What SMEs Need to Know From Xerocon 2025
Some of our business services team recently attended Xerocon 2025 in Brisbane and came away energised with fresh ideas and opportunities that will directly impact both our business and yours.
Below are five trends impacting SMEs – including AI, automation, and economic shifts – that we believe will matter most.
1. Smarter AI tools to streamline operations
One of the biggest announcements from Xero was the next evolution of JAX (Just Ask Xero). This is an inbuilt AI assistant designed for both business owners and their advisers.
- Ask simple questions like “What’s my cash flow looking like this month?” and get an instant answer.
- AI automation of routine tasks such as reconciling bank transactions or drafting invoices.
- JAX will even suggest proactive actions, like reminding you of overdue payments or highlighting when costs look out of line.
Benefit for SMEs: This means less time buried in admin and more confidence in day-to-day decisions.
2. Getting paid is getting smarter
Cash flow was a huge focus. Xero presented updates to help SMEs speed up payments, including:
- SMS invoicing: Send invoices via text for quicker responses.
- Statement payments: Customers can pay multiple outstanding invoices in one go.
- Progress payments (in beta): Perfect for project-based businesses where clients pay in stages.
- More payment options: Card, bank (PayTo), “tap to pay,” and even Buy Now Pay Later.
Benefit for SMEs: These developments together can help reduce the friction in getting paid and improve predictability in your cash flow.
3. Better insights for smarter decisions
Xero is doubling down on making numbers meaningful:
- Syft Analytics is now included at no extra cost with certain Xero plans, providing access to professional-grade reporting and forecasting.
- Home pages and dashboards highlight what matters most (like overdue invoices or reconciliation gaps).
- AI insights combine financial and non-financial data (e.g. website data) to give a more complete picture of business health (in beta).
Benefit for SMEs: More clarity on where your business stands today, plus forward-looking insights so you can plan instead of just react.
4. Economic insights tailored to small business
Xero’s Small Business Insights team highlighted trends affecting SMEs right now:
- Rising costs and global uncertainty are putting pressure on margins.
- Payment times remain inconsistent, making cash flow tools and planning critical.
- Businesses that scenario-plan (e.g. “what if sales drop 10%?”) are more resilient.
Benefit for SMEs: Putting the right tools in place to stay ahead of these trends is becoming essential, not optional.
5. Agentic AI
A key theme at Xerocon was the progression of AI beyond mainstream chat bots and generative tools like ChatGPT, into Agentic AI. This is an extremely powerful automation technology and tools to create AI agents are now accessible to SMEs and easy to use.
AI agents include:
- Retrieval agents: Like a chat bot, but trained with specific (often proprietary) data, so they can act as specialists, already trained with the relevant context.
- Task agents: Designed to carry out defined tasks such as drafting emails, posting transactions, updating documents, or even interacting with external applications.
- Automation agents: Triggered automatically by events such as receiving an email, saving a document, or a time-based cycle – many of these operate fully in the background without a chat interface.
Benefit for SMEs:Agentic AI can cut down repetitive work, boost accuracy, and free up time for higher-value tasks — provided it’s supported by the right data and risk frameworks
Synectic has a specific interest in this area. We set up data frameworks and AI tools to take full advantage of the AI opportunity, while pragmatically managing the associated data and privacy risks.
What These Trends Means for Your Business
The message from Xerocon was clear — SMEs must shift their focus from routine tasks and historical reporting to strategy, growth, risk management, and value creation.
The exciting part is that powerful tools once reserved for big business are now within reach of SMEs. But a word of caution: without the right planning and frameworks in place, the opportunities these tools offer may be lost.
If you’d like to explore how your business could benefit, we’d love to hear from you — get in touch with our team today.
