Xero has been known for presenting large, exciting user conferences showcasing the company’s software innovations and hosting more than 1,000 accounting professionals in one location. This year the company chose a different route – the Xero Roadshow convened in six locations across the country in July and August providing attendees with a more intimate experience where they could learn about the latest Xero features and make connections with users and Xero personnel.
“Our purpose is to make life better for people in small businesses and their advisors in communities around the world,” explained Bjorn Monsson, director of partner services, at the kickoff to the New York City roadshow event. The intro promised to focus on the biggest challenges that accountants are facing, including staffing shortages, economic uncertainty, and pressure to add advisory services to accounting and bookkeeping practices. “The rapid rollout of AI means what used to work for a profitable firm may not work going forward,” added Monsson.
The conference did not disappoint, and attendees were presented with plenty of food for thought from a plethora of new Xero features to a deep dive into Client Accounting/Advisory Services presented by accounting influencer Joe Woodard, as well as plenty of opportunities for networking.
Clearly, Xero isn’t resting on its laurels. In the past year, we’ve reported on many announcements of new products, acquisitions, and partnerships from Xero:
- Xero Adds New Features to AI Financial Agent “JAX”
- Xero Partners with Plaid for Bank Feed Access
- Xero to Acquire Melio, A Leading U.S. SMB Bill Pay Solution
- Xero Adds Tap-to-Pay on iPhone for Small Businesses Using Stripe
- Xero and Tallyfor Integrate to Streamline Business Tax Preparation
- Constant Contact and Xero Collaborate for Small Businesses
- Xero and Karbon Partner to Streamline Firm Workflow
- Xero Partners with BILL to Add Online Bill Payments for U.S. Users
- Xero to Acquire Syft Analytics to Enhance Reporting and Insights Capability
Meeting with the Data Master
In addition to attending the roadshow in person, I had an opportunity to talk with Eitan Sharon, senior vice president of data and science at Xero, who opened my eyes as to how AI is being adopted within Xero and how that is expected to impact the future of accounting at large. Some of the highlights from that conversation included ways in which Xero is leveraging AI features so that they will be useful, efficient, and safe.
“We’re talking about 8-12 features in the coming year that we are to launch, targeting tasks that save a lot of time and effort to accountants, bookkeepers, and small businesses,” said Sharon. “We’re trying to prioritize the features according to their usefulness based on what we hear from the community.”
Xero continues to position itself as a future-focused company, serving the accounting community by staying on top of change and positioning its product as a leading technological solution for financial specialists. This will continue as the company looks ahead. Within the next five years, Sharon predicts “an overall change of the way we work.” For a majority of our work, he says we can expect to change from “doing the tasks to reviewing and approving.”
Speaking about AI, Sharon said, “This tool will change the way we work. All the things that are simple will be done. In theory you could lean back and not do anything, but that’s never going to be the case, because there will always be places where attention is needed, on a higher level of judgement and connection, empathy and care, this will be an overall industry change and accountants will be part of this.”
That doesn’t mean there won’t be a place for accountants who are comfortable doing what they are doing now and aren’t looking for change. “I believe there will always be a compatible path,” Sharon continued. “I don’t think we’re moving the technology to a place where you could not do what you used to do. But I think accountants should take into account the speed of movement around them.”
Most importantly, the concept of trust is front and center as Xero and the rest of accounting technology continues to move forward. “A major focus point is trust and integrity of data. We have a large team at Xero that is committed to delivering the exact same level of reliability that you’ve seen from Xero in the past, the one that causes institutions to trust us as well as accountants and people who deal with finances. This is not something you get off the shelf today. For instance, in a partnership with OpenAI, we leverage everything they have, but we augment it with our own approaches to be secure. That would be things like agentic approaches, things we call JAX Assure, in which we have an architecture wherein many, many agents talk together to make sure that there’s a cross validation of the information extracted from AI. We don’t just let AI extend these numbers that we don’t validate.”
Xero is poised to be massively driven to move forward with AI. Sharon explained that the company is focused on incorporating two elements into its future plans: drive and confidence. “Drive is that we believe if the world is going there, we want to equip our customers with the best tools to be competitive and to perform in the best way. Drive is to make sure we help our customers to be in the front line of business and to not lose business, and to involve business, actually leverage this to do more rather than less. We need to be there for our customers. Confidence is we do have a very strong AI team at Xero in engineering and UX and we believe that we can, with the data we have, we have so much information at Xero that we can train our system, with our customers who can give us feedback and usage and from whom we learn, we believe we can provide those elaborate systems.
“Also we have invested in measurements and rating systems,” Sharon continued, “so for many of our features, we know the level of accuracy, the level of reliability. Part of the building here, and this is something that OpenAI cares about as well, is to be able to measure, so we know what is the level of integrity and reliability, statistically, and this gives us confidence. We don’t have to guess. We will be a responsible tool for you, like automatic driving, or something that will help you like cruise control, you can get an advantage, get our tailwind.”
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