Oracle NetSuite’s Quiet AI Revolution: How Evan Goldberg Is Playing the Long Game While Wall Street Chases Hype

While the technology world fixates on generative AI startups commanding eye-watering valuations and mega-cap companies racing to pour billions into GPU infrastructure, Oracle’s NetSuite division is charting a decidedly different course. Under the steady hand of founder and EVP Evan Goldberg, NetSuite is building an AI strategy that prioritizes practical utility for small and mid-sized businesses over investor-friendly spectacle — a calculated bet that substance will ultimately outpace sizzle in the enterprise software market. The approach stands in stark contrast to the prevailing mood on Wall Street, where AI has become the magic word that can send stock prices soaring or cratering depending on whether a company’s earnings call includes enough references to large language models. NetSuite’s position is that AI should be embedded, contextual, and genuinely useful — not bolted on as a marketing exercise. It’s a philosophy that Goldberg has been refining for years, and one that is now manifesting in a wave of new product announcements that deserve closer examination. Goldberg’s Counter-Narrative to the AI Investment Frenzy In a detailed conversation with diginomica, Goldberg laid out his thinking on why NetSuite’s AI strategy deliberately avoids the breathless hype cycle that has consumed much of the technology sector. His argument is nuanced but ultimately straightforward: the companies that will win with AI in the enterprise are those that understand the specific workflows and pain points of their customers, not those that simply layer a chatbot on top of existing software and call it innovation. Goldberg has been at this for decades. He founded NetSuite in 1998 — the same year Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and his longtime collaborator, helped back the venture. The company was a cloud ERP pioneer long before ‘cloud’ became a ubiquitous buzzword. That history gives Goldberg a particular vantage point on technology hype cycles. He has watched trends come and go, and his instinct is to focus on what actually moves the needle for NetSuite’s core constituency: the small and mid-sized businesses that rely on the platform to run their operations. Where SMBs Actually Stand with Artificial Intelligence The question of where small and mid-sized businesses go from here with AI is not merely academic. These companies represent the backbone of the global economy, yet they are often underserved by the AI conversation, which tends to center on the needs and budgets of Fortune 500 enterprises. NetSuite’s answer, as reported by diginomica, is to meet these businesses where they are — with AI capabilities that are embedded directly into the ERP workflows they already use, reducing the need for specialized technical talent or expensive implementation projects. This is a critical distinction. Large enterprises can afford to hire teams of data scientists, build custom models, and experiment with cutting-edge AI architectures. A 200-person manufacturing company or a growing e-commerce brand operating on NetSuite cannot. For these businesses, AI needs to arrive pre-configured, contextually aware, and immediately useful. It needs to reduce the time a controller spends on month-end close, help a supply chain manager anticipate disruptions, or enable a sales team to prioritize leads without requiring anyone to write a prompt or understand how a transformer model works. NetSuite’s Fresh AI Product Announcements Unpacked NetSuite has rolled out a substantial slate of AI-powered features that reflect this embedded philosophy. The announcements span multiple functional areas, including financial management, procurement, supply chain operations, and customer relationship management. What ties them together is a consistent design principle: AI should operate within the natural flow of work, surfacing insights and automating tasks without requiring users to switch contexts or learn new interfaces. Among the most notable additions are