The CEO of £1.4 billion software giant Xero says AI will be 'transformational' for finance

The CEO and founder of cloud-based accountancy software giant Xero says artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies will be "transformational" for finance over the next few years. Rod Drury told Business Insider during a recent interview in London: "We'll see more innovation in the next 2 years than we have in the last 10 years, all driven by AI." The Xero founder says: "We're getting a massive hit on the R&D we've done around machine learning and AI. We think it's going to be transformational for the industry. "If you capture information from the bank statement and the invoice and the bills that are flying through, you can actually programme things to do a whole lot of work for you and you're just checking and making fixes, which trains the machine." Xero's accountancy software helps small and medium-sized businesses manage their accountants in the cloud but Drury believes much of the management -- things like categorizing expenditure and sending accounts to be checked -- could be automated by "smart" AI and machine learning programmes, which learn the habits of your business. "You can build unique system for each business," says Drury. "The first innovation in cloud accounting was actually getting these transactions into the cloud.