NetSuite’s Global Vision: Building the Intelligent Enterprise for the AI Era

The next phase of digital transformation is not just about moving to the cloud; it’s about making the cloud intelligent. That’s the message NetSuite delivered loud and clear at its annual SuiteWorld 2025 event in Las Vegas. The focus this year was squarely on artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and how businesses can accelerate transformation through unified, intelligent systems.

On the sidelines of the event, Shipra Sinha, Lead Analyst, Industry Intelligence Group (IIG) at CyberMedia Research (CMR), sat down with Craig Sullivan, Senior Vice President, Enterprise and International Products at NetSuite. Sullivan, who has been with the company for more than nine years, oversees NetSuite’s international product strategy, managing localisation initiatives and expansion efforts that have taken the brand to 220 countries and territories.

Sullivan’s perspective is rooted in a simple but powerful idea: helping businesses “act global but be local”. And that, he says, remains at the heart of NetSuite’s product and market strategy as the company scales deeper into emerging regions.

A Global Vision Grounded in Local Relevance

For NetSuite, global expansion has always been about enabling customers to operate across borders while meeting the compliance and cultural expectations of individual markets. Sullivan explains that the company’s vision for growth lies in continuing to support the “breadth and depth” of customers adopting NetSuite worldwide while ensuring that its suite of applications reflects the specific needs of local users.

“The idea”, he says, “is to allow companies to operate at a global scale but at the same time deliver on what their customers expect at a local scale.”

This dual philosophy of global consistency with local flexibility is what has allowed NetSuite to become a trusted partner for multinational and midsized enterprises alike. As business models evolve and markets become more intertwined, this adaptability is becoming not just a differentiator but a necessity.

Making AI the Core of the Enterprise

At SuiteWorld 2025, NetSuite took a major leap forward with the launch of NetSuite Next, a new iteration of its platform where AI is no longer an add-on but a deeply embedded capability. The vision, according to Sullivan, is to make AI “intrinsic” to how users experience the product.

Once customers enable NetSuite Next, the new AI assistant Ask Oracle becomes omnipresent across the platform. It allows users to search, interpret data, and act on insights conversationally, effectively transforming how they interact with business information. Whether it’s understanding financial records, identifying anomalies, or forecasting outcomes, AI becomes part of the daily workflow.

Sullivan stresses that this integration is not about replacing human decision-making but about enhancing it through context-aware insights. Transparency, auditability, and user control are fundamental principles of NetSuite’s AI strategy. Customers can see how conclusions are drawn, verify underlying data, and determine how much automation they wish to deploy.

The design philosophy is deliberate to make AI accessible, explainable, and trustworthy. “We want customers to understand where numbers come from, how the system formed conclusions, and ensure it articulates its reasoning,” he says.

Empowering Customers and Partners Through AI

NetSuite’s innovation extends beyond end-user experience. Its Cloud Platform gives businesses and developers the tools to create customised AI-driven workflows, or "suite agents", that automate processes unique to their operations. Because NetSuite runs on a unified data model, these extensions inherit full contextual awareness, meaning AI understands the organisation’s structure, data flows, and business logic.

For NetSuite’s growing partner ecosystem, this represents a major leap forward. They can now develop vertical or horizontal extensions that are “instantly AI-enabled”, reducing the complexity and time required to integrate intelligence into business processes. Sullivan believes this will open a new chapter of co-innovation within NetSuite’s global partner community.

Driving Global Expansion Across Regions

As NetSuite continues to grow its enterprise and international product portfolio, the priority remains to ensure the suite is available wherever its customers operate. From North America to Europe, and increasingly across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, businesses are using NetSuite to streamline multi-market operations.

Sullivan points out that APAC is a particularly dynamic region where markets trade extensively with one another. Rather than favouring one market over another, NetSuite’s focus is to strengthen the connective tissue between them, supporting regional trade and operational efficiency.

“Businesses in this region are deeply interconnected,” Sullivan notes. “Our goal is to enable that flow by ensuring the suite supports the diversity and trade activity across these economies.”

The Unified Future of AI, Analytics, and ERP

Looking ahead, Sullivan envisions a world where ERP, analytics, and AI converge completely. “Why would anyone want an ERP that doesn’t have AI at its core?” he asks. The future enterprise system, he believes, will be an intelligent platform that not only manages operations but also continuously interprets data, provides predictive insights, and automates decisions.

This convergence aligns with NetSuite’s long-standing architectural philosophy of unification — where ERP, CRM, HR, and analytics operate within a single, coherent ecosystem. As AI capabilities proliferate across this foundation, the system becomes self-enhancing: it learns from usage patterns, summarises narratives, and collaborates naturally with users.

Balancing Innovation with Trust and Compliance

As AI adoption accelerates, so does the need for data security, governance, and compliance across jurisdictions. NetSuite benefits significantly from Oracle’s investments in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), where generative AI services are deployed securely within regional data centres. These large language models (LLMs) operate entirely within Oracle’s infrastructure, ensuring data never leaves the controlled environment.

Sullivan emphasizes that NetSuite’s AI is grounded in customers’ own business data and remains fully auditable. Users maintain control over what actions AI can take, ensuring a human remains “in the loop.” Transparency, he adds, is the foundation of trust a critical factor as enterprises become increasingly reliant on intelligent automation.

A Future Built on Agility and Unification

Reflecting on the next three to five years, Sullivan draws a parallel between today’s AI transformation and the early days of cloud computing. “Just like the beginning of the cloud era, things are moving very fast again,” he says. “We believe NetSuite’s unified data architecture, its deep industry functionality, and an open, extensible platform will continue to give our customers the agility they need.”

As the lines blur between analytics, automation, and enterprise systems, NetSuite’s philosophy of “act global, be local” seems more relevant than ever. It’s not just a tagline but a guiding principle one that balances innovation with accessibility, scale with trust, and intelligence with simplicity.

In a world racing toward AI-powered transformation, NetSuite’s approach deeply integrated, globally consistent, and locally adaptable offers a glimpse into what the intelligent enterprise of the future might look like.

By Shipra Sinha, Lead Analyst, CyberMedia Research (CMR)