Xero brings natural language custom AI agent builder to small businesses and accountants

Global small business accounting platform Xero on Wednesday announced the release of XeroForce, a natural language custom AI agent builder for small business and accountant financial workflows.

Using simple prompts, customers can create custom agents on top of Xero and third-party apps, turning time-consuming manual tasks into durable, scalable AI workflows by using Xero as an orchestration hub and core financial operating system.

XeroForce is built with domain-specific accounting and finance logic and is designed to support reliable, AI-native, small business finance and compliance workflows, the company said in a May 13 media release.

Xero says the release of XeroForce is in alpha, available to invited guests only, with general release expected later this year.

“XeroForce is uniquely built for end-to-end financial operations, combining decades of Xero’s domain context, validated data, and AI innovation to help small businesses and accountants deploy agents that can automate financial workflows and provide the visibility essential for compliance without the need for coding expertise,” Diya Jolly, Xero’s chief product and technology officer, said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing what our customers have created with XeroForce and helping them maximize the benefits of agent workflows so they can focus more on the strategic work that only they can do.”

Custom AI agents designed through XeroForce can be built in natural language and used across Xero and a variety of third-party tools that small businesses and accountants already use, connecting apps, actions, rules, and schedules to automated processes shaped for your company, a specific client, or a specific industry.

These agents also support always-on processes and workflows, where companies wait for events or actions, such as email replies or submission dates, and complete tasks over days or weeks in the background, Xero said.

Other key features of XeroForce include:

• Exclusive design: It was designed from the ground up with logic specific to small business financial workflows, from month-end closes and ongoing reporting to organizing tax documents, validating purchase orders, and approving payroll.
• Audit trail: All actions are logged and traceable. This is important for compliance and client trust.
• Bulk actions across clients: Many accountants and bookkeepers manage hundreds of clients, and XeroForce enables workflows that operate at the scale of an entire business, rather than one conversation at a time.
• No technical expertise required: XeroForce is designed to help accountants and small businesses deploy agents without writing code or creating complex prompts.

XeroForce is powered by Xero OS, an AI-native financial operating system for small businesses and accountants. Xero OS also powers JAX (Just Ask Xero), Xero’s financial super-agent that delivers actionable insights and autonomous workflows led by human experts.

In other Xero news…

On May 12, Xero announced a live integration with Anthropic, the company behind Claude. The multi-year partnership, announced in March, brings Claude directly to Xero and brings Xero’s financial data and tools to Claude.ai.

Users with an active Xero subscription can bring financial data directly into Claude conversations to solve pressing business challenges and gain financial clarity without switching tools. Insights generated in Claude are linked to Xero, where customers can take actions such as viewing full reports, contract records, and invoice details. By providing live data from Xero rather than static exports, users can uncover strategic financial insights and reporting in areas such as:

• Sales and profit: Reveal total revenue, whether profits are increasing or decreasing, and how performance compares over time.
• Contact and Accounts Receivable: Discover outstanding payments, past due invoices, and which customers are contributing the most to your revenue.
• Financial situation and cash position: Get a snapshot of the health of your business by viewing the status of your assets, liabilities, and cash flow.

“AI is rapidly becoming an integral part of our customers’ workspaces, and for that workspace to be effective, it needs Xero’s trusted financial intelligence as its foundation,” Jolly, Xero’s chief product and technology officer, said in a statement. “Providing this financial context within Claude allows us to bridge the gap between the AI tools that our customers use every day and the rich financial data in Xero.When customers have broader conversations with Claude about their business strategy and day-to-day operations, they can connect to Claude without interrupting their work flow. You can use it to instantly check your cash position, see overdue invoices, track your profits, and more. This means you can use Xero wherever you are, and it’s part of our commitment to making sure our customers have the power they need at every point in their decision-making process.”

Photo credits: Dom Wright/LinkedIn