Xero Ltd (ASX: XRO) shares are ending the week positively.
In morning trade, the cloud accounting technology company's shares are up 2.5% to $74.24.
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Why are Xero shares rising?
Investors have been buying the company's shares following the release of a promising announcement.
There have been concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) could disrupt Xero's business, but today it has demonstrated how it could strengthen it.
This morning, Xero and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, announced a multi-year partnership that will bring Claude's AI directly into Xero, and Xero's financial data and tools into Claude.ai.
According to the release, this will give small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors real-time financial intelligence and the ability to act on it, wherever they choose to work.
Xero's chief product and technology officer, Diya Jolly, said:
Every day, millions of small business owners ask the same questions: Why is cash tight this month? Which invoices are overdue? Can I afford to hire?
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. This partnership delivers on that.
The company notes that it is the first time Xero customers will be able to work with their financial data directly inside a major AI platform, and a new way for Claude to power end-to-end financial workflows for small businesses at scale.
It highlights that for millions of small businesses, this will mean less time manually chasing invoices or piecing together cash flow across multiple reports, with Claude proactively surfacing the insights and actions that would otherwise take hours to find.
Moving into agentic workflows
Commenting on the partnership, Jolly adds:
Small businesses and advisors don't just need data; they need a digital partner that acts on it. 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.
Crucially, this trusted intelligence isn't locked into one platform; it follows the user securely wherever they choose to work, empowering advisor collaboration. By shifting the admin burden to a team of agents orchestrated by JAX, we're giving our customers time back and providing them with clarity so they can make informed decisions and focus on the future.
The company advised that Claude-powered insights within Xero and the integration of Xero experiences into Claude.ai is expected to be available in the coming months.
As part of the deal, Xero revealed that its engineering teams will be able to use Claude and Cowork to accelerate their own product development.
