Not having a plan is one of the things that we see most frequently. Not having a plan in terms of the steps that they intend to take, but actually not having a plan for what their end goal will be. What are the top priority drivers for them making an investment in a business system and making sure that their plan is aligned with driving towards those outcomes that they’re seeking. 

Craig Sullivan, Group VP of Product Management, NetSuite.

Today I’m speaking with Craig Sullivan, Group VP of Product Management, NetSuite

In this episode, we talk about . . .

• Insights into NetSuite Next: AI-native ERP, natural language queries & agentic workflows
• Grounded AI: Role-based, explainable responses tailored to accounting & finance users
• Internationalisation & multilingual support coming to NetSuite AI
• Global compliance & e-invoicing updates—AI-enabled validation for governments
• AI Connector: Bridging NetSuite with tools like ChatGPT for insights and storefront integration
• Advice for accountants stepping into ERP consulting
• Importance of planning in successful NetSuite implementation
• “Suite Success” methodology explained
• Closing with Pitbull (Mr Worldwide) and the global theme of SuiteWorld25

🧰 Apps & Tools Mentioned

NetSuite, Oracle, ApprovalMax, Soldo, Synder, ChatGPT, Claude, Shopify

⏱️ Highlighted Timestamps

02:15 – Why Accountants Should Care: NetSuite’s role in SME digital transformation
04:40 – From Frustration to Innovation: Craig’s journey from accountant to product leader
07:55 – Big Reveal: What NetSuite NEXT brings to ERP and accounting
10:30 – Grounded AI & Natural Language: Role-aware, explainable ERP queries
13:25 – Jet Engine, Not Co-Pilot: NetSuite’s bold AI claims
15:40 – Going Global: Supporting business in 160+ countries with OneWorld
18:20 – AI in Multiple Languages: Multilingual support explained
20:05 – E-Invoicing Powered by AI: Compliance turned efficiency booster
22:40 – Ask Oracle & Contextual Insights: Smarter decision-making with AI
24:55 – AI Connectors in Action: Real-world ChatGPT and Claude integrations
27:10 – What Accountants Should Know: Scaling smart from Day One
29:00 – Implementation Pitfalls: Planning as the missing puzzle piece
30:35 – The Power of Sweet Success: Best practice baked into ERP deployment
32:10 – Craig’s Final Insights: AI’s future role in accounting
33:55 – Bonus Fun: Pitbull, Mr Worldwide, and SuiteWorld party prep!

Scroll down for a full transcript

This transcript has been generated and transcribed by AI

Craig, how has your morning been so far? Have you been soaking up the buzz?

Craig Sullivan
Thanks, Heather. Yes. It’s great to be here. Thank you for one coming to visit us here at SuiteWorld. And how has my morning been? It’s been very busy, very exhilarating and absolutely soaking up the buzz.

SuiteWorld for us is our best event any time of the year, honestly. Getting to meet with customers, getting to meet with our partners, getting to talk with people like you and sharing our message around the world is really what gets us out of bed in the morning. So this is the best thing that we get to do, frankly.

Heather Smith
Fantastic. So you look forward to it all year.

Craig Sullivan
I might be looking tired, but that’s only on the outside, I promise.

Heather Smith
That’s wonderful that you have such a big event to look forward to. And it does seem to drive software to develop something for the event.

Craig Sullivan
Exactly. Yeah, there’s definitely a target date that we have in mind of things that we need to make sure that we’re ready to show. I mean, there are 8000 people here in the keynote this morning, and more online as well. And you know that audience is the inspiration for much of and most of what we do in the product.

Heather Smith
The audience and the attendees are very passionate about NetSuite. Absolutely, they’re very passionate people, and we’ll get into that. But you, Craig, have been with NetSuite for more than 25 years, which is quite remarkable.

Craig Sullivan
It doesn’t show, surely.

Heather Smith
No, it doesn’t show.

Can you share about your journey into product management and what’s kept you inspired all of this time?

Craig Sullivan
Yeah, thank you. Well, that does take me back a bit. Takes me back to the mid 90s, when I was the financial controller for a software company in the UK, actually. That software company sold and made software for car dealerships and car importers, as well as some wholesale distribution businesses, and we were using our own software to run that business also.

