Evan Goldberg on the End of ERP as We Know It

0:00CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from OneStream, Trusted Data, Faster Decisions, and Salesforce. Explore new research on the future of finance and AI at Salesforce.com slash CFO report. Bonus episode.

0:24Well, we have customers going live in 22 days in one case. So it's obviously relieving a lot of the burden and it relieves a lot of the burden of the customer because it can ingest so much of the information, how you're using your systems currently, the data from your existing systems, and also everything you tell us in interviews It ingests once and you never have to repeat it. So that takes a lot of the burden of the implementation because, look, one thing is money, but the other thing is time. And time is your most precious resource.

1:12CFO THOUGHT LEADER: When Evan Goldberg declared at Sweet World this week that ERP as we know it is over, I'll admit my first reaction was skepticism. Technology executives have been announcing the end of things for as long as we can remember. But Goldberg is an interesting person to make that declaration. He helped build the very era he's now telling us is coming to an end. And it got me thinking about something I've heard repeatedly from CFOs over the years. For many finance leaders, implementing an ERP system wasn't just another project. It was a formative chapter in their careers. Those implementations earned them their stripes.

1:57CFO THOUGHT LEADER: They learned how information moved through an organization, how business processes worked, where the problems were, and how to bring different departments together. And those experiences often became valuable credentials for the next CFO appointment. In fact, the evolution of NetSuite and the evolution of the middle market CFO have been closely intertwined. As companies grew more complex, they hired more experienced finance leadership. And one of the first things those leaders often did was upgrade the company's financial systems. NetSuite became part of that journey. For companies preparing to scale, raise capital, or eventually go public, implementing a more sophisticated ERP system was often a major milestone.

2:47CFO THOUGHT LEADER: But here's what's changing. Goldberg is describing a future in which AI makes these systems dramatically easier to implement and operate. And NetSuite's new QuickStart initiative, initially aimed at technology startups and founders, suggests the company sees an opportunity to reach businesses much earlier in their development. Think about that. Historically, a company needed a certain amount of financial and organizational muscle to take on an ERP implementation. But what happens when AI reduces the need for specialized technical expertise? When a much smaller team can manage financial processes that once required a larger organization, suddenly the relationship between company maturity and ERP adoption begins to change.

3:40CFO THOUGHT LEADER: And so does the relationship between ERP expertise and finance leadership. At Sweet World, I spoke with three CFOs. And one thing that emerged was the growing importance of hiring people who knew how to ask the right questions. Not simply people who know how to navigate a particular application. People who understand the business, recognize problems, and know what questions need to be answered. That strikes me as significant. For years, ERP expertise helped define the careers of many finance professionals. Knowing how to implement and operate these systems could be a stepping stone towards the CFO chair.

4:26CFO THOUGHT LEADER: These skills aren't disappearing tomorrow, but their value may be changing. And perhaps that's the more interesting implication of Goldberg's declaration. It's not simply that ERP software is changing. It's the traditional relationship between the CFO, the finance organization, and the systems they depend on is beginning to shift. The next generation of CFOs, they earn their stripes in very different ways. And that's a transformation worth watching. Our talk with founder and executive vice president Evan Goldberg of Oracle NetSuite begins after this.

5:29CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Hello, Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite is with us. Evan helped launch NetSuite in 1998 when delivering business software through the cloud was still a radical idea. Nearly three decades later, he's helping lead another transformation as artificial intelligence begins reshaping how companies manage their finances and operations. We're here at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, where NetSuite has been outlining its vision for the next generation of business software. Evan, welcome. Thanks for having me. Evan, you've been building business software for nearly three decades.

6:14CFO THOUGHT LEADER: When it comes to ERP and company expectations, what has changed the most? Well, I think expectations have changed rapidly over the past couple years because people are asking, how can AI impact the experience that our users have with using this technology? How can it do much more for them than it's ever been able to do before? And that's what we've been outlining here at Sweet World, how revolutionary it is for users of ERP. are cfos asking fundamentally different questions today i don't i no i don't think in terms of uh the metrics that they want uh to know to drive that are driving their business the types of um things they want to automate and make faster i don't think those have fundamentally changed they just have these incredible new powerful tools to accomplish those goals that they you know may not have been able to do before.

7:19CFO THOUGHT LEADER: When you look at NetSuite's customers today, has the CFO's role survived compared with even five years ago? I absolutely think it has. You know, we see that because in a lot of companies, this may seem alien to tech companies, but in non-tech companies, often the IT function rolls up to CFOs and now people are expecting so much more out of AI across their entire company. And a lot of that is rolling up to the CFO. In addition, I think that the advent of these powerful analytics tools that can be driven by AI and don't necessarily require expertise to use are giving CFOs the opportunity for their people to be way more productive and use some of their analytical skills, not just in the pure financial functions, because a lot of those are easier and faster to accomplish than ever, but start using those tools across the organization and applying their skills to really make the entire operation run better, not just finance.

