Finance Automation with Claude + Xero: Live Demo

Charlie Cowan: Well, hello, and welcome to this week's Kowalah Wednesday webinar. If this is the first of your Wednesday webinars with us, we get together at the same time every week, and it gives us the opportunity to talk through something that is top of mind, either that we're working on AI in our own organization, or work that we're doing with clients. It's such a fast-moving space, and it gives us an hour when we can really sort of take a breath and go deep on one topic. Now, I'm always very passionate that we do these events live, because I know we've got some wonderful people that join us each week. Right now, unfortunately, I'm standing up in a church in London, where I am presenting at a client's off-site. And so, unfortunately, I've had to record this just earlier in the day, so it's just a few hours earlier, so you'll have to have my apologies.

Charlie Cowan: And for those of you that are watching on YouTube, well, it wasn't live, anyway. So with that, let's get into our normal, topic of, and our flow of the day. So, I'm going to spend probably about 30 or 40 minutes talking about our core topic, which today is going to be about Xero, which is an accounting platform, and how that connects into Claude. This is something that's coming up a lot with our clients at the moment, and we are Xero users here at Kowalah as well, so we've experienced this. Then we're going to talk a little bit about AI in the news. So this is our recurring spot where we talk about what has happened in the last 7 days. There's so much being released, and so this gives you a point to take a look at what that is, and what you should share back into your organizations.

Charlie Cowan: And then we have got a Q&A slot, which we have every week, and I love hearing your questions live. And now Caitlin, my human colleague, is on the live webinar right now, and she is able to capture questions. What she's going to do is take a note of anything that you ask, and we'll come back to you via the email to everyone that has registered for the event live. So don't sit on those questions, do feel free to ask them, and ask them as you go through. And if Caitlin can answer them, then she will. Otherwise, we'll just take a note of them, and I'll come back to you straight afterwards. Let's get into our main topic of the day, and that is Xero plus Claude. Now, if you're not in finance, then you may not have heard of Xero, and in which case, this might not be the right webinar for you.

Charlie Cowan: But Xero is a very popular accounting system that really started with small SMBs, and that really is their main forte, but they're bubbling up into mid-sized market, and so where you might have larger organizations that are using well, it could be SAP, it could be Workday, could be NetSuite for your financials. Underneath that, you tend to have things like QuickBooks and Xero are the accounting platforms. And so this is handling your accounts receivable, it's handling your accounts payable, it might be handling your payroll, it's handling your cash flow and your bank balances that are all integrated into that. Now, what's so wonderful is that in the last few weeks, Xero and Anthropic have announced a more in-depth partnership. Both with the Anthropic platforms being used to drive Xero's own AI, which is called JAX, Just Ask Xero. Took me a while to work that out, but that's what JAX stands for.

Charlie Cowan: So, there is AI within the Xero platform, and in the last couple of weeks, they've announced an improved, well, new, integration directly into Claude, so that you can access Xero from within Claude. And what I'm going to walk through over these next, sort of, 30 minutes or so is, three steps. Firstly, the native, the new native Xero integration in Claude. How you can get it, how it would be useful, how to use it. Then, I'm gonna talk about the non-native, which is a kind of a custom integration that Xero provides. Now, this is going to get a little bit more technical, and this is where you're going to be glad that it's a recording, because you can go back and watch it again, or you can bring in your friendly developer or engineer to help you with that. This is how you can really customize your integration with Xero.

Charlie Cowan: And then third, we'll just touch on at the end how you can take that Xero integration and customize it even further. So, why would you even care about a Xero integration with Claude? Well, if you just use Claude, or indeed any AI tool, whether that's ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Copilot, and you just go and have conversations with it, well, you're gonna get a lovely answer, but it hasn't got the context and the depth of knowledge about your business, your team, your processes, and of course, what's in your bank account. And this is where connectors really come in, into these AI platforms. So, firstly, on one side, you may, depending on your business model and the tools that you use, want to connect Claude into things like your CRM system, so that you can see what deals you're working on, your pipeline, the clients that you've got.

