With SuiteSkills, Oracle NetSuite is doing something few ERP vendors do, it’s making its own process knowledge available to various AI models. More than 45 skills for finance, inventory, projects, and HR run not only in Ask Oracle but also in Claude and ChatGPT. In doing so, NetSuite is paving the way for headless ERP and following Salesforce and ServiceNow’s lead. The question, however, is how much of the NetSuite experience will remain intact outside the platform.
At SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, NetSuite introduced SuiteSkills. A SuiteSkill combines financial and operational data from NetSuite with process knowledge. The idea is that an AI model doesn’t have to figure out how a financial close works within the system on its own. The skill defines that and can therefore be executed easily.
Everyone can access the 45 skills via GitHub. They work in Ask Oracle, NetSuite’s proprietary AI assistant, as well as in external language models that you can connect to the NetSuite AI Connector Service, such as Claude and ChatGPT. According to NetSuite, more than 13,000 customers are already using this service.
Also read: NetSuite next: what does the future hold for NetSuite?
What the skills can do
NetSuite has made 45 skills available that operate in 6 different areas:
- Financial analysis and closing. The Variance and Flux Analysis skill distinguishes recurring changes from timing effects and one-time items, helping teams prepare management commentary and focus on issues that need attention.
- Billing and cash flow. The “Revenue Leakage” skill distinguishes potential underbilling and unbilled delivery from accounting exceptions, helping billing and finance teams direct follow-up to the right issues.
- Inventory and fulfillment. Investigates inventory issues, delivery delays, and cost variances on work orders.
- Projects. The Project Operations Assistant turns a statement of work into an editable project plan and suggests suitable team members.
- Sales and support. Sales Assistant and Customer Support Assistant skills draw on relevant account and case information to prepare insights, responses, and proposed next steps for employees to review.
- Human resources. These skills identify patterns in labor costs and discrepancies between recorded hours and payroll records.
During the pre-briefing, NetSuite demonstrated the same CFO dashboard three times: built in Claude, in ChatGPT, and in Ask Oracle. The same data, the same three key focus areas, three different interfaces. So you can create a report in NetSuite, but also outside of it using the tool of your choice.
A dozen tools
Techzine spoke with Brian Chess, SVP of AI, Product, and Technology, at SuiteWorld; he says the AI Connector Service includes surprisingly few tools. So it’s not an extremely complicated service. “There are about twelve,” says Chess. There’s one tool for reading every type of record, including the custom records that customers have added themselves. Another tool reads the metadata, so the AI can figure out where everything is located and build queries on its own.
Customers and partners can also add their own tools to that set, allowing AI agents to perform even more tasks on the NetSuite platform. All tools, however, use the same roles and permissions system that NetSuite uses for employees.
“The AI is already trained to use NetSuite because it has already reviewed our documentation.” The combination of tools and documentation ensures that the model’s knowledge is robust. If it relied solely on documentation, it could easily fall behind, since NetSuite releases two major updates per year. SuiteSkills’ process knowledge is therefore crucial to keeping everything running smoothly. This means companies using Claude or OpenAI should update their skills regularly.
Why outsource ERP?
So far, we haven’t seen many ERP vendors open their platforms to this extent or share their process knowledge. Salesforce does this for CRM, Service, and Marketing; ServiceNow does it for its platform; but SAP, for example, still keeps the door closed.
NetSuite, like Salesforce and ServiceNow, believes it’s important to keep the system where business data, processes, and permissions reside, regardless of which AI runs on top of it. Founder Evan Goldberg puts it in similar terms in the announcement: NetSuite remains the core system, and SuiteSkills helps customers get more out of AI without losing control.
That doesn’t mean everything is the same. Chess was clear: the native route offers more capabilities. Within NetSuite, Ask Oracle runs on its own harness that can navigate the application and display results. It also provides a CSV file with the underlying data and links to the source records. “Users need to be able to click through to the data,” says Chess. Especially when the AI delivers bad news, financial results aren’t always positive. In Claude or ChatGPT, the external vendor’s harness handles the orchestration, not NetSuite’s, so source attribution can be more limited if the external harness doesn’t focus on it enough.
EMEA roll-out in 2027
There’s also news about the EMEA rollout. NetSuite Next and Ask Oracle are now being rolled out in the United Kingdom. According to NetSuite, Spain, Sweden, and the Benelux region will be the first EMEA markets to follow in 2027. SuiteSkills are already available for all customers to download, but the full Next experience will arrive in 2027.
Conclusion
With SuiteSkills, NetSuite is opting for openness rather than lock-in. Just like Salesforce and ServiceNow, they’re making the platform fully open. They’re making 45 skills available for Claude and ChatGPT. While you have more options within the NetSuite interface (Ask Oracle), you’re not locked into it. According to NetSuite, the internal native AI is better because it can also control the platform interface.
According to NetSuite, an ERP’s value lies in the data, process logic, and permissions model, not in the user interface on top of it. Customers can work with an external AI, but they’ll need to build a robust framework around it to make the data verifiable.