Craig Sullivan
GVP, Product Management
NetSuite

TRANSCRIPT:

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Vigoroso

Hi everyone, welcome to a special edition of the Enterprise Edge Podcast on site here at Suite World 2026 in Viva Las Vegas. We are joined here this afternoon with Craig Sullivan, who is leading the effort from a product management perspective at NetSuite. Craig, thanks for being here.

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This is round two. as many of you may recall, we met last year, so it's going be a catch up on what has happened over the last 12 months and what is potentially around the corner as we pick up speed in this topsy turvey AI world that we live in.

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Sullivan

It's accelerating.

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Vigoroso

Exactly. so Craig, you know, I'm I'm curious. I was very pleased to hear from customers. I was very pleased to see and hear from customers very prominent almost as prominently as some of the product announcements, right? And I and I think the the market is hungry for that. The the market in terms of public markets, private markets, investors, partners, they all are demanding proof. Show me. Is that something you're hearing and seeing as well? And is that sort of deliberate you're trying to really showcase some of the wins that your customers are seeing in the in the early days?

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Sullivan

Absolutely. But I don't know that it's new. know, we've been doing that for a little while. We've realized that the proof is in not just the pudding, but the eating of the pudding, right? So, you hearing from the customers, the customers are the heroes of those stories more than the suite is, more than NetSuite is. And sure, the market is looking for those proof points, but our other customers are looking for you know, those signals from those customers that are blazing the trail. And so, you know, it's great that you, you made that observation, you know, the likes of TheraBody and the way that they embrace the AI Connect to Service and, you know, took the opportunity to rethink how to do some things, how to, in essence, do more with the same people and in some ways actually inspire their people to find new ways to do their jobs.

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That is what our other customers and the reason frankly, customers come to SuiteWorld for is to be inspired by those stories, but more than that actually be able to understand how they can do those things themselves. And so the fact that not only did those customers in some cases shoot the videos, in other cases they were on the stage, but they're also here and they're available for other customers to ask those questions. so...

 

Absolutely. It's all about the customer and customers gaining confidence from other customers is one of the great opportunities that SuiteWorld represents.

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Vigoroso

In certain industries, you know, with construction and public sector that Evan talked about and are are you finding that that the markets that you serve are looking for those industry specific proof points, which would again wouldn't be new either, right? I mean they've always been, but in with regards to agentic deployment and which workflows first and how much autonomy is really realistic, oftentimes it's industry specific, right? Are you finding that as well?

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Sullivan

Yeah, the more that we talk to our customers, the more they tell us that they want to hear how other customers like them are embracing. So it's sort of one of those, it's definitely a chicken and an egg situation, right? Somebody has to be the first customer. But the good news is, and you've been around us and such for a while now, we've been doing this for quite a while. And we've got 44,000 customers across all, all of these industries. so, you know, nobody's first, if you will, you know, we already have construction companies and we've taken that opportunity to learn from them and to hear how they've tailored NetSuite to meet their needs. And then we've built on, on top of that learning and delivered more capabilities that come out of the box ready for businesses like those. And so that's why Evan, you know, said today about how we've been doing this and we are doing this together.

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You know, it's a, it's a virtuous circle of feedback. We learn from them. They learn from us and it gets bigger and bigger for everyone.

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Vigoroso

It’s been that way since the very beginning, right? And that's kind of a cultural trait, right?

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Sullivan

Yeah, we've very much, you know, we've very much always tried to be a listening organization.

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Vigoroso

So a lot of the use cases are in finance, like closing the books and things like that, and and but some of the ones that perhaps you could say might be the lowest hanging fruit. And I I'm curious what you've seen like procedurally for your customers, when when you start to go to a it's called the sort of the continuous close instead of the month end, what changes like operationally, organizationally? Is it all good or are there some bumps in the change that you've seen with your customers?

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Sullivan

Well, change is the right term and there are always bumps in change. The reality is that the opportunity to be doing more sooner has actually been something that the finance function, at least the people that we've spoken to in finance have wished that they had the tools to do. If only they caught that transaction exception earlier when Joe wasn't on vacation. They would be able to resolve it there and then rather than rushing around to correct it later in the period when the time is of the essence.

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Not least because that error or that exception may actually have a customer impact or, you cause an issue on payables or have some other, you know, upstream or downstream implication as a result of, whatever, whatever it was that caused the exception. And so what we've really been doing is, sort of working towards helping the finance function to get ahead of that. And, know, initially it was with tools that, you know, like exception management that's been available for, think a couple of years now, that you know, basically builds its own machine learning model based upon that customer's data and gets better over time as it sees, you know, what's going on in the business to flag those things so that the individuals, the humans can actually go into to make those adjustments as needed and to track down, you know, the source of the, of the challenge.

