Interview with Evan Goldberg – Founder & EVP of Oracle NetSuite

SuiteConnect 2026 in New York was packed with announcements, but one theme kept coming up in every hallway conversation: small businesses want AI that saves real time without sacrificing accuracy. In this interview, I sat down with Evan Goldberg—Founder and Executive Vice President of Oracle NetSuite—to unpack what NetSuite’s newest AI features are designed to do in the day-to-day reality of running finance, sales, and operations.

Evan walked through how NetSuite is using AI to monitor trends and variances, catch anomalies early, and move businesses closer to a “continuous close” where your numbers are reliable every single day—not weeks after month-end. We also covered AI-powered bank transaction matching, narrative reporting that turns dense dashboards into plain-language insights, Customer 360 summaries for faster context in sales and support, advanced pricing tools to protect margins across segments, and the SuiteCloud Developer Assistant aimed at making customization and script maintenance easier for lean teams.

Here is a transcript of the above interview:

Leland McFarland

All right, I’m here at Suite Connect 2026 in New York with Evan Goldberg, the founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite. Thank you for coming on. All right, so I’m to start off with some questions about AI innovation and efficiency. So the release mentioned monitoring trends and variance.

Evan Goldberg

Thanks for having me.

Leland McFarland

and showing net income impact. How does that help an owner catch problems early like expense creep, margin compression, or even revenue?

Evan Goldberg

Yeah, well, I real time information about your business is critical in, you know, for companies that are moving really fast and things are changing in their environment really fast. And so one of the things that we’re really focused on is using AI to help catch anomalies quickly, to help you reconcile your accounts really quickly, just getting you that sort of continuous close. So you don’t just have

best information about your business just at that one time, actually when it’s already outdated, know several days or weeks after the close, but really every single day you can rely on you run an income statement and it’s correct and it’s giving you that. Having accurate information every day is certainly the first element of being able to spot trends.

Leland McFarland

Yeah, definitely. What does detailed drill down into transaction data look like in practice? How quickly can a controller trace an anomaly from summary transaction to root?

Evan Goldberg

Yeah. Well, you know, it’s all happening right within NetSuite. It’s not an extraction of the data that it’s doing the analysis on. It’s that real-time data. So anything that it finds is linked directly to the actual transaction. And if you make a change, choose the recommended change, that’s updating your financials in real time. it’s kind of immediately you can see the impact.

of changes that you make. again, it’s again about this sort of all one real time system, a single source of truth that you’re operating on and doing it in real time.

Leland McFarland

That sounds great. So many SMBs lose hours each week matching deposit fees and payouts. Where do you expect the biggest time savings are going to be coming from?

Evan Goldberg

I mean, you know, what we hear from our customers is they definitely spend a lot of time dealing with the bank and getting reconciliations correct and being able to know exactly what their cash position is. And that drives a lot of different things, like when you can make certain investments, when you’re going to be paying certain payables that you have, all that is driven by your cash position. So I think, you know, the manual

sort of labor in maintaining your bank accounts is something that we’re really, really focused on.

Leland McFarland

So what are the most common bank reconciliation pain points you designed? this AI powered bank transaction matching for And how does a AI handle?

Evan Goldberg

Yeah. Well, again, there’s not sometimes not an exact obvious match between the transactions from the bank and the transactions in that suite. And so that’s where the AI can come in and figure out if multiple transactions were grouped together or other ways that there might be discrepancies. Again, the fewer that you sort of have to manually look at and try to understand the more the more time you’re going to save.

And I think in the past, a rules-based approach could only do so much. AI isn’t always right, it is quickly able to find at least the potential answers, the potential matches, so you don’t have to dig through reports. And that’s a big time.

Leland McFarland

Yeah, and I can imagine not having to set up those rules, really nice, AI just does it, and it could get you 90 % of the way there, and then potentially also learn where it went wrong.

Evan Goldberg

mean definitely adaptability. These are learning systems. They should be learning every time you say this is the actual match. You should learn from that and the next time it will be.

Leland McFarland

Definitely. What controls are built in so small businesses can trust auto matching without increasing risk?

Evan Goldberg

Well, I mean the number one thing that’s built in is you know, have 43,000 customers So who are trying it on so many customers that we’re getting you know Massive experience to make sure it is doing the right thing. Just as we talked about We allow you to look you know, if there’s if there’s any question, you know We kind of let you look at it and and make sure you You sort of agree. So I think the human in the loop

doing that at the right time, because obviously you don’t want a human in the loop all the time, that sort of erodes the benefit of AI. But having a human in the loop at the right time when there is some ambiguity or question is striking that right balance between automation and correctness. certainly we deeply understand how much our customers rely on NetSuite for accuracy. And that’s a guiding principle for us in everything we do.

Leland McFarland

All right, moving on to AI generated reports narratives. SMB owners often don’t have time to interpret dashboards. What kinds of reports will benefit most from AI narratives?

Evan Goldberg

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it’s the reports that are most connected to your business success. So certainly your sales reports are critical. Those are some of the first ones that we’re really been focused on improving and making more flexible and giving you this great sort of AI driven insight. And then on the flip side is your profitability.

