Small business accounting platform Xero will soon be integrating with OpenAI, allowing them to interact with their data via ChatGPT and Codex, as well as expanding its current Microsoft integration to Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Copilot Cowork, enabling live data flows from Xero directly into charts, tables and documents. CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy made the announcement during the company's Xerocon event in Denver. However, she emphasized that this is not only an integration but an adaptation of these solutions into the specific context of small business accounting.
"What's missing from those models is the trusted accounting context. The harnesses, the layer, the proprietary fine tuning, the compliance guardrails, your payments, the fraud protection, the trust actions, the regulatory approvals we have to operate in 52 states — all of these things are not in the models. They're on Xero," she said.
The idea is that customers will be able to seamlessly switch between their practice's client organizations while working across all of these integrations, ensuring access to real-time, client-specific data when and where advisors need it.
Such integrations can theoretically pose a risk to client confidentiality and any data that flows through them usually ends up on their servers (
"So first of all, we have a negotiation with them and a contract with them that does not allow them to use any client data," she said.
After that, however, she said the integrations are set up in such a way that queries involving sensitive data are processed inside of an applet (a small, focused computer program that runs inside a larger program to perform one specific job.) While the platform might know that an applet is being run, it cannot actually see what is inside that applet. So, for example, someone asks a question such as "How many invoices do I have outstanding?"
"What happens is a sort of widget of ours comes up. It's like an applet inside them that actually lays out 'here are the invoices, here are the totals.' But they can't look inside the applet, so they can't get the data," she said.
But she added that, at the end of the day, the degree to which a customer wants to share or not share data is their own decision. And so there are settings where a user could, if they wanted to, opt into data sharing and override the normal protections. She noted that there are certain workflows where someone might want to do that, and while it is turned off by default, someone can choose to turn it on if they want.
Cassidy, during her keynote presentation, said these integrations now allow people greater flexibility in how they interact with Xero, and emphasized the effort towards privacy and safety that Jolly discussed in the interview.
"You should look for this in the coming weeks. This gives you the ability to leverage, those of you who use ChatGPT or Word or Codex, being able to work [with Xero] together in the workflows you want to build. So connecting Xero to the models you use matters," she said.
When asked when these integrations would be available, a Xero spokesperson said "in the coming weeks."
Branding emphasis
Cassidy also spoke briefly about Xero making a concerted push for increased brand awareness. The city of Denver itself, where the event took place, had several very large advertisements for Xero that were easily spotted just walking around. Cassidy said this was intentional. She said the branding campaign, which has been going on for more than a year, began in select cities where there were particularly high concentrations of Xero partners.
"That's because you told us that it's important that when you try and bring people on Xero, they know who Xero is," she said. "Brand awareness in his market has been a continual ask from our accounting and bookkeeping partners."
Based on initial returns on investment, she said Xero has made the decision to accelerate its brand investment across multiple markets in the U.S.
"Why are we doing this? To make it easier for you to introduce Xero to your clients, when your clients don't know what Xero is already," she said.
