Here’s a thought experiment for any finance or operations leader reading this. Think about how you interact with your ERP today. You open a screen. You find the right module. You click through menus. You enter data into fields, save, wait, and maybe print or export a report. It’s functional, but it is unmistakably software built for the keyboard-and-mouse era.
Now picture the same work three years from now. You ask the system, in plain English, which customers are trending late on payments this quarter. An answer appears, already summarised, with the relevant invoices linked. You approve a batch of exceptions the system flagged overnight. You review a draft of the month-end narrative that an agent pulled together from your sub-ledgers. You never open a menu.
That isn’t marketing fluff. It’s where the two ERP platforms most relevant to the New Zealand mid-market — MYOB Acumatica and Oracle NetSuite — are actively taking their products in the 2026 releases they’ve just shipped.
What’s actually in the box
NetSuite’s 2026.1 release, which founder Evan Goldberg called the most significant update in the product’s history, introduced an Intelligent Close Manager that uses AI to monitor close progress in real time and highlight where the team is slipping. A new generative-AI-powered bank transaction matching engine extracts richer data to auto-match more transactions without human intervention. AI assistants now handle reconciliation assignments, cost-allocation modelling, and natural-language trend and variance analysis inside the EPM suite.
Perhaps most significantly for the direction of travel, NetSuite shipped an AI Connector Service using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard — which lets external AI platforms like Claude or ChatGPT securely query NetSuite data while respecting the system’s role-based permissions. That is a very deliberate signal: NetSuite is making itself open to the agentic world that’s arriving, rather than trying to keep all the AI in-house.
MYOB Acumatica’s 2025 R2 release took a similar path with AI Autocomplete, Automated Anomaly Detection surfaces issues before they become problems, AI-powered expense reporting and AI Bill Automation. The modern UI will soon be generally available — cleaner, more personalised, with side panels that let users see relevant data without leaving their screen.
Taken together, you’re watching the two platforms converge on the same vision: the ERP as the system of record underneath, with a conversational and agentic layer on top.
What this feels like, role by role
For CFOs, the biggest shift is in close and cash management. Month-end stops being a fire drill. Instead of chasing reconciliations, you’re reviewing a dashboard where the system has already matched what it can, flagged what needs human attention, and drafted an initial narrative for you to sign off. Forecasting improves as continuous reconciliation replaces period-end crunches. Cash visibility becomes real-time rather than retrospective.
For COOs and operations leaders, the change is in exception management. Instead of dashboards that tell you something went wrong yesterday, agents monitor your data continuously and prompt you when something is trending off-course. Anomaly detection becomes ambient rather than scheduled. In-transit inventory, job costing, and supplier risk all benefit from the same pattern.
For IT managers, the change is architectural. Gartner’s projection is that by 2028, a third of user experiences will shift from native applications to agentic front ends — meaning the conventional “log into the app” paradigm starts to give way to “ask the assistant, which talks to the app.” Open protocols like MCP are becoming the connective tissue, and the platforms shipping them today will have a head start.
For GMs and project leaders, the shift is in field visibility. Natural-language queries across job costing, project status, and resource availability mean you don’t need to wait for a weekly report to see where a project is drifting. You ask, and you see.
The cultural shift underneath
Gartner puts it sharply in their latest enterprise AI forecast: by 2029, at least half of knowledge workers are expected to build, govern or deploy AI agents on demand as part of their normal work. Agents won’t be a novelty — they’ll be colleagues. Some businesses will adapt gracefully. Others will struggle, because the change is less about the software and more about how teams work together with it.
The implementation playbook is going to change too. When your users can ask the system rather than navigate it, user training shifts from “here’s where the menu is” to “here’s how to prompt effectively and how to review what the AI gives you.” Change management becomes more about trust, governance, and validation than about click paths.
What this means for your decision
If you’re sitting on an older on-prem system, the pressure isn’t that your current system lacks AI. It’s that the gap between what your current system can do and what the platforms released in 2026 can do is widening every six months.
There’s another consideration we’ve been raising with our clients recently, and it’s probably the most important one. The AI features shipping in 2026 are only as useful as the data underneath them. A conversational interface on top of clean, integrated, consolidated data is a superpower. The same interface on top of fragmented, manually reconciled data will hallucinate confidently — and give you worse decisions than your current process does.
Getting the foundation right has never mattered more.
Seeing it for yourself
If you’d like to see these features running on the two platforms most relevant to the New Zealand mid-market — MYOB Acumatica and Oracle NetSuite — we run side-by-side demos tailored to manufacturing, distribution, construction, and project-based businesses. You’ll see the AI Assistant, the Intelligent Close Manager, and real agent behaviour working on realistic scenarios, not marketing mock-ups. Book a demo or request a migration assessment through the Verde Group website.
References
1. NetSuite 2026.1 Features New AI Close and Cash Management, AI Agents for EPM — Oracle NetSuite. https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/financial-management/netsuite-2026-1-features-new-ai-close-and-cash-management-ai-agents-for-enterprise-performance-management-and-more.shtml
2. NetSuite 2026.1 Release: A Deep Dive Into New NetSuite AI Capabilities — Project Salsa. https://projectsalsa.co.nz/blog
3. NetSuite announced 8 AI features at SuiteWorld 2025 — Project Salsa. https://projectsalsa.co.nz/blog/the-detail-of-netsuite-next
4. MYOB Acumatica 2025 R2: Advancing AI, Usability, and Industry Innovation — Avanza Solutions. https://avanzasolutions.co.nz/insights-hub
5. Acumatica Summit 2026 Recap: AI Highlights & Takeaways — CBIZ. https://www.cbiz.com/insights/article/acumatica-summit-2026-recap-ai-highlights-takeaways
6. Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature AI Agents by 2026 — UC Today. https://www.uctoday.com/unified-communications/gartner-predicts-40-of-enterprise-apps-will-feature-ai-agents-by-2026/
7. Gartner: 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026 — DEVOPSdigest. https://www.devopsdigest.com/gartner-40-of-enterprise-apps-will-feature-task-specific-ai-agents-by-2026
8. The Future of AI Agents: Key Trends to Watch in 2026 — Salesmate. https://www.salesmate.io/blog/future-of-ai-agents/
