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AI adoption likely to widen into bookkeeping, operational tasks

Generative AI has expanded beyond creative fields

In 2025, more businesses are likely to adopt AI for automating routine bookkeeping and operational tasks, enhancing business insights and decision making, and improving overall financial efficiency, experts say.

“With the evolving tax and regulatory compliance landscape, businesses will place more importance on staying aligned with the VAT, corporate tax, and data privacy regulations to ensure that they remain compliant and avoid potential penalties,” Prem Anand Velumani, associate director, strategic growth MEA , Zoho, told Khaleej Times in an interview.

Zoho has introduced advanced features like revenue recognition, fixed asset management, progress-based invoicing and profit margin scheme in Zoho Books to automate financial tasks, improve cash flow management and simplify bookkeeping processes.

Generative AI, particularly through models like GPTs, has expanded beyond creative fields into industries such as customer service, education, and healthcare. It is increasingly recognised as a reliable tool for knowledge retrieval and synthesis, similar to search engines. “While it hasn’t surpassed search engines in market share, there’s been a growing trend toward blending generative AI with traditional search for enhanced user experiences. Its integration into office suites, development platforms, and CRM systems has cemented its role in daily business workflows. In 2024, multi-agent AI systems were a notable trend, enabling specialised agents to collaborate on complex tasks. This development has fueled the integration of generative AI into enterprise environments where structured data and context are key,” Velumani said.

Use cases include AI-driven solutions for supply chain optimisation, financial analysis, and business decision-making. “These systems represent a shift toward more autonomous, context-aware AI applications that can adapt to dynamic business needs. Additionally, AI-as-a-service platforms are gaining traction, offering small and medium-sized businesses powerful tools without the need for heavy infrastructure investments. Efforts by global tech companies to localise AI tools for regional languages have also played a key role in bridging the digital divide,” Velumani said.

Zoho currently has more than 55 products, and all of them use customer feedback to improve the offering. “We have also been investing in making our platforms stronger so that our users can customise, extend and integrate our solutions to their own unique needs. As Zoho has been moving upmarket, we have worked with large enterprises to co-create solutions for specific industries,” Velumani said.

This year, businesses have been focusing on optimising their IT budgets by trying to derive the maximum value out of their existing software and avoid software bloat. “The rapid changes in markets and industries have pushed organisations to choose solutions on the basis of cost and faster time-to-market. AI has also been a game changer, and we see organisations experimenting with it. In 2025, we will see regulations come around AI to ensure fair usage, and we will see greater adoption,” Velumani said.