So in house, we had access to that development team, obviously not a cloud solution at that point. But as the financial controller, was very frustrated with our accounts payable processes, and I was frustrated with how we handled expense reporting for our employees and all these sort of other annoyances. I sort of looking at our software and thinking, well, if I’m frustrated by that, I’m sure our customers feel it could probably be better too.

I had the, you know, the conversation with the Managing Director and the head of finance at that point, and we started a project where we involved our engineering resources to actually help us improve the software for ourselves. And it was only a few years later, after I actually moved from the UK to California and was involved in working in some startup company.

That was my first job in in the Bay Area, that I realised that what I’d been doing in helping to drive solutions for what we needed internally was actually thinking about it from the perspective of product management and, you know. Basically parlaying my knowledge of accounting and business practice into making recommendations and proposals for how software could be improved, thinking about the end user need, you know, defining what it is that we were trying to do that actually fit the definition of what product management was.

At that point, all of a sudden, that’s all I wanted to do. And I got the opportunity when I joined NetLedger at the time, which obviously became NetSuite a couple of years later, was to basically take all of all that I had learned and think about how we could, you know, evolve that system to be better at solving the needs of the finance function, the accounting organisation, initially, within our within our target customers.

Heather Smith
Excellent. I find that when I interview successful people, they frequently use the word frustrated, and then that’s what drives them.

Craig Sullivan
Well, that’s the thing. We see what could be better, right?

Heather Smith
See, I don’t get frustrated by anything. Maybe this is why I just everything’s water off a duck’s back for me, that’s perhaps why I’ve not invented anything or created anything.

What are the product announcements at SuiteWorld 2025 you’re excited about that you think accountants need to know about?

Craig Sullivan
Yeah, we did make a lot of announcements.

Heather Smith
Just cherry pick a few, I don’t expect you to list them all.

Craig Sullivan
I think the key is really the opportunity that NetSuite Next represents of us, in essence, taking the benefits of the Oracle investments in cloud infrastructure, the investments and the partnerships in that’s been the continuing to be made with the leading AI companies and the LLMs, and embedding that within the cloud infrastructure, and bringing that as an enabler for our customers, such that they get to start to benefit seamlessly from this new technology as part of their business flows.

We talked about a lot of stuff today, but key, you know, key to that is this notion of trust, of grounded AI on top of the business or, you know, actually within the context of the business data. And the fact that now one you can interact in natural language with your business system and your accounting system and have it respond to you both in natural language, as well as actually with explanations as to as to why it’s reached the conclusions that it’s reached.

As you know, a key aspect of what we announced today was related to, you know, being able to ask about gross profit, about, you know, show me a financial statement. Run me a report. NetSuite Next shows you the report provides you with an interpretation of that and tells you exactly where that’s coming.  That leads to, you know, giving our customers the benefit of AI, with that grounded, with that, you know, real focus on making sure that it’s really delivered as part of the of the core financials, in a way that, you know, that we’re not seeing other systems do.

Then on top of that, you know, using the notion of agents, you know, agentic workflows is the is the phrase that we’re using these days to actually help the entire business, but specifically the accounting function actually do things more efficiently. Give the system the ability to to do things automatically, and increasingly, to the degree that they choose autonomously, within the context of roles and permissions and the security protocols that they define. That’s leading to this huge boost in efficiency and the ability for them to, you know, and particularly the finance function. Because they like to be talking and engaging with the rest of the business, thinking strategically, contributing strategically. So giving them more time to do that, we see that as being as a tremendous benefit to those teams within our customers organisations.

Heather Smith
Absolutely. And I think that they said that. Well, Evan explained that when you go in and you interact with I think it was Ask Oracle, the AI, it recognises your role. So it recognises you’re coming in as an accountant, and it responds at that level. That’s good, that gets you to the response that you need, at the level you need it faster.

Craig Sullivan
Absolutely right. In the context and at the level with that, right? You know that same perspective. It will talk finance to a finance person. It will talk sales to a salesperson.

Heather Smith
He didn’t use the exact term, but you’re saying natural language. He didn’t use the layman’s term, but, but in a in it explains it in a way that you understand it, which is helpful.