Charlie Cowan: You might choose to plug it into some kind of customer support platform that shows, again, your customers, but tickets and cases and resolutions, and so on. You might want to plug it into your email and calendar, your Google Drive, and if you're on the Microsoft system, it might be Teams or SharePoint or OneDrive, to give it that kind of context. And then you may have more, kind of, enterprise, kind of, data warehouses that contain information about your customers and products and so on. All of this gives Claude some really rich data, so that when you ask a question such as, you know, what's going on with this client, or help me build out my strategy for next year, it's got this rich data that you would be using as a human to answer those questions. Then you might start thinking about, well, what other systems have we got access to?

Charlie Cowan: And, it's unlikely that you'd have all three of these, or even two of these. So you might have chosen Xero as your accounting and payroll system. You might have chosen QuickBooks as your accounting and payroll system, or you might have chosen NetSuite, or indeed Workday Financials, or anything else as your accounting and payroll system. And these systems hold such rich data. Because if I take Xero specifically, not only does it hold information about your open invoices, bills that you've got to pay, but they're also integrated back in to your bank accounts. So you may have multiple bank accounts, that are handling your cash, and are recognizing when payments have been made or received. And so this is all really rich data that sits in these accounting systems, and giving Claude access to this, obviously, to the people that have got permission to access that information directly, is really, really valuable.

Charlie Cowan: So, how do you do this? Well, I'm gonna just show you with a few images here. So, let me just switch over into my Claude here, just so that you can see. So, here I'm in Claude, just in my browser. I could do this in Claude Desktop as well. And on the left here, I've got Customize. So if I click Customize here, you can see I've got Connectors, and I click connectors here. And here I've got connectors that I've already set up, we'll have a look at Xero in a minute, but just to show you how you can find these, you would go Browse Connectors, and then up comes this long list of connectors. Now, you've got the… if you're on the design team, you might have Canva. I mentioned Microsoft. We've got loads of Google ones in here. We've got Slack, if you're in here.

Charlie Cowan: You might be using Zoom or HubSpot, all of these lovely tools. You will have a think through the systems that you use to answer questions yourself. And if you would need access to it, then give Claude access to it so that it can help you on that journey. Now, there's tons in here, so you might want to filter them. So if I'm going to click on Financial Services here, because we're on a sort of finance-focused webinar, you're going to see Xero here. You're going to see RAMP, you might be using RAMP as a finance platform, Brex, for credit card management. What else have we got here? PayPal, we've got, what else? Turbotax, Intuit, okay. Gusto, some people use. What else have we got here? Go Cardless, if you're doing for direct debits. What else have we got here? Intuit, that's credit scores, okay. Zoho Books. I'm sure there's a QuickBooks.

Charlie Cowan: I don't know if I've… have I seen that? Did I go past it? Okay, I'll have a look. There's plenty more, and there's plenty more that are joining at each time. So… Yeah, definitely take a look at that. Oh, there is QuickBooks, it just wasn't in financial services, so that is there as well. So, when you click those connectors, let me go to my Xero one. The important thing to know here is that when I connect into Xero, and I'm going to show you how I do that in a minute, it is using my login to Xero. So I'm in my Claude, and I'm going to log into my Xero, and I'm only going to be able to see what my login in Xero is able to see.

Charlie Cowan: Now, if someone else in your team finds the Xero connector and tries to connect to the Xero connector, well, if you haven't set them up with a Xero account, they're going nowhere. So, let me disconnect here. I'm gonna disconnect Xero. And so this is what someone would see. Oh, I want to connect to Xero. I'd click connect. It's gonna ask me to log in, and I'm obviously logging in with my username and password. It's then going to ask me which organization in Xero do I want to connect to. Now, I've already connected it to Cocoboco Limited, which is the main company that we use. We've got another organization here. Important to know, you can only log into one Xero company at one time. So, if you have multiple ones for different business units, for different regions, then just be aware that through this standard connector, you can only connect into one at each time.

Charlie Cowan: So I'm going to leave it on the one that I'm connected to, and I'm going to go continue. Connection is successful, and I'm going to be returned back to Claude. So this is how you're connecting into Xero, and important to remember, the permissions follow what you have got access to in Xero, and so you're not, by you connecting, suddenly giving everyone else in your company access to your, to the cash flow, balance sheet, and so on. Next thing I want to show you is, how all of these connectors work, is that they expose a certain set of tools. And a tool is basically shown to Claude, so when Claude is using the Xero connector, it knows what it's able to do. And so we've got a few here. Interactive tools, and I'm going to show you what they are in a moment. Get our cash position.