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The journey that we've been on then is how then if we can identify those transactions early, how might we bring AI to bear to actually resolve them sooner too. And again, that is an iterative process with respect to change management because now you've got a system that can flag those things. It's up to the humans to embrace that opportunity to get ahead of the curve. And we've spent a lot of time and even tomorrow you'll hear more about this notion of continuous close and the journey towards, you know, ever, ever shorter, periods that our customers have been on, just because closing faster is in itself a great thing, but because being able to close faster means that you've had more confidence in the numbers all period long. And so we talk about this notion of always be closing, right? Always being ready.

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If you needed to close the books today, would they be accurate? And that's a great value proposition and a great sort of concept that finance teams can embrace. But the implications for the business are even greater. Because if the numbers are accurate, then if you're applying AI to those numbers, then the insights that it's providing are going to be more accurate. Its ability to reason across that data is going to be more pronounced and more helpful.

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And so it's sort of a, again, another virtuous circle, of focusing on that one goal actually brings these outsized, know, potentially exponential benefits, not just to one function, but to the entirety of the business.

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Vigoroso

It's exciting. Well, Evan made a lot of announcements. I would I I would curious you could talk a little bit about the sweet skills and a little bit what that means. And I caught it, but maybe some of the folks here haven't who are listening, but that one caught my eye. Well, I thought maybe we could just give a quick thumbnail on the thought behind that and what the hope is for the impact that's gonna be.

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Sullivan

Glad you picked up on that skills, you know, for those that may be not quite so familiar with the, you the AI terminology are in essence a way to train the AI that you're using, you know, whichever it might be in the context of your business and in the specifics of a business process. so, you know, today we announced Suite Skills with more than 45 out of the box, you will, sets of capabilities that train and can be used to train your AI of choice, whether that be Claude or ChatGPT or Grok, and actually ask Oracle built into the suite as well, which we'll come to, to actually understand what it means to be performing a particular function within NetSuite and in the context of your business. So it basically makes AI more useful out of the box by default. And that is also in response to what we've been seeing customers do over the course of the last 15 months or so since we announced the AI Connector Service.

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What that ultimately leads to then is confidence in deploying AI and using AI across and empowering members of your organization. Because whichever AI they use or whoever's using AI across these various functions, they're gonna get consistent responses. Because it's been told how to interpret terminology, it's been told how to interpret how the account is configured.

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You know, we've seen as being a tremendous driver of adoption confidence from our customers who recognize that AI is ready for them, but perhaps have been hesitant, you know, maybe have felt that they weren't quite ready to embrace the opportunities of AI because of concerns about inconsistency of responses or how can I validate and verify, you know, the responses that are being provided. So yeah, so across sales, across operations, across project management services, as well as finance, there's now a range of, in essence, out of the box capabilities, regardless of which AI tool you're using in your organization.

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Vigoroso

I assume a lot of customer input and feedback went into that.

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Sullivan

Absolutely. And that, you know, we've, you know, we've been engaging with, with the customers that have been using the AI connected service and the likes of Johnny Pops that was on the stage. I have to try. Yeah, no, they're delicious. And, they've been really successful, but it comes back to, to that change management. You know, could, know, Connor has driven his organization to do,

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Vigoroso

I gotta try one.

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Sullivan

You know, to basically leverage as much as possible the capabilities that have been made available to them such that, you know, they can grow rapidly while keeping their team, you know, efficient and lean and has had great success in driving those. So those kinds of examples, the kinds of things that they've done, the journey that they've been on.

That's all great inspiration. And not just for us, but for the other customers as well.

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Vigoroso

Speaking of rapid growth, I'd like to talk about Quick Start as well. I happen to be running a startup at the moment. I have some thoughts about what must be the strategy there? But it's free to start, right? Hence the name. But if you could talk a little bit about who that's aimed at and what you anticipate the journey to be of these really young companies, the ones that succeed and grow, how do they, how do they mature and become a get up on that stage one day? How does that happen?

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Sullivan

That's a great question. We recognize, and actually, I'm hoping we'll come to another topic that's adjacent to this as well, but we recognize that for smaller companies, NetSuite itself is a relatively big leap in terms of what it takes actually to implement it and to benefit from it. And there have been other opportunities, other solutions available to those startups that perhaps are not ready to embrace NetSuite. So we thought about that and focused then on high-tech startups, so software companies in essence. recognizing, one, there are more and more of these small companies being created all the time as a result of these incredible tools now being available to them like Codcode and Codex. And all of that is accelerating and is a very exciting space all the time as well. the thought there is, well, if they're in essence, their product function with those tools, then maybe they should start their business function from that perspective as well. And maybe there's a correlation there.

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So, the vision for QuickStart is actually to make that back office function actually something that you don't really need to think about. You shouldn't have to log in as a startup because you're busy proving your market, busy innovating. hustle. It's the hustle. like, it's those, back to my startup days, it's the late pizza.

