As small business owners, we all know that growth comes with both opportunity and challenge. Scaling efficiently—without losing control over operations, finances, or customer experience—has always been one of the toughest balancing acts. For years, technology has promised to make that journey easier, yet many of us still find ourselves managing a patchwork of systems that barely communicate with each other. At SuiteWorld 2025, Oracle NetSuite’s annual user conference, that conversation took center stage—particularly around how artificial intelligence is shifting what’s possible for small and midsize businesses.
I sat down with Sam Levy, Senior Vice President of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite, to talk about what’s new, what’s next, and how the company continues to shape its vision for small businesses that want to compete like large enterprises—but without the complexity. From the debut of NetSuite Next and its conversational AI “Ask Oracle” assistant, to real-world success stories from customers who doubled their revenue without doubling staff, Levy offered a front-row look at how automation and integrated systems are redefining small business efficiency.
For entrepreneurs considering when to move beyond QuickBooks or spreadsheets, or for those already seeking smarter, faster ways to grow, this discussion highlights where NetSuite sees the greatest potential—and what small business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the AI-driven future ahead.
Leland McFarland All right, I am here at Oracle’s NetSuite, um, SuiteWorld 2025 with Sam Levy, SVP of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite. Um, got a few questions for you.
So, SuiteWorld always brings exciting uh updates. Uh, for those who couldn’t attend, what’s the key message Oracle NetSuite wants small and mid-sized business business owners to take away this year?
Sam Levy Obviously. Well, well, SuiteWorld’s our annual user conference. And what’s more exciting, this is, I think our 12th or 13th year doing SuiteWorld as a as a conference where we bring all of our customers together and talk about strategies of what we’re where we’re going. Our theme this year is “No Limits.”
And it’s really been practiced into “no limits of scaling your business.” And whether you’re a small or medium-sized business, scaling, growth can be hard. And so the things that we are talking about and the themes we’re talking about is “no limits” is how do companies scale? What’s the current trends of scaling? How is technology an enabler? And now this exponential multiplier, what we call AI, how is AI going to help me scale or how should I be, you know, consuming AI in our business?
Leland McFarland Perfect. So, NetSuite has long uh served growing companies. How would you describe its current vision for SMB companies compared to five years ago?
Sam Levy Well, the vision has much been the same for us uh for NetSuite for since 27 years ago when Evan started the company and really being one, a revolutionary company that was cloud-first.
So, we only service cloud, we only deliver in the cloud, and that was from the born-on date 27 years ago through today. And so, part of what our transformation strategy of helping small and medium businesses is to transform their business. One, to do that digital experience of how do you take and do that digital transformation? Digital transformation is not just moving your books from on-prem to the cloud.
That is kind of just a functional shift and lift of technology. Processes have to evolve in that, and so there’s a maturation that occurs. And our biggest strength is one, we go to business and go to market by industry. So, we understand your industry, what it takes to operate your industry. And so, whether you’re a healthcare company or you’re a manufacturer or you’re a retailer, there’s a different set of automation and industry metrics that you need to solve your business issues.
And we come to small businesses and help them mature that. So, when we talk about digital transformation, the first thing is looking at is, how do we help businesses just get control of their current environment? Look at their processes and then unify them. Because we’re a suite for each industry, we offer all the components to run your business. And it’s really nice for a small or mid-sized business that they really want to act like a big company, but they want the processes and the scaling of the entry points to be for the small and medium-sized companies. Exactly what we do. Provide them that level of industry comfort, and then let them scale.
Leland McFarland Perfect. So, for many small businesses, they see uh ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning, um, they they kind of view it as enterprise software. I mean, it’s kind of in the name. Um, and it’s kind of meant for larger or maybe medium-sized businesses. Uh, how is NetSuite breaking down that perception to make ERP accessible for smaller companies?
Sam Levy Yeah. This is something that we introduced a decade ago with the conversation of “SuiteSuccess.” And SuiteSuccess was essentially is taking an industry playbook and saying, “For this industry, here is your stairway.” Start with financials first, then add on operations, then add on sales, then add on your supply chain, then add on commerce, whatever it might be for your industry.
And what’s the nice part about that is how we scale down for businesses that are very simple, but yet they’re going to evolve, is we have that stairway approach. Making it really fast and simple for them to join NetSuite, and then have a growth patch, you know, pattern with capabilities that they never have to leave. It’s simply as kind of what we look at probably with our iPhones. You get onto the iPhone platform, you buy a few modules and applications, and the outset is, you need some more capacity, you just turn it on. You need another module, you get another application and you go with it. Same with business, making it really easy for a business platform to start the financials and then grow the rest of the way.
