Pictured above: Evan Goldberg.
For Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) marks one of the biggest shifts in technology since the dawn of the internet. In his view, it’s one that will change the way people work with systems, not just what systems can do.
Speaking with NZBusiness and media from across the Asia-Pacific region at SuiteWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, Goldberg described the new era of AI as “putting power in the hands of everyday business users”, giving them tools that simplify complexity rather than add to it.
“The question executives have to ask … is what tool is going to put the most power, in the easiest way, into the hands of users … so that as a team, you can achieve your vision more quickly.”
Goldberg believes the real impact of AI won’t come from replacing roles, but from removing friction. He compared the current AI moment to the early internet era of the mid-1990s, a period of rapid experimentation and discovery.
“The internet came like a bolt of lightning in 1994-95,” he reflected. It took a few years before businesses figured out how to use it for structured data and real operations. I see AI following a similar timeline, but the difference is that everyone’s figuring it out in real time, all at once.”
Much of Goldberg’s excitement with AI in business centres around the conversational interface and the ability for users to talk to business systems in plain language. NetSuite’s new AI engine, Ask Oracle, takes that concept further by allowing users to create “suite agents” or intelligent assistants that automate tasks or surface insights based on simple prompts.
“The best experience humans have evolved is conversation. It’s natural, intuitive, and doesn’t require jargon. Being able to converse with your system and have it do things on your behalf in natural language [is] enormously powerful.”
Goldberg described this shift as a fundamental redesign of how people interact with enterprise software. “If you can communicate with your ERP like you would with a colleague,” he explained, “you remove the intimidation barrier. You don’t have to learn the system, you just tell it what you want to do.”
While many large organisations are racing to integrate AI, Goldberg sees enormous potential for small and mid-sized businesses, especially those in markets like New Zealand and Australia.
“We’re using AI to make it easier to implement NetSuite, to learn it, and to get value from it earlier in the life of a business. That’s super exciting, because it means more power for smaller companies, earlier in their journey.”
For Goldberg, the human-technology partnership is the real story. The goal isn’t to automate people out of the picture, it’s to give them the freedom to focus on higher-value work.
“We’ve always built NetSuite to empower users. AI is just the next step in that journey. Taking away the barriers, making the complex simple, and helping people achieve what they set out to do.”
As he put it: “It’s a really fun time right now.”
NZBusiness is in Las Vegas at SuiteWorld 2025 courtesy of Oracle NetSuite.
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