Charlie Cowan: Get contacts and receivables, so contacts being your customers or suppliers in there. Get our financial position, so balance sheet, get our profit and loss, and get our top customers by revenue. So these are the specific tools answering certain questions. And then we've got some read-only tools. Get a Connected Organization, so that's to find information about your company, your Xero organization, and then get organization financial year, so that when you're having conversations about Q1 and Q2, it's able to pull the right information out. So, next up, I want to just talk about these permissions here. And this is the same for any tool, whether it's DocuSign or Canva. You can choose for each of these tools whether it always allows it, so if I just ask Claude to use the Xero connector and get the cash position, don't ask me for permission, just go and do it. I'm happy with that.

Charlie Cowan: Or you can have… ask me for permission each time, or you can block it, like never use that tool. And so, as you can see here for me, I've got it set up as custom. I can set them to always allow. I had it on custom. Well, custom is going to be me clicking different things. So you can play around with these. This just gives you some permission. What I think you'll find, there are no write tools here. We're not updating, nothing is going back into Xero through this connector. It's one way. So you may well be like, look, just always allow. There's never going to be a time when I'm going to ask you, can you give me my cash position, and I'm gonna say, no, you don't have permission to do that. So you're probably gonna say, yeah, these things are always allowed for these.

Charlie Cowan: Alright, let me go back to my slides here, and let's talk a little bit about what you can do with this thing. So we've gone through this, give Claude eyes and ears, yeah, excellent. So what can you start doing with this Xero data? So really think about it in these three buckets. So the first is your revenue and your profit. So thinking about the invoices that you've got out there, thinking about how much you've sold. So, these are questions that actually come off the Xero website, where they talk about how to use this connector. What was my total turnover? Show me my P&L. What are the top expenses? All to do with revenue and the profitability of the company. Then, you might start to have a look at individual customers. Who owes me money? Which invoices are we waiting for? Who are the top customers?

Charlie Cowan: Which are the top 5 customers by a certain category of sale or product that we've sold over the last quarter or year? And then, as we all know, revenue is vanity, cash is reality. And on the right-hand side, we can start looking at the current balance sheet, what's in certain accounts, and this is where the beauty of Xero being plugged directly into your actual bank accounts is, that it's showing live updates, that you can start having conversations each morning about what's going on in the actual bank account. When we were looking at the tools earlier, you'll notice that 5 or 6 of them were what's called an interactive tool. And that means that it's not just going to give you text back. I should hasten to add that these images have come from the Xero website, from the connector.

Charlie Cowan: This is nothing to do with Kowalah, so we're not sharing customer information here or anything, anything secure, so this is just dummy data from Xero. But so, you've got the questions, like, what's my current financial position? This is going to show you a visualization in your Claude. It's not just going to be the text coming back, and everything that you can see here, you can click and interact with. So you might highlight current assets, you might highlight on the change, and it's going to allow you to have a conversation with that. On the right-hand side, what's my P&L for this quarter? These bar charts, you're able to click on, and it will then expand the conversation. So it's very interactive and digital in terms of how it is showing you this kind of information. A couple more of these images.

Charlie Cowan: Once again, just to highlight, this is dummy data from Xero, nothing to do with Kowalah. How much am I owed? And then pulling in accurately, based on the clients that you've got invoices that are out, but also, because it's got the accurate information from the bank balance in Xero, it's showing you real time whether this invoice has been paid or not. And then on the right-hand side, showing that cash position, what's in the bank, what are we owed, what's our working capital, and so on. You know, this is fantastic, real, live information. Now, the question that I would be asking, if I was you, is, well, this is great. But I can get this in Xero. And I'm… I'm the, you know, the finance lead, I'm working in accounts payable, I'm working in accounts receivable, I've got really rich reports in Xero. Indeed, they've got JAX, Just Ask Xero.

Charlie Cowan: Like, why don't… why don't I go there? Well, Xero data is only Xero data. It's Xero's view of the world. And this is exactly what we see. HubSpot has got great data and a little AI module. Zendesk has got great data and a little AI module. Salesforce has got great data and a little AI module. But each of them is the hub of their own world. But Claude is now the hub of your world, and this is why these connectors are so valuable. Because by having a conversation with Claude, not only can it pull the information in from Xero, but it can pull it in from all of your other systems. So imagine these questions. Can you check the finance email account? So you might have accounts payable at acme.com. Can you check that email account for updates on our outstanding accounts receivable?

