Newcastle technology firm Sage is launching an AI product that it says will “revolutionise” accounting and offer a huge boost to smaller firms.
The Sage Copilot aims to handle administrative and repetitive tasks while also recommending ways to make savings and drive business improvements. It is set to help with forecasting, cashflow management and generating and sending invoices, as well as workflow automation and spotting errors.
It will launch in the Ƶ initially, first in April for Sage Accounting with a limited number of existing customers, before rolling out more widely in May, and then being made available for Sage for Accountants and other products later in the year. Other products and countries will follow at a later date, Sage said.
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The new product - which has been mostly developed by a team at Sage’s headquarters on Tyneside - said it would automate every day tasks that currently slow down small and mid-sized business owners. Sage hopes Copilot will help business owners with common problems such as late payment and the difficulty of recruiting finance staff. Users will be able to integrate it with other apps and it would learn from user interactions and preferences to produce better financial outcomes.
Sage chief executive Steve Hare said generative AI would soon be relied on by many small businesses to handle basic accounting work, such as tax returns. Rather than eliminate jobs, he said, it would help free up people to do more interesting and creative work.
He said: “Small and mid-sized business owners all tell me they can’t recruit enough people. Young people don’t want to do repetitive tasks, they want to do interesting, meaningful work. I think what this is going to do is help economic growth and help productivity; it’s going to help create jobs rather than replace them.”
Sage has increasingly positioned itself in recent years as a champion of small and mid-sized businesses, offering products that aim to make it easier for business owners to run their own firms.
Mr Hare said: “Small and mid-sized business owners tend to be an optimistic bunch so they tend to try and find the positives and that’s pretty consistent all around the world. But what I hear consistently is that the barriers and headwinds to running a smaller business seem to be getting greater rather than smaller.
“I think what’s exciting about what we’re doing here is that it hopefully gives something back that helps reverse some of that trend, and helps people run their business.”