8:30CFO THOUGHT LEADER: You've talked about thousands of customers already experimenting, adopting with AI. What surprised you most about how they're using it? Yeah, and so many of them are not experimenting anymore. They've rolled out AI-based tools that are making so many different parts of their organization run more effectively. Certainly just the speed with which they've adopted them has been probably the thing that's most surprised me. Again, fundamentally, what people in companies want to do has not changed. They want to deliver effectively their product or service to their customers. They want to acquire and find new customers that might want to use it, and they want to do it profitably.

9:17So the questions that they've been answering in that sense aren't surprising. They're sort of similar to the questions that they've asked for before, the types of automations that they've wanted to do before. They're just getting so far so fast in actually doing that because what we've really done seems quite simple. We've just exposed the NetSuite platform to AI. That's a simple thing with an incredibly powerful result.

9:46CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Can you share an example where a CFO did something you hadn't anticipated? Well, I think just the scale is what we haven't anticipated. And, you know, these, you know, saving thousands of hours. We're hearing these statistics that I quoted in my keynote of thousands of hours a year, tens of thousands of order approvals getting done. And just the scale is probably the thing that most surprised us. Also, just how companies that may not have been thought of as tech leaders are actually the leaders in doing some of these things with AI because you can do it with natural language. And it's more about we give you the way.

10:34Do you have the will to experiment and try and then implement? And the ones that are, the ones that are making the leap, they're ahead of their competitors right away. And so, you know, that's why we're trying to make it the barrier to use these tools solo.

10:54CFO THOUGHT LEADER: for years erp has helped companies understand what's happening how significant is this shift towards systems that can actually take action how significant is that happening yeah it's it's to me it's by far the biggest transformation in the history of software that i've been involved with obviously that you don't have to navigate a complex UI anymore. You just communicate in natural language, which is sort of what we've evolved to do. That's a massive transformation. And in terms of doing things, I think the reasoning power and the ability to help you figure out how things should be done and then execute it, that's a fundamental change for systems.

11:45And it's really sort of limited only by your imagination now, whereas you may have had to wait for features to be developed by a software vendor before. You can basically, because we've exposed the core of NetSuite, it's data and it's business logic to AI. It's really you're in charge now. You don't have to wait for a NetSuite product manager or engineering team to do it. You can do it. And that's incredible power in the hands of all of our users.

12:15CFO THOUGHT LEADER: You've talked about moving toward a zero-day close. How close are we to making that practical? Yes, we obviously showed companies that had gone from 20 to 3 and 15 to 2 and that sort of thing. So, you know, we're close. There's always more to be done. But I think the most important thing, rather than how many days is the close, is how continuous is the close. How accurate are your financials mid-period? You know, not everything has to be exactly right all the time, but there's certainly things like your cash position that you want to be very, very accurate on as much as possible. And so I think that's just equally important as the speed of the close.

13:04CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Beyond speed, what changes when finance isn't constantly preparing for the next close? Well, I do think that, you know, we talked earlier about how if your finance team is freed up from some of the sort of blocking and tackling that they're always seeming to have to do, that team, which has incredible skills with financial analysis, can apply those to the bigger picture questions of how really can we run this company better? How can we achieve our goals more efficiently and more profitably, which is only going to get us faster to where we want to go? So I think that the system is always monitoring for exceptions so that you don't have to.

13:47The system is suggesting new ways of doing approvals that will maybe take a bunch of that off your plate without any kind of loss of reliability or trust. Those are the kinds of things that we think allow people to get to those projects that always seem to get delayed, but are the ones that are really going to move the needle for your company.

14:09CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Now, historically, finance has often identified the financial consequences of operational decisions after those decisions were made. Finance reports the margin erosion or the revenue shortfall. shortfall, AI is beginning to identify and address operational problems before they show up in the financial results. What does that mean for the relationship between finance and operations as you see it? Well, I think it should be tighter than ever. The better data you can give out of your operations to do the financial analysis sooner and prospectively rather than retroactively, I think the better you're going to be able to adjust to shifts even before they happen.

14:59AI is incredibly good at pattern recognition. New types of AI are actually good at modeling what might happen in the future. So we are experimenting with time series analysis to help you predict how things might change in the future based on what's happening now and what's happened in the recent past. And so the system being able to anticipate gives incredible opportunities to run your business better earlier, but it requires close coordination. It requires the data to be clean, and it requires cooperation so that that financial analysis can happen continuously.