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Yes. Team nights, kind of getting this thing off the ground, right? Why be distracted by tracking credit card activity? Why be distracted by reconciling your bank account? Why be distracted by having to think about running payroll? More and more of those tools actually can be connected via MCP and other technology to, in this case, Quickstart.

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Quickstart can just be monitoring all of that activity and saying, you know, notice this new transaction, what would you like me to do about it? And over time we'll learn and actually start to take on more of that administrative responsibility for the start-ups. we see, you know, particularly those new businesses being more predisposed to embracing that opportunity by virtue of the fact that they're starting and they don't have anything yet. So it's not like they're going through a change management.

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They're basically saying, well, I need this to happen. Let's just have it automated from day one. Yeah. Let's embrace the, you know, the opportunity of the technology. and so that philosophy then is, okay, well then as those companies, you know, grow, we're already working with them. We're already supporting the business. We already have that data that shows the history of the business. When they're ready. Now we can actually help them, you know, upgrade to full NetSuite based upon their needs.

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Vigoroso

I don't want to know what the success rate is, but they're not all they're not all gonna make it. But if you think about the percentages it it seems like a bet that is probably gonna pay off for you guys. because you have folks that are about the warmest possible lead…

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Sullivan

Right. And they have a real need, right? If they're to start talking to investors, then they're going to want to see the books. Absolutely. And, know, at some point someone's got to be doing that admin function. Why not just let it start that way?

 

Vigoroso

Yeah. Instead of having to rewind and unwind. So Craig, you want to talk about an adjacent topic….

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Sullivan

Well, you inspired me to think then of the other announcement that was made today, which was Suite Express. Yeah, which is where we you know, we're applying AI to another challenge that exists in ERP prior to the end of ERP as we know it, which is how challenging implementations can be. You particularly if you're moving from multiple other systems and having to figure out what it is that you need from a new system.

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And go through the process of allocating time and resources to actually clean the data and understand all of those requirements and source all the data from all of these systems and actually continue to run the business at the same time while all that's happening. So Suite Express then allows basically an approach that we're taking where we can leverage these AI tools that we've been building to ingest what is in essence the customer's knowledge base.

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You know, all of the documents that support how they run the business today, you know, what, you know, what their legacy data is, what are the needs of the business and through, through both discussion and, and, documentation, we can ingest that and actually make a proposal for how to implement net suite that meets their needs in a bespoke way in essence on, on day one. And by day one, we don't mean nine months later.

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Yeah, you know the example that we had on the stage, you know, it was a project that they expected to take six months to succeed eight. Yeah, yeah, and so we're really excited about that because you know, whether you're a quick start customer upgrading to NetSuite and thinking about then how you evolve your system or whether you're coming to us from prior systems, whatever they may be, we can help customers much more rapidly.

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From a time to value perspective, go live on NetSuite with an instance that meets their needs, but then can continue to evolve because, you know, we've got the AI monitoring usage. We can, we can help them identify where they need some additional capabilities or where, you know, perhaps a business process is, is beginning to fail them in whichever way, you know, whether it's from a materiality perspective, they have too much approval going on, which is, you know, which is not required.

 

Or whether the process needs to change because they've got a new product line or they're expanding internationally, all of those things that NetSuite has grown up over the last couple of decades, almost three decades, proven to be a really great solution to support. We're now actually making it even easier for those businesses actually to take advantage of that.

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Vigoroso

Exciting. Well, let's wrap up, but I'd like to hear maybe after it's been one day, right? One. What would you say is the the most memorable, the most surprising, the most challenging, something that you took away from today that turned your wheels a little bit?

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Sullivan

Turns my wheels, you know, I always say, and this is, you know, I guess a little cliche, but walking around the expo, you know, for someone that's been around this business, you know, for quite a while, we won't count the years, but it's been, it's been a little while, seeing how much that has grown over the years. And, you know, it's, it's super gratifying to see some of those partners that now have enormous space and hundreds, now thousands of customers using their service as part of our ecosystem. These were themselves startups that bet on our customer base and our trajectory 20 years ago in some cases, if not more. So from that perspective, being here every year, and then also in our Suite Connect events around the world and elsewhere, but particularly Sweet World, that seeing that, seeing the bustle.

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Seeing the interactions, the conversations, seeing people fiddling around screens with new capabilities that haven't even appeared on the keynote yet and pointing and talking and wanting to. That fires me up. That's what turns my wheels.

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Vigoroso

Awesome. Well, we still have another day and a half, so more to cover. More to come, let's hope so. Appreciate it, yeah. Thank you so much.

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Sullivan

And congrats on the book!

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Vigoroso

Thanks very much! Revenue Physics. you'll be hearing more about it. And thank you everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of the Enterprise Edge. Take care, everybody.