Neural Notes: An exclusive chat about Xero’s new assistant and one million free AI courses

Welcome back to Neural Notes, a weekly column where we go through some of the biggest and most interesting AI news of the week. In this edition: one million free AI courses for SMEs, an exclusive chat about Xero’s new AI assistant, and some eyebrow-raising data about how AI is being rolled out in Australian businesses.

One million free AI courses

The National AI Centre (NAIC), the Institute of Applied Technology Digital (IATD), and the CSIRO have joined forces to offer a free ‘Introduction to AI’ course to one million Australians.

The course is entirely online and is roughly two-and-a-half hours long. It’s aimed at SME business owners and workers who are looking to upskill in the AI space.

According to the CSIRO, the course will cover:

• What is AI
• Common AI terminologies
• The challenges and risks of using AI
• Common misconceptions
• Real-world applications of AI
• Australian AI case studies
• Advice from industry experts to start your career in AI

“SMEs make up over 98% of Australia’s economy, and ‘Introduction to AI’ is their opportunity to learn how they can use this revolutionary technology to enhance their operations, services, and market competitiveness,”  NAIC Director Stela Solar said.

The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) has also been welcoming of the course.

“Small businesses are a main source of innovation in Australia — they are entrepreneurs who try new ideas, test new products and usually back themselves with their own capital,” COSBOA CEO, Luke Achterstraat, said.

“This micro skill course will help build confidence and competency for small businesses as they navigate the AI landscape.”

The course is available now.

Xero unveils JAX, its new AI-powered assistant

Meanwhile, accounting software platform Xero held its inaugural Investor Day this week, where it unveiled a Just Ask Xero (JAX) — an AI-powered ‘smart business assistant’. This is something that Xero has been hinting at since last year, but now we have a lot more detail.

According to Xero, JAX will be able to automate tasks such as generating invoices and editing quotes. It will also be able to deliver personalised insights (such as cash flow projections) and “help elevate their client conversations”. We’re taking that to mean that it could allow for response generation.

In addition to this, Xero is making JAX available outside of its own ecosystem. It will be compatible with email clients, Messenger and WhatsApp. It will also respond to voice commands.

In an exclusive interview with Xero’s chief product officer, Diya Jolly, we went deeper into the rollout of JAX, including how humans are being kept in the loop, data security and the future of AI in Xero’s applications.

SC: How is Xero implementing human-in-the-loop systems to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information being generated by the likes of JAX? Can you share examples of how human oversight is integrated into your AI-driven processes?

DJ: Ensuring that JAX gives correct answers is a clear focus for us. We understand that our customers expect JAX to give accurate answers to the questions they’re asking. JAX isn’t just a large language model (LLM).

We’re taking LLMs and combining them with what we’ve already learned about accessing and managing financial information, as well as classical AI/ML techniques, to build guardrails that keep JAX grounded. Human-in-the-loop systems are one way we use to evaluate the performance of AI systems.

We also employ a wide variety of methods to ensure our AI products meet our customers’ expectations.

SC: As Xero aims to automate and streamline repetitive tasks, how does the company ensure that its AI solutions, including JAX, are adaptable to the diverse and evolving needs of different businesses and industries?

DJ: Small businesses are very diverse but there are many similar needs when it comes to pain points such as managing cash flow or completing different business accounting tasks that we can solve for despite the industry. We know small businesses and their advisors often feel stretched with the number of admin tasks they need to complete. So any way we can take this off their plate is a win.

There are a number of features we have that we believe all small businesses will find useful that are powered by our AI agents that help automate tedious manual tasks for our small businesses.

For example: bank reconciliation requires a small business owner to match transactions in their bank statements to their invoices, bills and other transactions in their accounting system. This line-by-line reconciliation is very time-consuming and tedious. We’ve put to work our AI models to be able to predict, auto-populate, and recommend how the matching should be done.

Another example is how we use our Hubdoc product. Hubdoc allows you to scan a physical bill. We then use AI to create the bill automagically in Xero. Think of all the bills a small business gets and how much time this can save them in manual data entry. Not only do we automagically enter the bill into Xero we also check for whether the supplier already exists in your contacts. If the supplier doesn’t exist in your contacts, we’ll check the supplier and add it to your contacts.

These are just some examples. We are making these AI agents more and more powerful every day so that we can give time back to small businesses.

SC: With JAX poised to automate significant aspects of accounting and bookkeeping, what do you see as the future role of human professionals in these areas? How does Xero envision supporting these professionals in leveraging AI to enhance their services rather than replace them?

DJ: We believe that AI has the power to augment human intelligence, not replace it. Routine tasks consume accountants’ and bookkeepers’ time, hampering their ability to provide added client value.

We believe that AI can support them in two really powerful ways: remove time spent on routine tasks and deliver them deeper insights. Enabling the accountant and bookkeeper with more time and empowering them with insights, supports them to provide much higher level advisory services to their clients.

With AI being a huge consideration for businesses this year, we created an AI guide to help accountants and bookkeepers consider how it can help their practice, what to watch out for, and how to mitigate risk along the
way.

SC: Given the sensitive nature of financial data, what measures is Xero taking to ensure the privacy and security of customer information, especially in the context of AI-powered services like JAX that process and analyse vast amounts of data?

DJ: Like all our products, our AI tools are built to the same high security and privacy standards. This is because we want to ensure we protect our customers to the same standard as the products they’ve come to love and use. We have a strong foundation in our responsible data use commitments that guide our decisions and we will. continue to secure our data to maintain our responsibility as a trusted platform for our customers.

SC: What future developments in AI does Xero anticipate integrating into its customer-facing applications and services? How do you plan to continue innovating to meet the changing needs of your customers and stay ahead of the competition in AI implementation?

DJ: Our guiding principle is delivering the best experiences for small businesses and advisors. For us, that means automating time-consuming tasks, delivering insights when they need it, and meeting our customers where they’re at. Our unique approach is making sure we implement this where it’s most useful to them — that’s why JAX will be available both within the Xero platform and on other apps such as email, text, messenger, WhatsApp and voice command. That way, they don’t have to log in specifically to do a task — they can ask JAX what they need, wherever they are in the moment, and get it done faster and simpler.

Other AI news this week:

• New data from Slack revealed that 60% of Australian executives have a high degree of urgency to implement AI — but only 35%  of Australian employees have received guidance from their leaders when it comes to navigating AI integration. Further data from Salesforce also said that while 61% of men report using or experimenting with generative AI at work, only 40% of women do the same. Read the full story here.
• Australia Post is pushing further into AI with the help of Salesforce’s Einstein1 platform. The aim is to help “drive efficiency and productivity” and create AI content across its sales, service, and marketing interactions. At present no detail was able to be provided regarding how these new AI capabilities will be able to help improve the business customer experience.
• Surprise, rapid AI adoption is still a potential security risk for businesses. 
• Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company will “break new ground” on generative AI in an investor call this week.
• Microsoft is investing in yet another AI startup to complement the US13 billion it has sunk into OpenAI. This time around it’s US$16 million into Mistral AI — a French company that specialises in foundational models and has a current valuation of roughly US$2 billion. But the deal has received the ire of the European Union, which has concerns about Microsoft’s growing dominance in the AI space.
• GitHub has released its Copilot Enterprise tool to the general public. This is a paid version of its developer chatbot and code completion tool that retails for US$39 a month.