Charlie Cowan: And what Claude's able to do is go and have a look at that email account, see if there have been notifications of remittances. And then go and check with Xero and see if that has been received. Think about this question. Are there any open support tickets with unpaid invoices? So, here we've got some customers that are delayed on paying. Well, maybe that's because they are not happy with the service that they're getting. And instead of us just going and chasing, chasing, chasing the invoice, we should go and speak to the customer success manager that is dealing with that account. Maybe you are the finance leader, and you need to prepare for the board meeting that's coming up next week. Help me prepare the narrative for our board deck.

Charlie Cowan: So, yes, I want to go and get this information from Xero, but I also want to create a Google Doc, which has got the narrative and has got the template for how we create these slides. Think of Xero as just one spoke in this great finance work that you're doing in the middle of this slide. So that is the Xero connector, launched a couple of weeks ago. If you've got that turned on and using it, you are already at the forefront of what a lot of people are doing with finance in Claude. I think you're going to have a lot of fun with it. However, it is version 1 of what Xero are launching, and we see this with very many of the companies that launch their connectors.

Charlie Cowan: They start with a very tight toolset, and what I mean by that is that if you have a look at this, they are read-only tools. There are no write tools. So, let me just have a quick jump back over into my Claude here, and let me go to HubSpot, for example. So when HubSpot started, it was very much, you know, read-only, get information about your CRM. But very quickly, you're like, well, hang on, I want to update stuff in my CRM. And so you can see we've got write and delete tools, of which one is manage CRM objects. And so when we're using the HubSpot connector in Claude, it is creating deals, it's creating new contacts, it's updating the next steps. It's changing the value of deals, it's fantastic. Our CRM is the cleanest of any CRM I've ever worked on, and we never go there. It's because we're using this write and delete tools.

Charlie Cowan: But this didn't exist at the start. It's more, as HubSpot have got more confident with how their connector works, they're adding in more tools. So, if we look at Xero, no write, or read-write, tools, or update tools. Now, if you're thinking like me, you think, well, I want to create invoices, I want to create bills, I want to maybe even run payroll, I want to create a new contact in there. I want to change the line items on an invoice. There's stuff that you want to do, and you probably want to do that from within Claude, because you've got this information that has been coming from another system. So that might be… I go back here. Maybe you've had an email from a customer that says, you've got the wrong information on an invoice, can you change our address? Wouldn't it be nice if Claude could just do that for you?

Charlie Cowan: Maybe HubSpot has just closed a deal, or the salesperson has closed a deal in HubSpot. Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically create the invoice directly via Claude? So these are these kind of use cases where you do want to write and update into Xero, and the standard connector, as it is today, does not do that. So, you could wait, and I've got no doubt that they will add these additional tools in, but I want to introduce you to another approach that you could layer onto the top of the standard connector. And this is provided by Xero themselves, so it is from the actual vendor themselves. And this existed before they built that new connector that you can use.

Charlie Cowan: My gut feel is, I'm going to show you how this works in a minute, my gut feel is that they will continue to improve the standard connector, and you'll get some write tools in that, and that will be where you'll spend most of your time. But if you can't wait, and either you are sort of an enthusiast with technology, and you don't mind going through a few of the steps I'm going to show you in a minute, or you've got an engineer or someone that works in, is a sort of finance IT business partner, and they can take a look at this, then maybe it's a worthwhile stopgap while we wait for anything that's going to come in the standard connector.

Charlie Cowan: So, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, and that is a phrase that is a standard protocol for how AI tools, like Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini speak to other systems, like Xero or HubSpot, or any other system. The connector that I've just shown you is built on the MCP protocol, and it was built by Xero. What they've also provided, and if I go here, is an open repository in GitHub from Xero called a Xero MCP server. And what this is, is a generic implementation for Xero, providing a bridge between the MCP protocol, so this way of things connecting, and Xero's API. And this allows you to have more tools and write functionality than you would have otherwise. But it requires a little bit of handholding. So let me show you what is required, and I'm glad we're recording this, because you'll probably want to follow it along afterwards.