So is revenue the sales reports, is profitability with your income statement? That’s a critical one to understand. Your aging reports, again, that can be a lot of numbers. You have a lot of customers with a lot of invoices or you have a lot of vendors with a of bills that you’re paying. Being able to understand where your receivables are causing a problem. If you have a day sales outstanding that you don’t… ⁓

think is really where you want it to be or it’s above sort of the industry standard, you know, we can pinpoint that for you, but then also by analyzing these reports like the aging reports, we can help you identify where you may have opportunities to lower that DSL.

Leland McFarland

How do you ensure the narrative is grounded in numbers and not overconfident? What’s the best practice for reviewing approvals in a small team?

Evan Goldberg

Right. Well, narratives and approvals are sort of two different areas for us. mean, the narratives, again, we’re on this journey with our customers. We’re continually improving. are, again, running it with thousands of customers, getting their feedback. That’s how they’re going to get better and better. We think they’re already there starting pretty good. ⁓

And then on approvals, it’s a similar process to otherwise where we’re tuning the system to understand, certainly a simple thing is larger approvals need more scrutiny, may need more human in the loop. so there’s a tension here, again, between automation and trust and accuracy. And by testing these, ⁓

improvements carefully with a representative set of customers. That’s how we think we’re going to get that balance right.

Leland McFarland

Are there guardrails to combat like hallucinations or anything like that when it comes to the AI data and can we come up with these narrative reports?

Evan Goldberg

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s a great question. Again, we are not releasing these features without a substantial amount of testing to show that they’re working for customers. AI is a different type of technology that we’re all sort of getting familiar with in real time on the fly about how, first of all, to make sure that it is as accurate as possible to be able to ⁓

identify places where it’s not accurate. It’s just like having a human analyst. I’m sure all of us have experience where you ask someone for a report and they bring you the report and it’s not quite the report you expected or the numbers weren’t calculated the way you were going to expect them. They’re not perfect either. so we’re just trying to, but if we can greatly improve

on the accuracy that you’re getting right now when you’re analysts to do this or an accountant to do this or whatever, then that’s gonna be a big plus and you’ll get the information faster and it often will be more comprehensive.

Leland McFarland

For small support and sales teams, what’s the simplest way to use role-based summaries to reduce handling time and avoid dropouts?

Evan Goldberg

Yeah. Well, I mean, these sales orders, for example, can be extremely complex. They have lots of items on them. Those items have lots of options on them. And, you know, if it’s for, you know, a lot of times it’s for a critical customer. So having AI be able to see, you know, the entire sales order, for example, and all the elements of it, and basically just give you checks. Have you done, you know, have you had a list? This item seems to be delayed.

What are you going to do about it? And do that proactively. So for an individual salesperson managing a lot of different orders, AI can be sort of that helpful coworker that’s looking at all of them, looking at how they’re proceeding and making sure they’re proceeding the way that you want them to. And again, you can continually sort of tune your helpful coworker and say, this is what I think is most important. This is what to look out for. And it’s going to be doing that 24 seven when you sleep.

Leland McFarland

I do love that aspect about it. It never sleeps.

Evan Goldberg

Hahaha.

Leland McFarland

All right, what does the new NetSuite Customer 360 add that a small business would actually notice day to day?

Evan Goldberg

Well, I think we’re just bringing more and more information from all different parts of the suite. mean, what excites me and I think our customers that have used it about Customer 360 is that NetSuite is a comprehensive system that deals with so many different aspects of your customer interactions from the moment they sort of come and ask to see your product or service and you give them a quote and then eventually you get the order, but then they’re

You know, you have to fulfill the order you may have to support that customer. You obviously have to collect the cash. mean, being able to see that everywhere. And so what we’re doing with customer 360 is continuously bringing more and more of that information right at your fingertips and using AI. The more the information there is, the harder it is to sort of page through everything. So that’s where AI summaries can be so critical because they can hone in on

What are the key things that maybe are different about this customer or that are worthy of your attention? So you don’t have to scroll through every single screen because there is a lot of data there.

Leland McFarland

All right, so moving on to AI assisted advanced pricing. Small businesses struggle to maintain margin consistency across channels and segments. How does AI assisted advanced pricing help ensure the right price shows up on every single quote?

Evan Goldberg

Well, we were really excited to show that vision today. Advanced pricing just gives you fine grain control. NetSuite’s always had sophisticated pricing where you can price by customer segment. But now we’ve added the ability to do cost plus pricing, which really maintains that price over the long term to maintain your margin. AI can help you to design your pricing strategies.

We’ve been showing where AI can monitor competitive pricing and alert you and then help you develop promotional pricing over particular dates that might help you with competitors. You’re right that pricing is a strategic asset to not only help you be as profitable as you can be, but also grow your revenue and get new customers in the door as effectively as possible.

Leland McFarland

All right, the release mentioned pricing by date range, assortment, and customer segment. What’s a practical SMB use case for this kind of feature?

