Tech Talks Daily
00:00:00 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:00:00] S0: The leading issue of agentic AI in businesses right now is ensuring agents act with compliance guidelines, and Denodo applies guardrails across your entire data estate. By aligning your company's data infrastructure under one system, these guardrails perform consistently across your platform. So start scaling your business and start with Denodo. Simply visit denodo.com to learn more. What happens when using business software starts with describing what you need instead of learning where everything lives? Let's face it. We've all been there. And today, I'm recording at Suite World in Las Vegas, and I spoke with Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of NetSuite at Oracle. And together, we talked about his vision of AI as the interface. We discussed dashboards created through conversation, the knowledge behind consistent answers, and agents that can handle work with the level of oversight a business chooses. And Evan will also share what this could mean for smaller companies and the partners who understand their industry. And along the way, I will ask whether software that does the work, does that change how it should be priced? Well, if your ERP system has made you feel like you needed a map or a very patient colleague to sit down with, today's conversation will hopefully give you a very different picture of how people could work with it and the decisions they still need to make about delegating business tasks. Some real valuable information in this one. Now the only thing left for me to do now is to ask you to join me in welcoming back Evan onto the podcast now. We're recording here from Sweet World in Las Vegas. The last time we spoke was two years ago. So to begin with, can you tell everyone watching a little about who you are and what you do?
00:02:01 · Evan Goldberg, Neil C. Hughes
[00:02:01] S1: Yeah. So I'm Evan Goldberg. I'm the EVP and founder of NetSuite at Oracle, and we we have been providing technology to help businesses succeed for over twenty eight years. [00:02:13] S0: And the last time we spoke, we were talking about the... Your origin story and how you founded the company, so many great insights. But two years is a long time in tech. So how much has changed in the world of AILTE? Yeah. [00:02:25] S1: I mean, it's changing so rapidly. It's, like, hard for everybody to keep up. It's sort of our job to keep up, though, and, you know, our mission is to take some of this great technology that's just, you know, coming daily, and translate it into capabilities for our business customers that will help them be able to be more successful. [00:02:45] S0: And you said on stage that this is the end of ERP as we know it, and to think of AI as the new you are... Well, as the UI. So... And especially when AR fits your business this way as well. So do you think we're heading towards a future where employees use ERP every day without even realizing they're interacting with an ERP?
00:02:45 · Neil C. Hughes, Evan Goldberg
[00:02:45] S0: And you said on stage that this is the end of ERP as we know it, and to think of AI as the new you are... Well, as the UI. So... And especially when AR fits your business this way as well. So do you think we're heading towards a future where employees use ERP every day without even realizing they're interacting with an ERP? [00:03:03] S1: Absolutely. I mean, it's... You know, the ERP used to be something you had to navigate, you had to learn, you had to go in your system, lots of different places to find things, and you spent a lot of time doing that, and, you know, that's not everybody's idea of a good time. The next generation of ERP, why it really is the end of ERP as we know it, is because it comes to you. You speak to it in natural language, you get what you want. We, introduced a new capability here for people to put key metrics on their dashboard just by describing what they want on their dashboard. That's the way software should work, and we've wanted that for ages. And now, the incredible advances of AI, we can deliver that kind of very natural, you know, experience to any business user that's using NetSuite. [00:03:55] S0: And obviously, there's been a lot of announcements this week, a lot of press releases. So which SuiteWorld announcement best shows where NetSuite is heading? What customer problems are you addressing with them? Well,
00:03:55 · Neil C. Hughes, Evan Goldberg
[00:03:55] S0: And obviously, there's been a lot of announcements this week, a lot of press releases. So which SuiteWorld announcement best shows where NetSuite is heading? What customer problems are you addressing with them? Well, [00:04:08] S1: I think one of the things that's really exciting that we announced, like, I mentioned AI portlets. It's the easiest feature in the world to use in NetSuite. Just, you know, put it on your dashboard, ask a question, that's very cool. But how does it answer that question accurately? That's what people are certainly very concerned about with AI. AI is always very confident in its answers. But how can you be confident in its answers? And so, SuiteSkills is something that we've developed to sort of collate all the knowledge about how NetSuite works, how businesses work in NetSuite, that when you... However you're accessing AI to use your NetSuite information, whether you're doing it inside of NetSuite, NetSuite Next, which is our next generation of our technology, or you're doing it in something like ChatGPT or Claude, and using our AI connector service, that the AI has the skills necessary to give you accurate, consistent answers. [00:05:07] S0: And everybody uses different models for different reasons. Is being model agnostic is very important to you as well.
00:05:07 · Neil C. Hughes, Evan Goldberg
[00:05:07] S0: And everybody uses different models for different reasons. Is being model agnostic is very important to you as well. [00:05:14] S1: Absolutely. You know, people are gonna choose not just which model they wanna use, but how they wanna use it. Do they wanna use it in sort of full reasoning mode? Do they wanna have it give relatively quick answers? You know, we are working to make sure that no matter what model they're using, however they're using it, you're gonna get consistent information back from NetSuite, and, you know, that's how people are gonna be able to trust these systems, and and give them permission to do more and more on their behalf. Because ultimately, what we're trying to do is make it so the system does so much for you behind the scenes. You don't, you mentioned not even knowing you're using an ERP system. Well, you won't be using it directly. It'll be working on your behalf twenty four hours a day, you know, based on what you've asked it to do for you. Different job functions or different things, but that's what everybody wants, is to get some of those rote things that they spend a lot of time on that they don't think they should be spending time on off their plate, so they can work on that arm's length of of things that they know are important and they've never been able to get to before.
00:05:14 · Evan Goldberg, Neil C. Hughes
[00:05:14] S1: Absolutely. You know, people are gonna choose not just which model they wanna use, but how they wanna use it. Do they wanna use it in sort of full reasoning mode? Do they wanna have it give relatively quick answers? You know, we are working to make sure that no matter what model they're using, however they're using it, you're gonna get consistent information back from NetSuite, and, you know, that's how people are gonna be able to trust these systems, and and give them permission to do more and more on their behalf. Because ultimately, what we're trying to do is make it so the system does so much for you behind the scenes. You don't, you mentioned not even knowing you're using an ERP system. Well, you won't be using it directly. It'll be working on your behalf twenty four hours a day, you know, based on what you've asked it to do for you. Different job functions or different things, but that's what everybody wants, is to get some of those rote things that they spend a lot of time on that they don't think they should be spending time on off their plate, so they can work on that arm's length of of things that they know are important and they've never been able to get to before. [00:06:20] S0: And I'm curious, just to bring this to life for business leaders that are watching and listening here, how are you seeing AI changing the role of ERP from a system of record into a system that can recommend or complete work? Any examples you can share?