Global small business platform Xero announced this week a multiyear partnership with artificial intelligence research and development company Anthropic that will bring its generative AI model Claude directly into Xero, and Xero’s financial data and tools into Claude.ai.
Xero says this partnership will give small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors real-time financial intelligence and the ability to act on it—wherever they choose to work.
“Every day, millions of small business owners ask the same questions: Why is cash tight this month? Which invoices are overdue? Can I afford to hire?” Diya Jolly, chief product and technology officer at Xero, said in a statement. “To run their business efficiently, small business owners and their accountants and bookkeepers need to be able to answer these questions and act on them in real time whether using Xero or Claude. This partnership delivers on that.”
Xero says this is the first time its customers will be able to work with their financial data directly inside a major AI platform, and a new way for Claude to power end-to-end financial workflows for small businesses at scale.
“For millions of small businesses, this will mean less time manually chasing invoices or piecing together cash flow across multiple reports—with Claude proactively surfacing the insights and actions that would otherwise take hours to find,” Xero said in a March 26 media release.
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Key features will include:
- Claude-powered automation in Xero: Customers will be able to orchestrate financial tasks from start to finish across accounting, payroll, and payments. Powered by Claude’s advanced reasoning, Xero’s AI assistant, JAX (Just Ask Xero), will proactively do the heavy lifting analyzing revenue and profit performance, tracking real-time cash flow, and identifying unpaid invoices to suggest actions for small business owners and their advisors to take.
- Xero insights and actions in Claude.ai: Customers will be able to safely use their Xero financial data and insights in Claude.ai for detailed analysis and business planning. By combining real-time revenue, profit, and unpaid invoice data with external market trends or business plans, customers can assess different business scenarios—such as evaluating year-end positions—to help make critical decisions without having to switch between tools. Over time, Xero in Claude.ai will also suggest and complete end-to-end actions that customers can trigger with a single click to help them more seamlessly manage their financial workflows and maintain business health.
In line with Xero’s responsible data use commitments, data responsibility is foundational to the partnership, the company says. Financial data shared between the platforms is used solely for the user’s specific session, and Xero stresses that proprietary business data won’t be used to train Claude’s AI models.
“Small businesses and advisors don’t just need data; they need a digital partner that acts on it. Integrating Claude moves Xero into agentic workflows, where Xero’s AI superagent, JAX, does the heavy lifting—from predicting cash flow gaps to executing complex financial tasks,” Jolly said. “Crucially, this trusted intelligence isn’t locked into one platform; it follows the user securely wherever they choose to work, empowering advisor collaboration. By shifting the admin burden to a team of agents orchestrated by JAX, we’re giving our customers time back and providing them with clarity so they can make informed decisions and focus on the future.”
Chris Ciauri, managing director of international at Antrhopic, added, “Xero has spent 20 years building the financial platform that millions of small businesses depend on. Claude brings a reasoning layer to that foundation. Now, instead of spending hours trying to make sense of their financials on top of everything else it takes to run a business, customers get clear answers and recommended actions in real time. This provides small businesses and their advisors with the kind of financial intelligence that used to require a dedicated analyst or CFO.”
Claude-powered insights within Xero and the integration of Xero experiences into Claude.ai is expected to be available in the coming months. As part of the deal, Xero’s engineering teams will also use Claude and Cowork to accelerate their own product development.
Photo credit: Xero
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