Choosing Your First ERP: AI-First Platforms vs. NetSuite — and Why Vertical Bar Tips the Scale
Sep 3, 2025
When a company reaches the stage where spreadsheets and point tools no longer cut it, choosing a first ERP is one of the most consequential IT decisions it will make. The market today looks very different from a decade ago. Alongside established leaders like NetSuite, new AI-first ERPs such as Rillet have emerged, designed from the ground up with machine learning at their core.
So which way should a growing business go? Let’s break down the tradeoffs.
The Promise of AI-First ERPs
AI-first ERPs like Rillet are built to impress with automation and speed:
Fast closes. By embedding automation into the general ledger, they promise companies can “close [their] books in hours” instead of weeks.
Native AI agents. Tasks like reconciliations, accruals, and reporting run automatically, with AI copilots available for finance teams.
On-demand forecasting. Unified, real-time ledgers feed predictive models for cash flow and performance, giving CFOs immediate insight.
These advantages are attractive for finance-heavy startups or SaaS businesses. But AI-first ERPs are also young platforms — narrower in scope, less battle-tested at scale, and often focused on accounting rather than complex multi-department operations.
Why NetSuite Still Wins for Complexity
NetSuite, with 40,000+ customers worldwide, remains the most proven ERP foundation for businesses entering their first enterprise system. Its strengths include:
Breadth. NetSuite covers finance, inventory, CRM, supply chain, and more — capabilities most AI-first systems don’t yet provide.
Ecosystem. Thousands of SuiteApps and integration partners make it extensible across industries and geographies.
Scale. From midmarket firms to global enterprises, NetSuite has proven its ability to grow with customers.
That said, NetSuite’s biggest weakness is what the AI-first crowd exploits: visibility and automation gaps. Many processes (order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, manufacturing) still rely on dashboards, saved searches, or manual detective work to find bottlenecks.
Vertical Bar: Making NetSuite AI-Native
This is where Vertical Bar comes in. As a NetSuite-native process intelligence layer, it closes the visibility and automation gap:
Process Mining. Automatically converts NetSuite logs into real-time flow maps, showing how transactions actually move through the system.
Bottleneck Detection. Pinpoints delays in approvals, shipments, or collections that hurt cash flow and customer satisfaction.
Predictive Alerts. Forecasts where problems will occur — late payments, stockouts, approval bottlenecks — and notifies teams before they happen.
Actionable Recommendations. Integrates with NetSuite workflows (SuiteFlow, SuiteScript) to trigger intelligent automations, effectively making NetSuite behave like an AI-first ERP.
Quick Comparison: First ERP Decision
Capability | AI-First ERPs (e.g., Rillet) | NetSuite (core) | NetSuite + Vertical Bar |
|---|---|---|---|
Close Speed | Hours–days via AI-native ledger automation | Weeks with manual adjustments and reconciliations | Faster closes by removing upstream bottlenecks and surfacing exceptions |
Automation | Built-in AI agents handle reconciliations, accruals, reports | Rule-based workflows (SuiteFlow), emerging GenAI features | Intelligent process automation: AI-driven exception routing and proactive approvals |
Process Visibility | Strong finance visibility, limited cross-department insights | Dashboards and saved searches, but siloed | Real-time process maps across order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, manufacturing |
Forecasting | Real-time, AI-driven forecasts from unified ledger | Forecasting via SuiteAnalytics and add-ons | Predictive alerts (e.g., late payments, stockouts) tied to live NetSuite data |
Breadth & Ecosystem | Narrower scope, mainly finance-focused | Broad modules + 40k customers + global ecosystem | Keep NetSuite’s breadth and ecosystem, add AI-native intelligence |
Future-Proofing | Startup velocity, evolving features | Proven scale, extensible | Best of both: proven scale + modern AI-native process intelligence |
First ERP, Future-Proofed
For companies evaluating their first ERP, the decision isn’t just about today’s needs. It’s about future-proofing.
AI-first ERPs shine for finance teams that want immediate automation, but often lack depth across operations.
NetSuite alone is robust but risks feeling “legacy” without modern process intelligence.
NetSuite + Vertical Bar delivers both: proven breadth and scale plus AI-native workflow insights and automation.
In other words, if you’re choosing your first ERP and expect your operations to become complex — spanning finance, logistics, manufacturing, or global entities — NetSuite enhanced with Vertical Bar is the smarter long-term bet.