Craig Sullivan

Exactly, it meets you. Where you are, I think was one of the phrases that Evan said.

Heather Smith

Absolutely. The other thing that Evan said was, this is not a co-pilot. This is a jet engine. I did like that one.

Internationalisation is a big part of your role. Were there any announcements this year that are going to make it easier for business operations across multiple countries? 

Craig Sullivan
That’s the No Limits aspect of OneWorld. To pull in one of our phrases from this event, yeah. We’re very proud of the growth of our customer base in general: 43,000 businesses around the world, 350,000 subsidiaries operating all around the world, in some cases, companies with hundreds, 170 and certainly dozens of subsidiaries around the world. OneWorld has really allowed for businesses to use a single system to unify their operations and have that ability to have that global perspective about what’s going on.

Much of what we announced today is starting in the US and will be rolled out to other markets over time, once we launch it in the US in the next 12 months. But things like subscription metrics that Evan announced as part of the keynote today, which is really that solution for software as a service companies with all of the key performance indicators that they need, the insight that they need to understand what’s happening with their revenue stream now and into the future, the ability to understand churn risk. All those capabilities are actually available as of this release for our global customer base. So while some of the capabilities of NetSuite Next will be coming later for our international markets, a lot of what we do is available for our global customers, including things like the MCP capabilities through the NetSuite AI Connector also.

In terms of the global customers, when we’re dealing with the Ask Oracle and the natural language interface. Can I use languages other than English there?

Craig Sullivan
NetSuite Next will support multiple languages. In fact, I’ll be talking about that in tomorrow’s keynote as well.

Heather Smith
Visionary, hey.

Craig Sullivan
You’ve had your own little peek into the future in that context. But yes, the beauty of these tools is that they are being developed to be universal, if you will. So Ask Oracle, by virtue of the way that operates, will speak our users language. Not just in the context of their role, but actually in their local language as well. From that perspective, you know that that creates tremendous benefits for our users as well as for our customers’ customers, if you will, to be able to communicate and interact with them also.

Heather Smith
Fabulous.

For our listeners, Craig and I are both members of the global Accounting Association, the ACCA. It must make you really proud that you’re not working for a global ERP but for an accounting software company that supports businesses globally. 

Craig Sullivan
Absolutely does. And it’s sort of one of those things where you only realise, after the fact, perhaps, that the global perspective that you know that was part of actually that training and that early sort of ingraining of philosophy, really, as part of that experience.

As you know, when I was an accountant myself, as you told me last night, I’m still an accountant, but I don’t tell everyone that. But that perspective is one of the things that I think I’ve really benefited from in actually being able to parlay the frustration into actually thinking about how to to better serve the needs of our customer base.

Not that this is an advertisement for becoming an accountant, but I think that’s truly a very, very helpful grounding in what makes businesses tick, what’s important for businesses, how to think strategically in the context of what’s happening in the numbers. That gives you that perspective, then to how to make recommendations and contribute to, you know, the C-suite level, to the to where the business is going,

Heather Smith
Absolutely, and to be able to surface the information so you can influence the C-suite level.

Craig Sullivan
Exactly.

Heather Smith
And be really sound about that.

Craig, I noticed you have seven patents to your name, with the most recent in December 2020. Are there any new innovations in the pipeline you can hint at?

Craig Sullivan
Anything in the pipeline?

Heather Smith
I don’t know how long it takes to create to a point that you have a patent.

Craig Sullivan
Well, there are a number of things that we’re doing. The patent work is very interesting, because they call them patents here.

Heather Smith
Oh, sorry,

Craig Sullivan
It’s okay. I come from the UK. So we would say patent also. But one of the opportunities I’ve had is, and it goes back, I think, to that understanding my grounding in sort of the operational aspects of the business, and understanding that is thinking about how to marry the constructs and the constraints in a good way that that are required when thinking about how to generate financial statements, with the opportunities for how a business system can actually help achieve those needs, or meet and achieve those outcomes.

