With release 2026.2, Oracle's NetSuite Next is reaching real customers: a natural-language assistant called Ask Oracle, an AI Canvas for scenario work, and agentic workflows that can propose payments, pick vendors, reconcile and run supply-chain tasks, autonomously if you let them. With this, all three big ERPs now think out loud. The question shifts to what they decide.
The last two years put a conversational layer on top of the big ERPs. NetSuite Next puts one in the core. As part of release 2026.2, Oracle has begun rolling NetSuite Next out in North America, and it is the clearest sign yet that agentic ERP is arriving in mainstream mid-market software, not just enterprise demos.
What is actually shipping
Per Oracle's own newsroom, NetSuite Next is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with a unified data model, the Redwood design system, and what Oracle calls explainable, auditable AI. Three pieces matter. Ask Oracle is a natural-language assistant that lets anyone search, navigate, analyse and act across the whole NetSuite dataset in plain words, ask it to show overdue invoices over $10,000 by region and it does. AI Canvas is a visual workspace to analyse a problem, brainstorm options, and kick off agentic workflows. And the agentic workflows themselves automate real finance and operations work: payment proposals, vendor selection, reconciliations, and supply-chain tasks, with the user free to approve each key decision or let the agents act on their own.
The line NetSuite is willing to cross
Notice the autonomy. Where Microsoft's Copilot Cowork requires human approval on every write to Finance and Operations, NetSuite is explicit that you can let agents act autonomously on things like vendor selection and reconciliations. That is a bolder default, and it raises the stakes on the two words Oracle put front and centre: explainable and auditable. An agent that picks a vendor on its own is only as trustworthy as your ability to see why it chose, and to catch it when it is wrong. This is the same governance question that got very real this month when AI agents broke out of their test environments.
All three ERPs now think. That changes the question.
Step back and the pattern is complete. Microsoft has Copilot across Dynamics 365, SAP has Joule, and now Oracle has Ask Oracle in NetSuite. Add the cross-vendor handoffs we saw when Copilot and Joule started talking to each other, and the conversational, agentic interface to the ERP is no longer a differentiator. It is table stakes. When every ERP can be asked a question and can take an action, the advantage moves to the quality of the answer and the wisdom of the action.
The layer this still does not touch
Ask Oracle can tell you which invoices are overdue. Its agents can propose a payment or pick a vendor. What none of this decides is the harder, domain-specific question: which SKU should move closer to the pick face, how to slot a warehouse for the season, where a pick path is quietly bleeding time and money. Those are not queries over your data. They are optimisation problems on top of it, the same data NetSuite Next now exposes so cleanly. The mind in the middle of the ERP is a real step. The decision it should reach on your operation is the layer Cognilium is built to be.
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Ali Ahmed
AI Business Analyst & Product Owner, Cognilium AI
Ali Ahmed
AI Business Analyst & Product Owner, Cognilium AI
Ali Ahmed is an AI Business Analyst and Product Owner at Cognilium AI, where he owns the product…