Everyday AI: Accountable Intelligence Meets You Wherever You Work

AI is opening up new possibilities for how we work across nearly every industry. As an accountant or bookkeeper, you’re accountable to your clients for every number, so making your daily tasks more efficient is critical to freeing up time for higher-value work. At Xero, we see a growing opportunity to bring AI into your everyday work so you can make the most of its potential. 

For an accountant or bookkeeper, consider this: It’s a typical Monday morning and you have five client meetings. When Xero is connected to whichever AI model provider you’ve chosen, your preparation becomes ready in minutes. You can simply ask portfolio-wide questions for each client covering cash position, what customers owe and profit against the month before. AI does the first pass and heavy lifting, so your prep time for each client is spent on what changed and what to raise, not on gathering figures. 

A recent Goldman Sachs report highlights the increasing opportunity for small businesses to use AI to improve productivity, but this isn’t simply about adding more AI tools. As technology evolves, businesses are navigating a growing range of applications, new ways of working and questions about what they can trust. Boston Consulting Group data found that roughly one in seven US working professionals reported what it called “AI brain fry”: the mental fatigue associated with managing AI.

As AI continues to evolve, it can leave many wondering how to apply it without adding complexity or compromising the expertise and judgement needed for good financial management. For accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses, Xero is making intelligence and automation a seamless and trusted part of everyday work to give you time back for what matters most.

This is Xero’s vision for Everyday AI. Accessible, practical and reliable AI, grounded in Accountable Intelligence, that meets you where you already work and helps you run your business or practice more efficiently. 

Everyday AI in practice

At Xero, our approach to Everyday AI means:

• Automating routine work, with you in control. Simplifying daily tasks and surfacing actionable insights to help you make informed decisions.
• AI that meets you where you work. Making financial intelligence accessible in the third-party tools and applications you already use.

Automating the routine.

Xero’s AI, JAX, takes on routine work and runs your daily workflows, showing you what needs attention so gaps, risks and opportunities are spotted sooner. From automatically reconciling bank transactions rather than categorizing them by hand, to capturing data from receipts by snapping a picture on your phone, and executing tailored collections plans for overdue invoices, we are bringing AI to your most time consuming and high-value tasks. 

A small business owner working alongside their advisor can see the same data and take action back in Xero to complete bank reconciliation, payroll, payments and more. The difference is that the groundwork is done, and you get to review and approve it. These capabilities help prevent you from getting bogged down in the daily administrative toil, giving you the freedom to proactively run your business. 

Meeting you where you work. 

Beyond the in-product experiences that help you save time and reduce manual work, Xero meets you in the tools where small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers already work together. Our integrations with Microsoft 365, Claude, Claude for Small Business, ChatGPT and Google Gemini enable you to access your financial information in the applications you use every day, with Xero as the trusted financial operating system at the center, no matter the AI platform you choose. 

Built on secure data sharing, you can confidently bring your live Xero data into your chosen AI platform. We facilitate this access so your chosen AI platform can do the ground work, while you stay in control. For accountants and bookkeepers, these third-party integrations can surface key financial insights and accelerate routine workflows to get the first pass done faster. You can then spend time on the part that counts: interpreting the numbers, advising your clients and deciding together what happens next.

For small businesses meeting with an accountant or bookkeeper during a quarterly catch-up, the owner and the advisor can open whichever AI integration they’re using, compare this quarter with the last and finish with a one-page agenda. The business owner arrives with clearer questions and the advisor spends the meeting on strategic decisions. 

Built on 20 years of trusted data

Xero’s infrastructure is built on 20 years of proprietary data serving as the global system of record for 5 million customers across 180+ countries. This foundation provides the critical harness for powering an operating system that spans our customers’ entire web of financial operations across accounting, payments, payroll, and tax, integrating with over a thousand connected apps and processing billions of transactions. 

JAX also understands your accounting with a level of financial precision and domain expertise that general-purpose AI simply can’t match. It works from your live Xero ledger where small businesses and their advisors can see the same data. Through this approach, JAX is an intelligent, trusted layer across Xero. 

With Everyday AI, we’re making intelligence and automation a natural part of how you work. Our open ecosystem reflects a longstanding belief that you should have access to the tools that work best for you and your business. By taking away the tedium and making AI accessible, practical and reliable, we’re enabling accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses to stay competitive, build resilience and make confident decisions for the future.