ORACLE NetSuite is expanding its artificial intelligence-powered enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings in Southeast Asia as businesses in the Philippines and across the region accelerate digital transformation and overseas expansion.
At SuiteConnect Manila held on April 28, NetSuite announced a range of AI-powered tools under its NetSuite Next initiative, which the company said aims to simplify AI adoption, automate workflows and improve operational visibility for businesses in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).
“Across Southeast Asia, organizations are navigating how to bring AI into their operations in a way that fits their processes and supports long-term growth,” James Chisham, vice president for product management at Oracle NetSuite, said in a statement.
The company said NetSuite Next will embed conversational AI, natural language search and automated workflows into its ERP platform, enabling organizations to analyze data and automate business processes more efficiently. The rollout in Asean is expected within the next 12 months.
Amit Suxena, group vice president and head of Asia at Oracle NetSuite, said the Philippines has become a key growth market because of its young population and high level of digital adoption.
“The Philippines has one of the highest rates of digital adoption globally,” Suxena said in an interview with The Manila Times. “That combination is a major foundation for growth for companies, especially startups and midmarket organizations.”
Suxena said many Philippine companies are moving beyond AI experimentation and are now adopting AI tools for day-to-day operations such as inventory management, collections and profitability analysis.
“AI is now outside the experimentation stage. It is now in the execution stage,” he said.
He added that fragmented business systems remain a challenge for many organizations attempting to deploy AI effectively.
“AI is as good as the data you feed it,” Suxena said. “If you only give it one part of the business, then it’s only going to look at that and train itself on that part.”
According to NetSuite, many companies in Southeast Asia are seeking unified cloud-based platforms that combine finance, customer management, supply chain and analytics functions in a single environment. The company said this setup allows AI tools to generate more relevant business insights and automate complex workflows.
NetSuite also announced the NetSuite AI Connector Service, which enables organizations to integrate external AI models and assistants with NetSuite while maintaining governance controls over enterprise data.
Other new capabilities include NetSuite Exception Management, which uses agentic AI to identify operational and financial anomalies, and Subscription Metrics tools designed for companies with recurring revenue models.
Suxena said Philippine companies are increasingly looking beyond the domestic market and expanding across Southeast Asia, creating demand for systems capable of handling multiple currencies and regulatory environments.
“There is a huge push for Philippine companies to find new markets outside the Philippines,” he said. “You want to operate in different geographies, but you still want to maintain control centrally.”
He said businesses in the region are also bypassing older technology infrastructure and moving directly to cloud-based AI-enabled systems.
“Smaller businesses found it difficult to maintain on-premises systems because they required databases, servers and maintenance teams,” Suxena said. “Now they can move directly to AI-enabled cloud systems.”
As part of the event, NetSuite also highlighted local customer deployments, including Philippine real estate developer JDN.
JDN said it adopted NetSuite’s AI-powered ERP platform to automate finance and property management operations as its tenant base expanded by more than 300 percent.
Founded more than 60 years ago in Angeles City, JDN manages more than 70,000 square meters of leasable space across Central and North Luzon. The company said NetSuite helped reduce financial reporting turnaround times from four days to as little as one to two hours.
“As our business has expanded several-fold, driven by growing urbanization and strong local economic activity, NetSuite has continued to scale with us to support increasing operational complexity,” JDN President and Chief Executive Officer Aaron Jeffrey Montenegro said in a statement.
Suxena said NetSuite is seeing growing adoption among Philippine companies expanding abroad, including firms in retail, pharmaceuticals and other industries.