We’ll be talking tomorrow a little bit about translation capabilities. We’ll be talking about some work that we’re doing in the area of E-invoicing, which is actually a very important change, initially driven by compliance needs. But actually, if you think about, what that actually represents, the ability to have a standardised format of communicating financial data between two interested businesses and a third party, which is the government that wants to make sure that it too understands those transactions for all of the reasons that governments like to have that understanding.

If you think about it just from the compliance perspective, obviously it helps. Obviously, it helps and saves time in meeting the compliance obligations of the government, wherever that may be. But if you’ve got a standard way of communicating business intent, now you’re actually driving towards much more efficiency between a vendor and customer and vice versa.

We’re furthering our investments in invest in E-invoicing. We’re getting ahead of both the compliance changes, but basically, you know, using this as a vehicle to encourage and to support businesses to become more efficient in how they manage these business processes. If I think about that in the context of, you know, sort of the forward- looking nature of the system, I think that’s actually an opportunity for customers to embrace, for businesses to embrace what would otherwise have been something that would be a complex compliance situation, and actually get benefit from it from a business perspective.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that.

Craig Sullivan
We’re applying AI to that space as well.

Heather Smith
To E-invoicing?

Craig Sullivan
Yeah, I guess that doesn’t quite work from a vowel perspective, but yes, there will be AI in E-invoicing.

Heather Smith
Okay, I’m going to ponder where it would be. Because I thought like you’re literally taking data and almost putting it through a portal and putting it into the other system.

Craig Sullivan
AI is being applied to help one understand the nature of the changes that are being published by the governments, as well as to help pre-empt validation and surface potential compliance issues where the data in the business system may not be actually sufficient or could potentially be inaccurate in the context of successfully populating those documents.

Heather Smith
Yeah. Okay, thank you for that.

This morning, we heard from the co-founder of Bero, the non-alcoholic beer that one of the co-founders is Tom Holland. They started on day one with NetSuite, which that really shocked me quite a bit. But he was like, we are going to grow. We know we’ve got to grow because we’ve got the Tom Holland accelerator behind us.

Craig Sullivan
That was a good way to describe it.

From your perspective, what mindset should accountants adopt if they want to make the most out of NetSuite and adopt it from day one in a business?

Craig Sullivan
I think there’s a couple of things to be thoughtful about, which is, you know, if you’re a brand-new company, you have no burden associated with what you may have been using before. From that perspective, you should think about it. From what are the best practices that I can adopt from day one that will see me through this expected trajectory. And what can we do early that will set us up to scale in that way?

On the flip side, if you are an existing business, you actually have to have a similar perspective, which is as I’m as I’m choosing NetSuite as a new business system. What could I do differently? Because the reality is that anything that you’re doing in your in your system is a function of what systems you have. Very often, that system is not the same system that you started with, you know, either by by virtue of configuration or the fact that you’re now using Excel to do some of that.

You’ve got business processes that span multiple systems, embracing the opportunity of the leading practice and the best practice of in, in this case, NetSuite, to help you take that not just system leap, but a business process change leap. We’ve developed, excuse me, over the last you know, almost three decades.

SuiteSuccess represents a boost by benefiting from almost three decades of experience working with 10s of 1000s of customers to basically find the the right path to benefit from what NetSuite has built. Recognising that opportunity, if you will, to shed some of the practices that you’ve implemented by virtue of necessity with your existing systems, and moving to a world where you’re operating in a way that’s similar to other peers in the in your industry. Gives you that, in essence, that that ability to boost your growth without being burdened by the business system anymore.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely.

In your opinion, if you see implementations happening or people trying to scale their business, where do you see they have the most problems or make the mistakes?

Craig Sullivan
Not having a plan is one of the things that we see most frequently. Not having a plan in terms of the steps that they intend to take, but actually not having a plan for what their end goal will be. What are the top priority drivers for them making an investment in a business system and making sure that their plan is aligned with driving towards those outcomes that they’re seeking. We see that time and time again in these in these conversations and then and again, that was one of the drivers for us a decade ago now, for us to implement what we call SuiteSuccess, to help companies, you know, basically understand the opportunity and then plan for the outcomes that they’re seeking.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely. And it seems that a lot of implementations engage in implementation partner which can support, support through.