Leland McFarland Perfect. So, what are some of the biggest pain points that you see small and medium-sized businesses that are facing um that are they’re facing today, um, that NetSuite directly helps to solve?
Sam Levy Most businesses today, and I was just, you know, meeting with hundreds of customers this week, have a business need for certain systems and requirements. They have business issues. And whether they need to fill out a timesheet, they don’t have tracking, they need some information for human capital and talent, they can’t close the books, they have business issues. And I think what one of the things that NetSuite’s making it really easy for companies to do is, jeez, if you have these ripe issues, how do we help you, you know, transform your business? And that’s been the secret sauce for for us, I think is is the first part of your question. I think the second part was, how are we transforming? What was the second part of your question?
Leland McFarland Um, how are are you using or what what’s involved with the NetSuite? You know, what what does NetSuite have that can kind of really address those uh pain points?
Sam Levy Okay. So the the main thing I was talking about is, well, I was saying they say business issues that arise from small businesses, they want to grow quickly or they want to manage cost. And most small businesses have to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning both. They have to grow, but they don’t have a bunch of people that they can add into their business. So they need some automation, a platform to help them. Let me give you an example.
A company that comes with us with $25 million in revenue, they want to double and get to $50 million in revenue. They need to invest in their product and R&D, but they don’t want to add in a bunch of accounting and operational staff. They come to NetSuite because they can automate their business and grow without adding additional headcount to support their business system. They’re adding the investments where it truly is going to make them grow. So that’s one of the offsets that we see is, just basic automation and operational improvement helps them get control of their operational costs.
Leland McFarland Okay. That seems like it’ll be very helpful, um, for small businesses, uh, who need to get, you know, as you said, control over their finances and and whatnot. Um, can you share a recent example or a customer story where a small business significantly improved operations or profitability using NetSuite?
Sam Levy Yeah, I mean, I’ll talk about some of the companies that were on stage even this week. We did some keynote addresses. One that comes to mind is a company called Cymbiotika. Now, Cymbiotika is a wellness company. They’re well-known for taking supplements and wellness, liposomal, I should say. It’s not supplements, but it’s just liposomal. And those are good for your body. And so one of their challenges is as they were growing from a $50 million company to $100 million company and launching their brands, is the complexity with them.
Now, their organization adopted NetSuite and they went live with NetSuite. And what’s interesting about their operations is their operation headcount has roughly stayed flat through their growth patterns. They’ve added a few employees, but as they doubled their revenue, they did not double their employees.
I think that’s a true testament, I think, a case study of, how do you look at leaders in your industry and what are they doing that perhaps we should be considering doing? Or how do they do it? What is their secret sauce? So how do you double revenue without adding double staff?
And so for them, they were using automation to do that. They were doing the things that that once took a team of people can now be done by an individual. An individual now instead of owning one account can manage 10 times the number of accounts. And so that became their offsetting maneuver. That was a great story that Kimberly talks about on their growth strategy.
Leland McFarland Oh, that’s perfect. All right, switching over to AI and automation, which has been basically uh most of what’s been talked about this week. Um, AI has been a huge theme this year. How is uh NetSuite’s approach to AI helping small businesses uh compete on the same level as the uh big boys?
Sam Levy The big boys? This is interesting. Uh, AI is in every, you know, it’s in every conversation seems like in business today. How we are helping companies is twofold. One, we are unique that every one of our customers is on the same version, the same release, and ultimately the same data model. So 43,000 organizations all use the software the same, from the biggest to the smallest.
AI, we believe that the best AI comes from the best data. So having all of your data in one place, there’s two approaches: outside-in versus inside-out. The outside-in approach is, let me take a Claude or a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude and use it against my current NetSuite account. So how do I unlock all of my data in my current infrastructure and tie it into a large language model? And that’s what we’ve done. We announced Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a connector. It’s free for all of our customers to connect their NetSuite data to Claude or to ChatGPT. Now you can go in there and simply ask prompts inside of Claude, which is, “Who are my top five customers?” “What is my inventory levels?” “What’s my financial statements?” Your conversational AI, that’s an outside view in. That’s our first approach to AI being outside-in. It’s been really successful and taking an enterprise product like that and really making it simple for small and medium businesses.
The inside-out approach is doing the opposite. Building AI with inside of NetSuite and solely for just NetSuite data is you can go into NetSuite now and use certain AI capabilities inside your your your application.
So, you can use either either or or and or both ways to do it. There’s a lot of things that we use and we’ve released now for years of continuing to add onto AI capabilities from the inside-out. The outside-in approach has been good because sometimes you want NetSuite data connected to other systems. And Model Context Protocol allows then chat to not just interface with NetSuite data, but also maybe another system that you have out there. Maybe it’s a commerce system or maybe it’s Salesforce data, you can then pull in together through MCP.
