SuiteConnect 2025 Recap
SuiteConnect Chicago + San Francisco were a blast. Here are my notes after attending them.
If you’re interested in my NetSuite services (technical or functional), I currently have availability for 2025. Please message me on LinkedIn.
TL;DR
SuiteConnect are a series of day long conferences NetSuite hosts across different cities in the world. Think of it as a micro-dose of SuiteWorld.
We’re moving from the “lets bolt on AI to everything” era to more elegant use cases of it, and that’s starting to show in the product.
Continually impressed by the multi-industry and multi-persona appeal of NetSuite. From a drone company to an apparel company, from finance to sales - NetSuite continues to be, well, the Suite for everyone.
What is SuiteConnect?
SuiteConnect are free, day long conferences that NetSuite hosts across the world (but mostly in the US). I went to the one in Chicago and San Francisco. The general format is:
Check-in
Breakfast + networking
Keynote from NetSuite staff + guest speakers (typically NetSuite users, sometimes vendors).
Break + networking
Talk or learning lab
Lunch + networking
Talk or learning lab
Evening reception
It’s a great place to see a preview of NetSuite’s product roadmap, self educate yourself about the product, and network with others. Speaking of attendance, the audience was a great cross-section of customers (~70%), vendors (~20%), and NetSuite staff (~10%).
What I saw
The day kicked off with a keynote from Evan Goldberg. Couple takeaways:
NS views finance as the cornerstone of every business, and tailors their product around that worldview. NS is pitched as the operating system for one’s entire business, covering operations + HR + sales + finance.1
A lot of messaging around educating customers about the entirety of NS. I got the sense that the average user doesn’t know how powerful the product is. This corroborates the massive amount of education programming NS invests in, which probably doubles as a potent sales channel for upsells.
The AI fever is receding. I saw less “lets bolt on a LLM to generate product description”-esque features, and more thoughtful uses of these models. For example, they’re rolling out a fraud detection feature (eg a large furniture expense hitting the MISC account instead of the office expense account, thus triggering an alert).
They talked about agents, and shared some of their philosophy around them (uncover patterns, recommend actions, automate workflows) but didn’t share any examples of truly autonomously acting agents. I suspect they’re still building here.
After Evan spoke, we heard from some users of NetSuite. No important takeaways from here other than the impressive diversity they’re able to summon. You had everyone from an apparel company (Adam from Marine Layer) to an AI company (Erica from Cohere) to a drone company (Barak from Saildrone). Hearing how these companies customize NS to their needs was fascinating to hear.
What I learned
NSAW
I went to the NSAW (NS Analytics Warehouse) learning lab, which was a lot of fun and run by an individual whose name I’m forgetting but I remember he had a lot of fun giving this presentation in his southern accent.
NSAW solves the following problem: there’s a ton of joins that NS data is spread across. This can result in a difficult UX and slow performance. NSAW vacuums in this data, auto-joins it for you, and gives a series of prepared read-only views.
I suspect the motivation is the current friction it can take for a question about the business to be answered. This typically has to flow through people (an administrator, a controller) or in extreme cases, a developer.
Preparing for releases
Clients often ask me how to prepare the business for new NS releases. ACS gave a great talk about that:
Do three things:
Learn: read through the release notes
Plan: understand what part of the notes overlap with your system
Test: focus on approval workflows and custom scripts. Look at high traffic parts of your instance.
ACS offers custom support, too. If you’re an ACS optimized customer, you’ll get a spreadsheet that covers impact to your instance, and areas on where to focus testing on.
Closing
Overall, I had a wonderful time and met some amazing people. Shout to Kim Boyd and Gerson Rodriguez for educating me about the NetSuite community and product. If you’re looking for help on the staffing side, reach out to the wonderful Tate James at SystemsAccountants. And if you need any help with vendor + contract management, let Alex & Ben at GateKeeper take care of you.
See you all SuiteWorld!
If you’re interested in my NetSuite services (technical or functional), I currently have availability for 2025. Please message me on LinkedIn.
The original compound startup.