‘It can be a win-win situation’: Xero explains why giving businesses more control over their finances might actually be the key to AI success
With AI tools and services now increasingly common in workplaces across the country, finding the right use cases where the technology can really have an effect is becoming more and more important.
Accounting and finance seems an obvious use case for AI, where an automated system can quickly go through reams of data to find the solution, or ensure everything is properly sorted.
I spoke to Akankshu Dhawan, Xero SVP, Product & Tech, at the recent Xerocon 2026 event in London, to find out more.
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“The best way to build products”
“It’s a very fortunate place to be in, when customers want more of what you have,” Dhawan tells me following the Xerocon 2026 keynote, where the company announced a whole host of new tools, products and services.
Xero seems fairly unique to me in that it really seems to take care to listen to users and customers when developing new offerings – transformation and customization seems to be the key watchwords.
“I think that’s the best way to build products,” Dhawan says, “sometimes you do need to push the envelope sometimes – as the world is changing so fast, technology is changing so fast, not everybody is going to be comfortable with it, but that’s also an opportunity to listen.”
As mentioned, accounting and bookkeeping are clear and obvious use cases where AI should be able to have an impact, taking complex procedures and tedious manual processes and streamlining them, freeing up workers for other tasks.
But for this reason, it may require extra time and care to ensure tools are intuitive for accountants and bookkeepers, some of whom may have started out working with pen and paper, then moved to computers, and now to the age of AI. This is especially true for those with small businesses or start-ups as customers, where any filing mistake or accounting error could have major consequences.
“Our job is to help bring as much calm to this,” Dhawan says, “as long as (accountants) feel they are in control, and we can give them the right set of controls, that can help them navigate this with as little anxiety as possible.”
This includes JAX, Xero’s AI platform, which the company says looks to offer “accountable intelligence” (pun probably intended), as part of its philosophy to infuse AI into every part of the product, built on top of its Xero operating system.
“It was very obvious to me any industry where there is a source of truth, and you can build a full loop…where customers can validate the input and give you the data…as long as you can do that well, you will have the ability to disrupt,” Dhawan says.
Xero had announced JAX will be able to create full end of year accounts, a significant escalation in capabilities, and an area where any mistake could be extremely costly in every sense of the word, so I ask Dhawan about the concerns some businesses may have on relying too heavily on AI tools.
“I think it’s a risk if not done properly,” he says, “we keep coming back to the sense of control, and making sure the right controls are in place – we don’t our AI to just send you a notification one day saying ‘I’ve sent your taxes to HMRC’ without you having even looked at it…you need to strike the right balance.”
He notes that the company’s AI is trained on 20 years’ worth of data from over five million customers, so it should be able to avoid troublesome variants.
“Because we have this…we can give you an idea of ‘it’s either this, or this’ – now check,” he says, “it’s much more productive, and you still save time, and you still keep the human in the loop.”
“Always in control”
All of this seems to result in what Xero had pledged about offering extra oversight when it comes to what can be the most critical part of running a business.
Dhawan had mentioned in his keynote the theme that users were “always in control – that’s our promise to you”, and I ask him how realistic an aim that can be in a rapidly-changing and evolving market.
“Honestly, that’s table stakes in our industry – I’m often blown away by promises that companies sometimes make,” he says.
“We are here because of this group of accountants and bookkeepers, and when they’re sitting in the room with their small business clients, there’s that trust, which kind of doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not – they want to know, can I trust the advice.”
“It can be a win-win situation…it’s a no-brainer that that is our way of creating value for the ecosystem that we serve.”
“If we can really rise to the occasion, meet our customers and capture this AI tailwind, that’s front and center – it’s very real, it’s happening, we’ve got to just keep our eye on the ball.”
