Accounting software provider Xero has launched a new machine learning automation system that it claims will “transform” the accounting practices of small businesses and their partners and save them time and money.
Xero is touting its new technology as the first example of personalised machine learning in a small business cloud accounting system after development of the system in-house by a specialist team of engineers working full-time for a year across three different locations.
The system uses detailed statistical analysis to learn from and assist the individual business and their partner based on their own specific circumstances.
Luke Gumbley, Xero business product lead says the machine learning automation will be made available to an initial group of small business customers and their accounting partners for testing, before being launched to all Xero customers later this year.
{loadposition peter}According to Gumbley the new technology is the first step in Xero’s plan to build a bespoke, personalised assistant for small businesses and their accountants to cut the administrative burden, prevent mistakes, and enable them to spend more time growing their business.
“Simply talking about machine learning isn’t enough. The truth is, it’s really difficult to do beautifully. While many claim to use machine learning principles, actually implementing them across complex platforms to address customer’s real needs takes intricate, specialized knowledge of the technology, the platform and the user,” said Gumbley says.
“Our machine learning automation will give each Xero business and their advisor the unique insights and processes they need to cut the burden on manual tasks and let them spend more time growing their business. We’re not asking them to learn something new - we’re saving them time and money by ensuring the system learns from and for them.”
According to Gumbley, although the true impact of the technology will only become apparent when the product goes live, the benefits have already been demonstrated in early testing.
“After just one invoice, machine learning techniques understood invoicing behaviour in general better than Xero experts. By the fourth invoice, early machine learning implementations are accurate over 80% of the time and by the 50th they consistently reach over 90%.
“We expect the wider adoption of machine learning to lead to further insights and improvements that will help small businesses, their advisors and other partners fundamentally change the way they work. In the future, Xero will be able to use aggregated, non-identifying data to identify trends, patterns, behaviours and industry insights. This is just the beginning.”