rather it became where the work actually gets done, and customers in Australia and New Zealand are among the first to find out whether that holds up. That's becuase NetSuite Next is available as of now, to customers in the region.

That's emerged among a raft of announcements out of Oracle NetSuite. NetSuite Next, the new generation of the world's most venerable cloud ERP, is hitting the market and brings with it the conversational AI assistant, Ask Oracle. Oracle NetSuite Australia and New Zealand vice president and general manager Scott Wiltshire described NetSuite Next as "our biggest update since launching in 1998."

Writing in an ANZ announcement, Wiltshire pitched it squarely at local conditions. "For ANZ businesses managing rising costs, productivity pressures, and increasing complexity, this represents an important step forward. AI should do more than answer questions. It should help people get work done."

Ask Oracle comes first. It answers natural language questions from a customer's NetSuite data, without clicking through screens or building reports, and it is rolling out to existing NetSuite accounts ahead of the move to NetSuite Next, where it is embedded throughout. It respects existing roles and permissions, and users can see how an answer was generated (which, given AI's habit of confidently making things up, is no small thing).

The UK is on the same clock. Oracle NetSuite senior vice president EMEA Nicky Tozer confirmed the UK rollout has begun, with Spain, Sweden and the Benelux countries to follow in a phased rollout "coming soon in 2027." Ask Oracle's answers, Tozer noted, "are based only on information users are already authorised to access."

Skills, agents and the 'autonomous suite'

Behind the rollouts sits NetSuite's vision for an 'autonomous suite'. Oracle NetSuite founder and executive vice president Evan Goldberg set it out in a statement: "Our vision is for a suite that understands business goals, anticipates what needs attention, and takes action to achieve results."

The building blocks start with AI Workspaces, which put people, AI agents, information and approvals in one place; an Autonomous Close workspace is meant to move businesses towards a 'zero-day close' (CFOs and finance departments are sure to celebrate this acceleration of one of their most persistent bugbears). This will be followed by AI Portlets, which generate dashboard analysis and charts on request, then SuiteFlow Agent for building workflows by simply asking. SuiteAgent Studio equips operators to create their own agents, and SuiteAgent Management Workspace keeps tabs on what those agents get up to.

There is also SuiteSkills, offering more than 45 prebuilt business skills spanning the financial close, billing, inventory, projects, sales and workforce management; a Revenue Leakage skill, for example, hunts for potential underbilling. The agents work in Ask Oracle and with outside large language models through the NetSuite AI Connector Service, which NetSuite said more than 13,000 customers have already adopted.

Customers, Goldberg said, "Can choose NetSuite's embedded AI or their preferred AI service." SuiteSkills is available to all NetSuite customers via GitHub and popular AI service marketplaces.

Industry-specific SuiteAgents round it out. Agents for software, product and construction businesses are available now in NetSuite Next, with others, including healthcare and nonprofit, planned for a future release. SuiteSkills, AI Portlets, AI Workspaces and select SuiteAgents are available in all markets where NetSuite Next is available; other autonomous suite capabilities are slated for a future release, and timing may change.

Faster implementations, with fine print

SuiteExpress takes aim at a perennial ERP complaint: that there is no such thing as a completed project. "Long ERP implementations ask too much of customers," Goldberg said. The agentic implementation toolset pairs a knowledge base of each customer's documents, meeting notes and recordings with NetSuite's own expertise, aiming to cut implementation time to "weeks or even days."

The fine print? SuiteExpress is initially available only to software industry customers in the United States and Canada.

Much the same applies to NetSuite for Construction Businesses, a planned solution for contractors and specialty-trade firms, with a limited US rollout first and broader availability expected later. It includes agents that turn estimates into job budgets and prepare payment applications, plus a Construction Workbench and work in progress (WIP) accounting.

Proof of the pudding

Personal care brand Every Man Jack said it has cut its financial close time by 50% and uses the AI Connector Service to run an AI-powered order approval agent. It estimates these initiatives will save more than 4,500 hours a year, with annual cost savings put at about US$350,000. "By automating routine processes and making our data more accessible, we can give our teams more time to focus on higher-value work," chief financial officer Steve Fox said.

Frozen pop maker JonnyPops has cut its monthly close nearly in half and uses Ask Oracle so employees can answer everyday business questions themselves. Wine and spirits business Terlato's lean IT team built 25 tools in about 18 weeks, automating more than 100,000 order status updates a year. "AI has fundamentally changed what our small IT team can accomplish," CIO Kevin O'Toole said.

Vendor-supplied case studies, of course, and the savings are the customers' own estimates.

Finally, Wiltshire offered a line that may resonate with stretched ANZ finance teams: "AI isn't about adding another layer of technology. It's about getting more from the systems you already rely on, reducing manual work, and creating capacity to grow."