In a strategic move designed to equip small businesses and their accounting advisors with real-time, actionable financial intelligence, Xero and Anthropic have officially unveiled a new multi-year partnership.
The landmark deal represents the first time Xero customers will be able to work with their financial data directly inside a major AI platform. By bridging the two ecosystems, the companies aim to drastically reduce the time users spend manually chasing invoices or piecing together cash flow across multiple, disjointed reports.
Moving into agentic workflows
Diya Jolly, chief product & technology officer at Xero, noted that small business owners constantly face pressing questions about tight cash flow, overdue invoices, and hiring budgets.
“To run their business efficiently, small business owners and their accountants and bookkeepers need to be able to answer these questions and act on them in real time whether using Xero or Claude,” Jolly stated. “Integrating Claude moves Xero into agentic workflows, where Xero’s AI superagent, JAX (Just Ask Xero), does the heavy lifting, from predicting cash flow gaps to executing complex financial tasks.”
The integration, which is expected to be available in the coming months, will introduce two primary operational shifts for users:
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Claude-powered automation in Xero: Customers will be able to orchestrate financial tasks from start to finish across accounting, payroll, and payments. Powered by Claude’s advanced reasoning, JAX will proactively analyze revenue and profit performance, track real-time cash flow, and identify unpaid invoices to suggest immediate actions.
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Xero insights and actions in Claude.ai: Customers can safely port their Xero financial data into Claude.ai for highly detailed analysis and business planning. By combining real-time revenue and unpaid invoice data with external market trends, users can seamlessly assess different business scenarios. Over time, Xero in Claude.ai will suggest and complete end-to-end actions triggered with a single click.
Data privacy and internal adoption
Addressing the critical issue of data privacy, Xero confirmed that data responsibility remains foundational to the new partnership. Any financial data shared between the platforms is utilized solely for the user’s specific session, and proprietary business data is never used to train Anthropic’s AI models.
Chris Ciauri, managing director of international at Anthropic, highlighted the transformative nature of adding AI reasoning to established financial infrastructure.
“Xero has spent 20 years building the financial platform that millions of small businesses depend on. Claude brings a reasoning layer to that foundation,” Ciauri explained. “Now, instead of spending hours trying to make sense of their financials on top of everything else it takes to run a business, customers get clear answers and recommended actions in real time. This provides small businesses and their advisors with the kind of financial intelligence that used to require a dedicated analyst or CFO.”
Beyond the customer-facing integrations, the partnership will also transform Xero’s backend operations. As part of the deal, Xero’s own engineering teams will adopt Claude Code and Cowork to accelerate their internal product development.
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