15:42CFO THOUGHT LEADER: If the software is increasingly solving problems on its own, what does the CFO fit into the process? How do they fit in? Well, we are certainly not saying that those critical strategic decisions about your business, about what you should be doing to get to your larger goals as a company should be done by AI. we're really trying to free up the cfo from firefighting mode to you know strategic analysis mode and making those decisions that really do require human judgment that will require collaboration discussion giving the space for those to happen more consistently and sooner so that you can stay on track with your whatever it is that you're trying to achieve as a business Evan, yesterday you declared that ERP as we know it is over.

16:42CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Now that's a remarkable statement coming from someone who helped pioneer cloud ERP. But what's changed that makes you believe we're entering an entirely different era? What exactly is ending? And what takes its place? yeah i'd say three things the first thing is that with ai is the ui now you don't have to learn and new ways to navigate to get to the information you want it comes directly to you you interact with natural language to the degree that you need a ui ai builds it tailored to the task at hand It makes ERP so much more accessible to the everyday user. They can get so much more out of the system than they could before.

17:34And it really because they can personalize it and it's tailored to them. And so that really brings us to the second element of it is the ERP is really built for you. It's built for you as a user, tailored to you, but it's also tailored to you as a company. You know, we combine the knowledge about your business that you have built up over years with the knowledge about your industry that we've built up over the years and how NetSuite works best in business to tailor the NetSuite account for you and do it in a fraction of the time and expense that it cost before. or Suite Express is our new approach to implementing NetSuite so much faster.

18:14So that's another huge way that I'd say it's changed. Long, complex implementations of ERP are definitely a thing of the past. And then finally, that it can do so much of the work behind the scenes that it really becomes an autonomous suite. Only in the ways that you approve and over time, as you become more comfortable with it, the ability for the system to do so much for you and only involve you when you need to be involved, that's a fundamental shift in ERP and makes it really a totally different animal than it was in the past.

18:49CFO THOUGHT LEADER: ERP implementations have traditionally been expensive and disruptive. With Sweet Express, how much of that burden can AI realistically eliminate? Well, we have customers going live in 22 days in one case. So it's obviously relieving a lot of the burden and it relieves a lot of the burden of the customer because it can ingest so much of the information, how you're using your systems currently, the data from your existing systems, and also everything you tell us in interviews, it ingests once and you never have to repeat it. So that takes a lot of the burden of the implementation because look one thing is money but the other thing is time and time is your most precious resource and you you don't get these systems to sit in an implementation for months you get these systems to get them up and running quickly and make the getting that time to value uh shortened and realizing true value out of the systems and uh we're seeing enormous success in ai being able to bridge that gap put together the customer's specific knowledge the net suites specific knowledge, AI ties that all together and can bring you to a go live way faster than ever.

20:11CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Historically, companies have grown into NetSuite as their financial operations became more complex. With QuickStart, you're reaching them much earlier. So what's the bigger opportunity here? Nobody wants to go through an implementation. Even if it's relatively quick and easy, you'd like this continuity in your systems. And certainly you'd want the power of ERP, what it supposedly delivers early in your company. That's just never been available. You've had to wait till you get bigger and you have the resources and you maybe have some IT people to help with you. The fact that you can start with an incredibly strong foundation targeted to you, we're first targeting this to tech startups, really tailored to tech startups, And that's ready at a moment's notice when you're ready to go to full NetSuite, which is how the majority of tech companies IPO, for example, the fact that you know that you have that strong financial foundation from the beginning, it's working in the background.

21:13It's available wherever you want it in ChatGPT or Claude or Slack or with its own user experience occasionally that you may want to use yourself. That's a game changer, I think, for anybody that's building a company. I mean, you really have all the tools to become an incredibly professional tech company amazingly quickly now. Obviously, for many years, you've been able to host with professional hosting with something like AWS or OCI or something like that. Now you can have basically the equivalent of professional programmers building your dream into a real working system quickly. and you can have, because you're going to quickly be hopefully selling your product to many customers, you could have a professional financial system running things behind the scenes for you, you know, all before you have more than a handful of employees.

22:10It's incredible.

22:13CFO THOUGHT LEADER: And then looking three to five years ahead, what do you believe CFOs will be doing differently because of all of this? Well, I think they'll be spending more time on what matters and I think they'll be having bigger impact across the organization because AI has taken out that underbrush, all that clutter that was preventing them from being able to focus on the big picture. And I think that CFOs have such incredible talents in business and helping organizations really get to their goals faster. If you can use your resources most effectively, That's how you're going to achieve your dreams in a much easier, faster, and less expensive way.

23:05CFO THOUGHT LEADER: Evan Goldberg, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Thanks for having me.

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