Evan Goldberg

Well, everybody wants to make a price that’s right for that customer based on their profile and ultimately sort of, a lot of different attributes for different customers. So customer specific pricing on the other hand is, can be complex to maintain. The more fine grained you make it, you could have a price list for every single customer and have every single one be different. That’s a lot to maintain. AI can just help you. ⁓

be more fine-grained about pricing and yet not have to do a lot of manual pricing. And that’s just gonna, again, help increase your sales, but also help maintain great profits.

Leland McFarland

All right, moving on to sweet cloud developer assistant. Many SMBs have one admin or rely on partners. How does developer assistance reduce the cost and time of customization and integration without increasing risk?

Evan Goldberg

No, that’s a great point. We try to make it as easy to customize NetSuite as possible, but a lot of small companies have big ambitions to really make the system be very powerful, tailored specifically for them and their needs. so yeah, in the past, sometimes you can see that admin’s list of to-dos got very, very large. So it’s not like you’re going to replace that admin, but you are going to make that admin way more effective.

go from idea of customization to execution in turbo speed, way, way faster than they ever could before. And that’s just going to help them be able to work down that list of enhancements that you want to make to your NetSuite instance and also help maintain them. Because again, AI will always be able to look at the things that it did months or years ago and help you fix them as you know.

You have turnover in your IT department sometimes, have turnover in partners, but there’s sort of no turnover in AI, for lack of a better word.

Leland McFarland

And I know I’ve done the tech side of things and it can be daunting with the list of tasks and AI has been a big huge help.

Evan Goldberg

Yeah, and mean, it’s just that’s what it’s really about. mean, people spend an enormous amount of time working on urgent issues, but they have this big important list that they never seem to get to. And it’s again, it’s not about replacing those people, but having those people be able to spend more time on those important long term tasks that they never seem

Leland McFarland

Exactly. All right. Now on NetSuite EPM planning agent, SMBs want faster planning without hiring FP and A staff. What kind of questions can an owner ask in a natural language that produces immediate value?

Evan Goldberg

Right. mean, we, um, that’s a pretty, there’s a pretty deep examples there. mean, EPM is a very sophisticated product, uh, built for enterprises scale down to where it work for NetSuite. And one of the most exciting things about it now is even scale down. It’s, can be a daunting process, a product to adopt for NetSuite users. And so the more AI we’re building in, the easier it is to adopt the tool to set it up. have now a great, for example, account reconciliation.

a setup assistant for EPM to just make it much easier to set up account reconciliation. I think one of the things we talked a lot about in AI is the ability to give you great answers or automate things, but there’s an equal capability to just help you implement and help relatively non-technical people take these sophisticated products and make them work within their business. So that’s sort of where we’re focused on. And it’s just going to be easier to get EPM up and running.

in your company when you need that level of sophistication.

Leland McFarland

What’s a safe starter use you would recommend? Writing scripts, generating documents, when it comes to the sweet cloud developer system.

Evan Goldberg

That’s a great question. I think…

I think it’s great for writing scripts, there’s no doubt about it. I should say that one of the issues that some customers have is they have a lot of sweet script already. It’s been written by multiple people. Maybe some of it was written by a partner, some written by people in your company, those people may have left, et cetera. mentioned that. The ability for the developer assistant to just go through everything you have and better document it, better comment it, everybody knows.

who writes code that, know, commenting is often minimal, let’s say, but AI can understand the code deeply and the maintenance of that code is just, you know, that headache again, is gonna just free up more time to do new things. And then, yet when it comes to writing your next script, Suite Cloud Developer Assistant is gonna not only make it faster, but it’s gonna automatically write unit tests for you. So the code is gonna come out sort of much more ready.

for prime time and maybe in the past.

Leland McFarland

So last year at Sweet World 2025, it was announced that a company co-founded by Tom Holland Bureau is using NetSuite. Now here you released something that said, you did a release that said that a company co-founded by Robert Downey Jr. is using NetSuite. Happy, are you kind of going for like an epic Marvel collection? Is Chris Hemsworth?

Evan Goldberg

Maybe, but that would probably not be a great business strategy. It’d be good for our events. yeah, requiring our customers to have a celebrity co-founder is probably just too high a bar.

Leland McFarland

Perfect. All right, well, that’s what I got for you. Thank you for dealing with all the barrage questions that had.

Evan Goldberg

Appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

What stood out most in this conversation is that NetSuite’s AI direction isn’t about flashy demos—it’s about compressing the time between “something changed” and “you know what to do about it.” From real-time anomaly detection and faster reconciliations to narratives grounded in financial reports and role-based summaries that act like a tireless coworker, the goal is clear: fewer hours lost to manual work and more confidence in the numbers driving decisions.

Evan also emphasized the balance small businesses care about most—automation with trust. Human-in-the-loop review where it matters, testing at scale across thousands of customers, and AI that learns from corrections are all positioned as guardrails to keep accuracy front and center. And for companies with big ambitions but small teams, tools like advanced pricing and the SuiteCloud Developer Assistant may be the difference between “we want to do this” and “we actually shipped it.”

Thanks again to Evan Goldberg for joining me at SuiteConnect 2026—and if you’re a small business owner trying to move faster with fewer resources, this is an interview worth digging into.

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