How Intuit, Xero, Sage, and SAP are positioning AI to transform your accounting department

It’s July 2024. You run a small or medium-sized business. Or maybe you’re a senior financial manager. You want to use AI to streamline accounting and financial operations, as well as increase employee productivity. What are your options today? Here’s what you’ll find.

Several AI startups

There are many startups using AI to perform a variety of accounting tasks.

For example, Ember, Layer, and Teal are developing apps that will be embedded into existing platforms to eliminate data synchronization with accounting software. Rows, GPTExcel, and Numerous.ai offer AI-powered intelligent spreadsheets (or spreadsheet formulas) that these companies promise will “create better spreadsheets, faster.” Basis, Materia, and Tutti are implementing large language models to perform tax and financial research for both financial managers and outside accountants.

H&R Block has “assistance” features that use AI to help you file your taxes. Startups like AI accounting platform Lili — aimed at very small businesses — promise to manage “your accounting and payments on one platform, simplifying your accounting and giving you a clear picture of your financial situation.” There are also a number of AI-based accounting startups in this space — including Kick, Pilot, and Puzzle. There are also vertical apps like FundGuard, which has raised millions for an AI-based app specifically for asset managers.

In most cases, the apps above — while promising — are in their relative infancy and still in development. If you want to get in on the ground floor, do so. But buyers be careful this year.

If you’re a financial manager or accountant (like me), you’re probably conservative and—unless there’s a strong business need—don’t like to be on the cutting edge of technology. My clients use well-known accounting apps and—rightfully—expect those vendors to include AI features to increase productivity and help them run their businesses more efficiently. So when it comes to AI features, what can you expect from some of the larger, more popular accounting software companies this year?

JAX Photocopier

Xero — which boasts more than 4 million subscribers in over 180 countries — has launched Just Ask Xero — or JAX. It’s an AI assistant that will do things like generate and edit a quote using voice commands, notify you about an overdue invoice (and help you compose an appropriate response), proactively prepare payroll in advance for review and approval, and help with cash forecasting.

Intuit Assist for QuickBooks

Late last year, Intuit launched Intuit Assist for many of its products. For its flagship small-business accounting platform QuickBooks, Intuit Assist offers a natural-language reporting and analytics tool (“what’s my revenue this year?” “who’s my biggest customer?”) along with AI advice on trends, issues, and observations that it pulls from a company’s financial data. Like Xero, it will also identify overdue and potentially overdue invoices and help create responses based on the customer relationship.

Smart Copilot

Sage’s popular Intacct accounting software, which hasn’t been released yet (though you can add your company to the waiting list), will soon have its own AI assistant called Copilot, which promises to perform similar functions to JAX and Intuit Assist, such as preparing payroll for review or providing data and analysis of a company’s financial operations upon voice commands.

SAP joule

Joule is SAP’s AI assistant that will do a lot of the things described above, but it also offers users a more advanced, workflow-oriented experience. For example, it has a pretty cool process for resolving customer disputes and returning items that includes both a conversational interface and intuitive assumptions about what’s needed next in the process. It’s more advanced functionality than what Intuit, Xero, and Sage offer, but it sets the stage for the future.

And this is the key word: future.

For the most part, the AI ​​features these companies offer today are nothing more than a refined version of ChatGPT. But they are built using your company’s data as its big language model. If you start digging into these features, be prepared to hear words like: testing, preview, waitlist, beta, trial, and experimental. This is a software company telling you not to trust the results their AI features are delivering. Yes, they are as nervous about these things as we are.

I’ve played around with these products, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, and the results are spotty and unreliable. Sometimes the queries just hang around. Other times the results are inaccurate. And even when the AI ​​features work as promised, the incomplete and poor data in my accounting system—which is my fault—gives me the disappointing results you’d expect.

The good news is that you can see where the train is headed. Some of the startups I mentioned will fail, but others will flourish, and their AI tools will change the way accountants and financial managers do their jobs. AI offerings from Xero, Intuit, Sage, SAP, and other smart tech companies will continue to evolve, become better, and more robust. Right now, media, PR, and marketing are driving their AI offerings. In a few years, their customers and competitors will be telling them what AI features they need. Like all emerging technologies, this one will improve rapidly as it is used more and more.

We haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. Given these early days, the future of AI in finance and accounting is exciting.