Customizing their way: the rise of the builders

For years, when a small business or advisor hit a workflow problem, the answer was to find an app that solved it or live with a workaround. Building a solution was often costly, and required a developer to bring the app to life. 

Today, greater accessibility and popularity of AI and LLM custom coding tools means more and more businesses are taking a different path: they’re building the app themselves. And we’re not seeing any signs this new way of working is slowing down. Increasingly, the customers and advisors using Xero’s ecosystem are becoming the builders of their own custom apps. In fact, we’ve seen new app registrations increase 4x since 2025. 

So it’s not just that software is now easier to build, but it’s who is building it that has also changed. It’s called the rise of the builder: the people closest to the work, whether that be an accountant, a bookkeeper or business owner, are customizing workflows to fit how they actually work.

Why is it happening now? 

Building on top of Xero isn’t new — developers have been building on our APIs for years, built on two decades of data and trusted by millions of our customers. Our app store and APIs have long sat at the heart of how we deliver value to customers, allowing developers the opportunity to build apps or integrations that connect with Xero. And we’re proud that we have more than 1,000 certified apps in the Xero App Store.  

AI has now unlocked a world of new opportunities and closed the gap between having an idea and shipping something that works. 

As custom coding tools have matured, an advisor or small business owner can now describe a workflow in plain English and have AI generate the app, automation, or integration. 

Builder Spotlight

Enzo O’Hara Garza, founder and CEO of Accounting Prose, decided to build tools that help them run their firm more efficiently. Faced with the manual grind of reviewing client files at scale, they’ve built their own Claude skill using Xero’s MCP Server and Xero data to review client files more intelligently.

“When I built this skill inside of Claude, it was something that was done out of necessity,” Enzo says. “All I have to do is explain (to Claude): ‘I want to solve this problem.’ And I get ideas of what to do next, and then my problem can be solved.”

Rob Collings, is co-founder of AI-native accounting firm, Flexal. He says his team has been supercharged by AI, allowing them to spend time on focusing on their clients and making their processes easier. 

“I’ve been using Xero pretty much all of my career, so I know it inside out.  The tools that are available allow us to build on top of Xero… and also there’s a lot of apps that already exist within the ecosystem,” he said. 

 “We’ve connected as many tools as we can to Xero, standard things like the bank feeds, but then we’ve also built our own apps on top. For the first time in history, there is this period where accountants can start to build things themselves because of AI.”

How we’re supporting  builders

One in five connections into the Xero ecosystem is now a custom app from outside of the Xero App Store. And usage of Xero’s MCP Server — the secure gateway that lets AI tools work with live Xero data — grew ten-fold between December 2025 and May 2026, powering more than one million API calls as of June.

Recently, we worked with Lovable on their new Xero Connector. It is an easy way for anyone to describe an app in plain English and have it working with live Xero data in minutes. Every permission is opt-in, reports are always read-only, and the customer stays in control of exactly what the tool can access.

We also launched earlier this year, XeroForce, our natural language custom AI agent builder, built specifically for accounting and compliance workflows. It’s currently in early access with general availability later this year.

This is only the first step as we plan to release more builder-focused tools and resources to support this new wave of small business and accountant software builders relying on Xero as their trusted operating system for the agentic era. 

A trusted operating system for the agentic era

None of this replaces the ecosystem of world-class apps already built on Xero OS — the AI native operating system that powers JAX — or XeroForce. If anything, it deepens it.

As Rob puts it: “I think that’s what’s so exciting about the ability to build your own custom apps that integrate with Xero.  If there’s a problem that you’re trying to solve, there might be a solution on the App Store. But if there isn’t or you have quite a niche workflow, then you can use AI to build a custom app around the way that you actually work”.

As we continue to lead the industry as a builder of AI innovation in small business financial management, we’re focused on expanding that ecosystem to support them.

The Builder era is here. We can’t wait to see what you make.

Head to our AI toolkit page to learn more and stay up to date on all the developer tools.