IDG Contributor Network: Automation and the end of accounting

Recently I’ve been spending time looking at the various initiatives that the accounting software vendors have in terms of applying automation (via artificial intelligence) to their core offerings. While my assessment is that there is little happening in the enterprise space around this topic, in the small- and mid-sized accounting space there is huge amounts of work being done on this. I have seen development from a number of the main players in the space aligned to this automation theme and recently spent some time at Xero’s global HQ talking to their own machine learning team.

It is hardly surprising that Xero is at the forefront of talking about machine learning — its CEO, Rod Drury, has been waxing poetic for some time about the company’s move to Amazon Web Services and what that move enables in terms of utilizing the higher-level machine learning services that the Amazon cloud offers.

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