Small business accounting platform Xero announced a wide variety of new and upcoming AI enhancements centered around its proprietary agentic system JAX, with most aimed at addressing not so much the accounting itself but the work that needs to be done before accounting can even take place. Diya Jolly, chief product and technology officer, discussed these updates at the company's Xerocon event in Denver as well as in a later followup interview.
"How much of your time is actually spent from work and requires your judgment, your expertise, your knowledge of the client? And how much of it is spent on everything else? Chasing client documents, cleaning up, looking at transactions, opening up client files one by one by one to find that one client that's ready for you to work on. Every practice here carries the same invisible overhead. It's that which must be taken care of before we can get the actual work," she said during her presentation.
With this in mind, Jolly introduced both recent and upcoming enhancements to JAX meant to address what she called the "unbillable admin" work that few professionals actually want to do, such as chasing down clients for missing documents. She said "over the next few months" Xero will introduce the ability for JAX to automatically identify transactions and, if there's missing documentation, email the client asking to please send it, send reminders if the client fails to do so, and ask further clarifying questions if things are unclear. Once the document actually arrives, she said, JAX then uploads it and matches with the transaction, with the user able to review and approve every step of the way. Jolly said they added this feature after hearing repeatedly from customers how annoying it was to have to get clients to send them the documents they need.
"If you had a dollar for every single receipt you ever chased down for your client, you'd be retired by now," she said. "So we thought 'how can we get JAX to help here?'"
In the same vein, she also introduced Payment Followups by JAX.
"Now, who here actually enjoys chasing their clients so they get paid? Yeah, I don't see one hand," she said.
From the moment an invoice is sent, she said, JAX has a plan in motion. It looks at the customer's past payment behavior—how they pay, when they pay, how often they pay—and, based on that, builds a unique plan for each customer. One might get a consolidated month-end bill while another gets statements one at a time. Someone else always ignores texts but checks emails, and so gets an email statement, while someone else who ignores their emails will get a text message instead.
"These are not generic reminders. They're plans that involve the customer's payment behavior. And the plan is always yours. Yours to review. Yours to edit," she said.
She also said that, in response to requests for finer control over payments, Xero has introduced Cashflow Actions. JAX, she said, looks at everything that is coming in and going out, such as invoices or bills or payroll, and can not only spot cashflow gaps but fine tune payments to bridge them. She noted that many tools handle the first part, showing the user the problem, but stop there.
"We thought, this is only half the problem. So we built for the other one. JAX also builds a plan," she said. For example, a user might decide to "delay those two non-critical bills to protect payroll. And because everything is on the same system, you can review it, adjust it, and execute it without ever having to leave Xero." It is, she said, "the difference between going into crisis and protecting the money."
Another new feature she discussed was Bill Protection, an anti-fraud measure. She noted that while people can now pay their bills in Xero without leaving the platform, paying bills is about more than efficiency, it is also about safety. And so Bill Protection has JAX inspect every single bill before it is paid and flags anything that might indicate fraud.
"Unusual amount? Flagged. Invoice details changed? Flag. A supplier you've never paid before? Flagged," she said. "The flag is yours to review. The decision is yours to make. We help your clients go faster and we help them get safe."
She also discussed planned upgrades to the recently-introduced automated bank feed transaction matching. Generally, JAX can match transactions to bank feeds automatically. She said that, over the coming months, the AI will be able to handle much more complex cases such as splitting payments.
In a later interview, when asked to elaborate more on those complex use cases, she and Akankshu Dhawan, senior vice president of product and tech, named transactions that involve paper checks, single transaction split into multiple payments or times when people might want to separate out fees and payments. When asked about a specific rollout schedule, she said release isn't tied to a specific date but when they are satisfied the feature works as intended. She also noted that it won't be one big change; if someone is trying to figure out a pace, she could say every quarter more and more enhancements will come out.
During her presentation, Jolly also discussed the recently-released enhancement to Xero Partner Hub which will now have live book health, work status and month-end readiness in a single view connected directly to tax and advisory, something intended to save users from having to go through every single client file one by one to see what needs to be worked on.
She also talked about the recently-released XeroForce, a natural language custom AI agent builder powered by Xero OS that, without writing code, lets people use simple prompts to build custom AI agents that connect Xero to the third-party apps they already use. These integrations allow customers to access and query their live Xero financial data directly from their everyday productivity suites.
During the later interview, Dhawan explained that the agents can be "invoked" for simple tasks within other tools; for slightly more complex things, the agents can utilize coworking tools to directly operate tools, though such integrations would be third party; and finally there are the integrations that XeroForce itself creates.
"XeroForce can enable integrations where [the user says] 'I want you, whenever the month end close happens, to prepare this set of reports in Excel, make sure they're reviewed, then use Outlook to send the email.' Those are integrations we will control, first party integrations within XeroForce," he said.
Jolly, during her presentation, also discussed upgrades to the recently released Smart Doc Capture which can extract data from bank statements, auto-create transactions, and check VAT. Jolly said Xero is working towards auto-fetch, where JAX automatically retrieves the documents the user needs to perform the required task. It saves a few minutes per client, but multiplied out over many clients, she said, can generate impressive time savings.