Charlie Cowan: The first thing is that you need to create a custom connection in Xero. And I'm going to give you the link to this afterwards, but it's all described down here. You are going to create a custom connection, and you are going to set up this custom connection by clicking on this link. So Xero provide all of the steps, so don't feel that you need to take loads of screenshots as we go through, but I'm just going to show you some of the key elements to it. So, one is you're going to create a new app, and so you would just call this, you know, Claude Connection, something like that. It would be a custom connection, and then you're going to put in your company's URL there, click a button, and create an app. I should let you know that you require an additional subscription from Xero for this.

Charlie Cowan: I think it's something in the order of £6, $7 or $8 per month for a custom connection, but it'll guide you through this if you don't have that already available. What you then do, once you've created your custom connection, is provide it with access to certain scopes. And on that previous website that I'll give you the link to, it describes exactly what scopes you need to provide access to, but this is really telling this integration you're allowed access to our bank transactions, you're allowed access to invoices, you're allowed access to payroll, and there's a number of these scopes that you're just going to tick this box. And it will give you access to that. Having done that, you'll then get to this next screen, and you will determine how you want to allow your Claude desktop to get access to this, to authenticate. And it will guide you through.

Charlie Cowan: You'll click a button, you'll say either I want to have these secrets, and it will give you a client ID and a client secret, or you will select this thing called a bearer token. Don't worry too much about this, the Xero page explains the difference between these two, and why you might choose one over the other. But it will then generate, in Xero, all of this happening in Xero will give you these codes. And then, what you're gonna do is hop over to your Claude desktop. And this is important, it's gonna happen locally on your laptop. So it's not going to be in the browser. It's basically going to run this new Xero connector on your own laptop. Once again, in the Xero page, it will walk you through all of these steps.

Charlie Cowan: But you're going to click on your settings down at the bottom here, and then when you're in your settings, you will see this developer link here, and then you will hit this Edit Config button here, and it will guide you through that. And that's going to open up what will look like a bit of a scary page. This is where you might need a little bit of your developer friend to help you. And it will offer you two options. The documentation explains this. If you've chosen to add in client secrets, you're going to copy this in, and if you've chosen to use a bearer token, you will copy this in. But this is following the MCP specification, where you're basically going to say, I want to use a new MCP server. It is for Xero.

Charlie Cowan: We're going to pull it from the Xero website, or the Xero GitHub repository, Xero API, Xero MCP Server, that's that page that we were on. And we are going to use these secrets to authenticate. And this is where you would put your client ID and your client secret. And if you were using the bearer, this is where you would put your bearer token. And don't worry, the explanation from their website, from that GitHub repository will explain that all in detail. I would take a strong coffee, set these things up, but once they're done once, then this gives you, and you only, access to your Xero through your Claude desktop. Now, why would you do this? Because that looked very complicated, Charlie. Why would I be doing that over and above using the standard connector that I can just click a button to connect to? And it's really about the available tools.

Charlie Cowan: So take a look at all these available MCP commands. List accounts, list contacts, list credit notes. Listing trial balances, listing payroll employees, there's loads of stuff that goes beyond what might have been hidden behind the tools that you've got at the moment in the main Xero connector. But if I go on to scroll down, take a look at all of these. Create bank transaction, create contact, create invoice, create payment, create quote, update manual journal. All of these are added into this reference MCP. So this is where it takes… it gives you a bit of benefit from taking a bit of that pain, that whilst it's not as snazzy and not as quick, I can now start creating invoices and things like that. I said earlier on that there was a third step for those that really want to go further, and I'll give you one example, is that even though all of these tools exist.

Charlie Cowan: Create invoice, for example, it creates an invoice in the default currency of your Xero organization. So that might be great if you only trade in the US, in US dollars, and all your customers are in US dollars, happy days. Same if you're in the UK and you deal with GBP, but if you have a number of customers in your organization, and some have a default currency of euros, and some have yen, and some have dollars, well, wouldn't it be nice if, when I create an invoice, I could pull through the default currency for that organization, for that contact? That is not currently in this default, sort of, well, kind of default implementation of this MCP server. So, if you do have a finance IT representative, and someone wants to take it further.