Craig Sullivan
Absolutely right.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Craig Sullivan
Well, with NetSuite Next, we’re bringing a whole host of AI-based capabilities into the into the core of the business system, and creating a great opportunities for users, accountants and other users, to get really deep insights into their business, plan for changes that they wish to make, take action based upon those, those insights.

Another side of that is, and you know, what we’ve seen from customers is that very often, they don’t know how AI can help them. Yet, they’re being sort of told to think AI first, think about the technology, whereas our perspective is, well, actually you should think about what you’re seeking to achieve, and then apply AI in the right way to help you achieve that.

At the same time, we also recognise that there are other customers that are on a perhaps an earlier stage of adopting some of these later stage of adopting some of these technologies. Maybe they’re already comfortable with AI in the context of their business, they might be using Claude or ChatGPT. We’ve created these AI connector capabilities that allow users to take advantage of those tools that they’ve already created, to actually, in essence, get a leap on benefiting from AI in their in their business data.

It’s quite astonishing what these tools can do when connected to the unified suite of data that NetSuite provides in understanding context and providing deep insight into the business. Then, moreover, things like the commerce announcement we made today with ChatGPT.

Heather Smith
Very interesting.

Craig Sullivan
Basically, in essence, becoming a storefront for shoppers. In essence, becoming a personal shopper, you know, for making, therefore your NetSuite item list available as part of that experience. It represents a very interesting new channel of sales for our customers that have, you know, they may have a Shopify site, or they may be using SuiteCommerce in other ways. Now, all of a sudden, they actually have, you know, tremendous reach into, you know, a lot a lot more of a lot more customers.

Heather Smith
Yeah. Selling via ChatGPT, and I imagine it will extend beyond that, is very exciting and interesting, and kind of one of these, I expect that’s going to explode very shortly, once it all rolls out.

Craig Sullivan
We’ll see. I mean, the AI Connector and the MCP tool set has really caught the imagination of folks on LinkedIn, with a lot of people doing experiments and, you know, showcasing the things that they’re implementing the service in their businesses.

I think that’s, you know, something that we’re going to continue to see more of these. You know, just as with any new technology, over time, it becomes understood, people start to adopt it more. They see the benefits of doing so. We’re just at the beginning of this journey.

Thinking about the accounting community and that’s something that businesses need to embrace, because their competition is doing, their customers will be demanding, and more of those kinds of interface or interactions through AI-based tools on the side of the accounting firms, one they have to recognise that their clients are actually using these tools, and think about how that changes how they may approach the bookkeeping function, or the advisory function, the audit function that maybe may be performing.

Equally, how can they embrace AI in the context of this, you know, the services and running their business as an accounting firm? You know, these are all relatively early days, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how these tools get adopted and the opportunities that get created as a result.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely, Craig. Thank you so much for joining me on the Accounting Apps Podcast. I’ve just got one final question for you.

Tomorrow night, the SuiteWorld party will feature Mr Worldwide himself, Pitbull. Time of Our Lives, Give Me Everything, Fireball, Feel the Moment, Timber, do you have a favourite Pitbull song?

Craig Sullivan
Feel the moment. Very good. It’s great that we’ve got Pitbull coming. He’s going to put on an amazing show, and I know that the audience are going to really love it. He’s known as Mr. Worldwide. We’ve long been talking and going back to your earlier question about our international capabilities. We’ve long talked about the notion of act global and be local.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely.

Craig Sullivan
We’ll see if he says that on the stage. But I think the fact that we’ve got Mr. Worldwide at SuiteWorld epitomising, you know, the strength of global reach and of being messages of positivity and thinking on a global scale is almost like the perfect act first at SuiteWorld.

Heather Smith
Absolutely. I’m very much looking forward to the concert. Did you know that the audience members of Pitbull concerts frequently dress up like him: bald, cat mirrored sunglasses, pinstripe suit. I’m putting the challenge out.

Craig Sullivan
Oh, I did not know that. I don’t think I packed appropriately there. Where were you last week?

Heather Smith
I think there’s emergency party gear everywhere in Las Vegas.

Thank you so much, Craig, for joining me on the Accounting Apps Podcast. Really enjoyed speaking with you.

Craig Sullivan
My pleasure. Thank you so much.