Xero credits AI for reaching new milestone in global small business platform

Xero says it has delivered more than one billion machine learning recommendations to Xero subscribers, describing it as a major milestone in the company’s push automate admin and reduce burdens on small businesses and their advisors.

“The milestone demonstrates the impact of Xero’s investment in automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning,” says Xero.

“Since introducing the first AI-led features a year ago, automation has become a core foundation of the Xero platform to benefit the small businesses and advisors who use Xero every day.”

The company says many business owners and managers find themselves doing the administrative parts of their job after work hours or over the weekend. It says using automation and AI, Xero is reducing the time these tasks take, and helping business stay in business hours.

“At the heart of Xero’s automation vision is to augment humans, not replace them,” says James Simpson, executive general manager- product, Xero.

“We want to reduce the burden of doing time consuming tasks to allow businesses to do more of what they love,” says Simpson, in a statement.

“The scale of what our first AI features have already achieved demonstrates the power of our innovation, and we’re excited to introduce the next wave of products to further contribute to this.”

Xero says the impact of this AI milestone extends to the accounting and bookkeeping partners of SMBs.

Partners can use the insights to develop a greater understanding of their clients’ business, and use the time automation frees up to scale their own business and improve the quality of advice they give to their clients. Partners are now able to focus on delivering higher value advisory services which benefits both the company and the small businesses they advise.

“We develop products based on solving the challenges our partners and users face. Reducing the time partners have to spend on menial tasks allows them to develop the skills and capacity to build and deploy high value products and services. This in turn helps small businesses run more efficiently and deliver better value”, says Simpson.