Charlie Cowan: Then, and they know their way around Claude Code, then it is absolutely possible for you to clone or fork this repository, and then start customizing it, because it is fully, you know, open source. If I go here, then we have got the entire default for all of the tools. If I go to the tools here, we've got some create tools. Where have I got? Create Invoice Tool. And you don't need to be, you know, a developer to understand this, but this is basically teaching Claude how to create an invoice. And if you fork this repository, and you're a developer, you could get it to create line items however you want. You could get it to create invoices in whatever form that you want. It's got full access to the Xero MCP, and as long as you've exposed the right schemas, you can really make this your own.

Charlie Cowan: Now, I hope, with that, we've gone on a journey where you might be just a finance, I'd say just a finance, what I mean is, like, not technical and not a developer. And so, hopefully, with the standard Xero connector, you know, you're comfortable with that, you can connect it, and you'll get a long way. With the second and the third option, maybe I've just piqued your interest a little bit, but there is more to come, and it's either you working with your dev team to build it out yourself, or maybe it's just knowing what's possible, and that this is very likely to arrive in the standard Xero connector at some point in the future, and maybe it's just a wait-and-see situation. Let's move on to our AI in the News recurring section.

Charlie Cowan: Now, as I say, I'm recording this a little bit earlier than we're going live, so hopefully nothing major has happened in the next 2 or 3 hours. But here are some of the things that have jumped out to me over the last week that I think are going to be interesting for you. On the 1st of June, so just a couple of days ago, Anthropic filed, confidentially, their draft S1. So what this means, if you're not familiar with the US, sort of, public stock markets, is that you need to file to say that in the future, we may be looking at doing an initial public offering and becoming a public company. And so this is big news. As you may have seen, SpaceX are going public at the moment. There's talk about OpenAI and Anthropic now filing themselves.

Charlie Cowan: This could be a big year for IPOs, as these companies seek to diversify their shareholders and start to pay some money back to some of their initial investors. What I was gonna say, I'm gonna skip over, just to say, that said, they raised $65 billion in a Series H just last week, which valued the business at just under a trillion dollars. So, a lot of money flying into Anthropic. It's not that they desperately need the money right now, they're kind of well funded, but I think they're definitely getting their ducks in a row for what comes next. Also last week, Anthropic launched their Frontier model, or current Frontier model, I should say, Opus 4.8. So up until last week, it was Opus 4.7, and so they've launched a new version, which has got, you know, benchmarks of benchmarks. Each new model comes out with a new number.

Charlie Cowan: So if you've got teams that are using Claude, then just make them aware that there is a new top-level model. It's charged at exactly the same amount, it's using the same amount of tokens as Opus 4.7, but this is always a good reminder that your daily workhorse, if you're Claude users, should be Sonnet 4.6 at the moment. And really only use Opus when you're doing more complex analytical work. Maybe when you're doing some of your detailed analytics of your Xero information, for example. So I showed you this a minute ago, Anthropic raised $65 billion, a huge chunk of cash. But also, in that press release, they said that they are now having their first profitable quarter. Now, it's been kind of a talking point that these companies, OpenAI, Anthropic in particular, are just burning cash, burning VC dollars as they scale. But what we're seeing with Anthropic specifically, because they've focused on the enterprise.

Charlie Cowan: Is that they are now making a lot of money. Look at this chart. This shows Anthropic's annualized revenues. So I say annualized, because not every dollar that they make is committed on annual contracts, but if you take what they're bringing in monthly and times it by 12, I'm guessing this is how they get to it, you get to an annualized run rate of revenue. Now, you might think, oh, this is years, you know, let's have a look at the years, as they've gone, but no, this is pretty much months. So, at December 2025, so just 5 months ago from now, they were at 9 billion of annualized revenue. And just to say that in January of the previous year, they were at 1 billion revenue. So they went from 1 to 9 in the year, times by 10, pretty much. Anyone would be very happy with that.

Charlie Cowan: By the middle of February, so just 6 weeks later, they had gone to $14 billion of revenue. By the 1st of April, so just another 6 weeks after that, they had doubled that to $30 billion of annual revenue. And now, just, well, 5 weeks later than that, that's gone up to $47 billion of annual revenue. I mean, these numbers are absolutely staggering. Can you imagine any other company that in 5 weeks has added $17 billion of annual revenue? Indeed, the guy, Simon Willison, who wrote the blog post that this graphic came from, said he'd been trying to do some research and trying to find any other company in history that had organically grown at that level. So, not through acquisition, this is purely through customers throwing their money at Anthropic, and he wasn't able to find anything. So, this is definitely a story worth taking a look at.