Leland McFarland Right. Um, are you partnering with any outside LLMs to kind of or are you building from scratch, um, your own LLM, um, or or AI uh protocols within uh um your own system?
Sam Levy We definitely partner because those best-of-breed applications are certainly market leaders. When you think about ChatGPT and what they’ve done, you think about what Google has done, you think about what Meta has done, you think about xAI, they’re big in R&D and billions of dollars just in these large language models. Uh, we did we first start with Cohere two or three years ago as our first large language model, and then we’ve adopted all the others as subprocessors within inside of our environment. So we’re definitely leveraging all of them.
Leland McFarland Perfect. Um, what are some practical ways SMBs can use NetSuite’s new AI capabilities to save time or make smarter decisions without needing a data science team?
Sam Levy Well, the new interface, and I don’t know if you use ChatGPT, hopefully you probably do to summarize notes and so forth, or if you’ve used Claude, I think that the most interesting piece of it is it’s taking what used to be a technical way to get your answers, and it’s it’s really making it simple into context, a simple language context.
So before, if you wanted to go ask a question, which is summarize summarize my financial statements and show me year-on-year compares and show me, you know, FEs that I had, you might have to go run data from multiple systems or multiple NetSuite reports and searches to do that. You’d have to write the research or report and then pull it all together. So, very feasible, and that’s what customers have done for years. Very linear though, one report, one answer, one report, one answer, and then pulling it all together.
The nice part about taking chat is I just ask the question inside ChatGPT or I ask it inside of Claude. Show me the same data, pull my financial statements, do the year-on-compairs, do the FEs, change my visualization, show it to me in a chart, make it beautiful, hit enter. It goes and runs the searches, runs the reports inside the data, shows you where it’s got its data, and then it presents it back to you in matter of minutes now, what perhaps was days before. And that’s a simple way, I think that the most people are getting the biggest value is just taking a non-technical approach just asking the conversational questions.
Leland McFarland All right, perfect. That’s seems very useful. Hopefully it’ll save uh small business owners a bunch of time and effort.
Sam Levy And give them the visibility to their business, right? Most important, yeah.
Leland McFarland Um, switching over to industry and growth trends. Uh, from your perspective, what are the next biggest trends shaping the future of small and mid-sized businesses over the next two to three years?
Sam Levy Well, I think everyone is being asked, the biggest trend is, how can I grow but yet control my operational cost? And we’re seeing that with these, you know, the invention of the AI business models out there where, you know, we call it the multiplier effect with AI. And I think the biggest trend right now is, how can AI give me an advantage, a competitive advantage going forward? One, I got to simplify my back-office processes, make it really simple to do business from the back office, meaning how do I enter an order? How do I collect cash? How do I create a procurement transaction, receive it, and so on? So making that really simple is number one. But then how do you take that simplified process and make that a competitive advantage externally? So when a customer comes and does business with you, they don’t find it five, you know, it may take them too long to get their product or their service. Making it very easy to do business with them, and that’s been the growth lever is they’re trying to simplify things, because transactions are happening faster and faster. But we’re simplifying the complexity of the transaction, which has been the big theme today. Not a lot of complexity, simplify it, but just more transactions.
Leland McFarland More transactions, more money.
Sam Levy Well, that’s good. That should be the simple linear equation with that one. Yeah.
Leland McFarland Um, are there specific industries like manufacturing, retail, or services where you’re seeing especially strong SMB adoption or innovation through uh NetSuite?
Sam Levy This is a uh it’s a good leading question of which industry is hot and which one’s not. They all seem to have challenges going on in their business and headwinds, whether that’s macroeconomic or it’s industry pressure. You know, some product and inventory-based companies had tariff issues. And so that helped, you know, that helped help create a big headwind for them. How they reacted to it, though, I think were a little bit differently. And so, I look at some of these industries are breakthrough, meaning inventory ones that had to deal with tariffs, they were forced to use better planning and budgeting tools to get the right SKU assortments and so on.
The people that were in healthcare on the other side of it, finding more avenues to service their customers. And so they wanted to automate billing, automate billing to their insurance carriers. So they needed help on automating. For them to grow, their issue wasn’t buying more product, it was making billing to their insurance carriers more easily and more streamlined without people. And so we’re we’re seeing it kind of all industries are growing. And some are some are, I wouldn’t say contracting. High-tech has been a good one because of AI, and you’re a high-tech company creating AI. So you see a lot of sourcing, you know, uh capital going into AI companies. But I think that money is being used now across all the other industry segments.
Leland McFarland All right. Um, flipping that a little bit, are you seeing any kind of industries that it’s it’s a little difficult for you for for NetSuite and in general to kind of break into for the small business?
Sam Levy For small business? Well, one of the things we we generally say is if you’re in a regulated industry, that can be more difficult for NetSuite. Government or municipalities have a lot of restrictions. Some health and biotech have a lot of restrictions. Some government contracting and DOD have a lot of restrictions. And the restrictions are how and their compliance works with their data and how it works with the government entities and businesses that they solve.
So for our commercial business, we tend not to go after heavily regulated industries. There’s compliance, but heavily regulated industries, when you look at public sector or uh financial uh institutions that have different type of governance, we generally stay away from those. Uh, just not not our bellywick, right? We stay to the ones that are commercially available that we are really good with.
Leland McFarland All right, that’s good to know. Um, many small businesses are moving from QuickBooks or spreadsheets to cloud platforms. What triggers this transition and how is NetSuite supporting them in that journey?
Sam Levy One of the most popular systems that we replace on the entry-level market is QuickBooks. And it’s not even it’s just entry level anymore. We’re finding that it’s not just entry-level, they’re medium-sized businesses that are running QuickBooks, but they’ve certainly outgrown it, mostly for the capabilities. The number one reason they usually come to us is they can’t do something or it’s too bespoke.
So, if they’re growing internationally, they have too many databases to manage, and they want to put it in one infrastructure and have one global process. It’s very hard to do with QuickBooks. So that’s an interesting one. If they have advanced inventory items, where they’re putting in multiple warehouses and demand planning and point of sale and distribution, QuickBooks is for very simple companies. Once you add a lot of complexity to it or start to customize it, you’ve really outgrown it. And that’s where NetSuite picks up and really excels. The complex small business.
Leland McFarland All right. If you had, if you had uh one piece of advice for a small business owner looking to future-proof their operations, what would it be?
Sam Levy Wow, hire the right people. I mean, that’s a bit, you know, people and human capital and certainly in a small business is critical. And and some of the traits you say, “Well, that’s fine, but what type of competencies would you look for?” Certainly the entrepreneur spirit, challenge the status quo, and you you’ve got to make some big bets. And if you’re not making the bets around using AI in your companies, I tell founders all the time, I think you’ll be leapfrogged by a founder who is using AI to get that competitive advantage.
Leland McFarland All right, final question. What’s next for NetSuite when it comes to serving the small business market? Any areas of investment or innovation where you’re uh you’re especially um excited about?
Sam Levy Well, we announced it this week, “NetSuite Next.” It is our next generation of how we’re evolving our AI strategy and just making it available everywhere in the application from the inside-out. What we’re building and what we’re releasing for all of our customers and new customers is the kind of “Ask Oracle” concept. It’s AI-ready everywhere at any time. And it’s the conversational piece of it.
You don’t have to go learn a menu structure and navigation, the how-tos. Our firm belief is the way that you interact in the future is going to be conversational. Like we’re having now, that’s how you’re going to be interacting with your business system. Very much conversational, not menu-driven, searching for data. You’re going to be asking and prompting versus clicking and pointing. And so that is, right, the big excitement that we have is we’re doing it, we’re prototyping it now, and we’re slowly releasing it to the masses. This time next year, it’ll be fully available and it’ll be so exciting to see so many customers on it.
Leland McFarland That will be exciting and I’m I’m I’m interested in trying it out. Having a nice digital assistant.
Sam Levy Yeah, exactly.
Leland McFarland All right. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for uh coming on and uh putting up with all my questions.
Sam Levy Great. Good to meet you, Leland.
After speaking with Sam Levy, one thing became clear: small businesses no longer have to choose between growth and control. The tools that once seemed out of reach—enterprise-grade analytics, automation, and now AI-driven insights—are being built with accessibility in mind. NetSuite’s approach to scalability, especially through its “SuiteSuccess” industry playbooks and AI integrations, is transforming how entrepreneurs operate. The idea of “no limits,” this year’s SuiteWorld theme, isn’t just a marketing slogan—it’s a mindset shift.
Levy’s point about AI serving as an “exponential multiplier” resonated deeply. Small business owners have always worn multiple hats. Now, AI can help us wear them more efficiently—managing data, identifying trends, and freeing up time for strategic decisions. Whether it’s automating billing, unifying processes, or simply asking conversational questions to get answers that used to take days, the value of accessible AI is undeniable.
What’s most encouraging is NetSuite’s commitment to making this technology practical—not just powerful. As Levy put it, the future of business systems will be “conversational, not menu-driven.” For small businesses, that future is arriving faster than many realize. The real question now is how quickly we’ll adapt. Those who embrace AI as a trusted partner in growth, rather than a distant concept, will likely define the next wave of small business success.
This article, "NetSuite’s Sam Levy on How AI and Automation Are Redefining Small Business Growth" was first published on Small Business Trends
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