Charlie Cowan: And the fact that that $47 billion has now turned into its first profitable quarter, I think is quite astounding. But it's not all about Anthropic. I do try to vary by doing our research in the run-up to these webinars to make sure that we're keeping an eye on all of the news, and I do take a look at Grok, I do take a look at Gemini and Copilot, and we bring what we think is most relevant to our clients. In the OpenAI world, a couple of things that I thought caught my eye this week. So just yesterday, June the 1st, I think, depending on what the day is today, well, a couple of days ago, OpenAI announced that all of their frontier models, so that's ChatGPT 5.5, and Codex, which is their desktop coding and knowledge work platform, are now available on the AWS platform.

Charlie Cowan: So, if you are an AWS customer, and you like the fact that everything is ring-fenced in your secure AWS network, then you can now access all of OpenAI's products from within that, following your existing, as it says here, security, governance, and deployment workflows. Now, this is really this battle for enterprise adoption. So, one of the things that we hear a lot from our large enterprise customers is that they are either in the Google ecosystem or they are in the Microsoft ecosystem. And if you're in the Google ecosystem, well, it's just easier to use Gemini, because I don't have to ask any questions, I don't really have to pay any more for it, because depending on our license, we've probably got access to a lot of Gemini.

Charlie Cowan: If I'm in the Microsoft ecosystem, well, we can use Copilot, and I don't have to fight with IT or with our CISO, I don't have to go… I've got to pay for Copilot licenses, but no one's going to ask me too many questions about that. Whereas, if I start asking for ChatGPT licenses, or I start asking for Claude licenses, I've got to start, you know, answering questions, and you know, maybe it's just easier to stick. And so, in this battle for enterprise adoption, both Anthropic and OpenAI are really doubling down on their partnerships with AWS, with Google and their Google Cloud Platform, and with Microsoft in terms of Azure and the different cloud platforms that they provide. The goal for OpenAI and Anthropic is to make it as easy as possible for you, as a Microsoft or AWS or Google customer, to use their models and their platforms from within their ecosystem.

Charlie Cowan: So expect to see more of this. Anthropic had made announcements a couple of weeks ago about their partnerships with AWS and Google. And yeah, definitely one to keep an eye on. The other thing that I wanted to call out on ChatGPT, we keep an eye on the release notes for all of the platforms, and this came out just a couple of days ago, was that in ChatGPT, only in the US at the moment, and only in personal accounts, so not in team or enterprise, but you can find live jobs and format your resume in ChatGPT. So you can imagine that you've got students, you've got graduates, you've got people who are naturally, as we know, going to ChatGPT, or their AI tool of choice, and helping them to help them with their job search.

Charlie Cowan: Now, imagine that this is now surfacing jobs and helping them to apply for those jobs, and it's calling out here Indeed, Upwork, and AppCast as some of the tools that are surfacing these jobs. This feeds into our webinar that we're going to talk about next week, I'm going to show you in a minute, which is all about answer engine optimization, AEO. How do you get found in tools like this? We've always thought about it in terms of getting your company found. But now, think about getting your job found. In the war for talent, how do we get our jobs in front of the highest value candidates at the point when they're searching? You know, help me think through my career, where should I be thinking of working, help me to apply. So I thought this was a quite interesting twist on AEO. And with that, that brings us to talking about next week's webinar.

Charlie Cowan: I'm really excited, because next week is another one of our Spotlight series, where we have a guest speaker come to join us. And Natalia Rice is going to join us to talk all about that topic of how do you get your company found in ChatGPT, in Claude, in Gemini, in whatever the tool of choice is, whether that is to share the jobs that you've got, whether it's your products, whether it's helping your customers or prospects to understand better how to work with you. So, same time next week. You can register using the QR code here. You can also go to kowalah.com, and then go to resources and Wednesday webinars, and you will find that. And we look forward to spending an hour with you and with Natalia this time next week. With that, thanks very much. I hope you learned a lot about Xero, and we'll see you next week.