Dext launches AI Connector, letting accounting and bookkeeping practices ask Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot about their own practice data

General-purpose AI tools are now part of daily life for many practices and their clients. Dext's own research across the UK, Canada, France and Australia has tracked the risk that comes with that shift: general-purpose chatbots don't know a business's true financial context, and practices are the ones left correcting the results. AI Connector takes a different approach. Rather than asking a general-purpose AI tool to guess, it grounds the answer in a practice's own Dext data.

Partners can already see this detail across Dext's dashboards, from Practice Insights to team performance. AI Connector gives them a second way to reach it: ask a question in plain language, from wherever they're already working, and get an answer grounded in their real Dext data rather than a generic response. That might mean asking which clients have the lowest health scores, which clients took the most hours last month, what a client's live cash position looks like ahead of a call, or which clients are missing a dividends account ahead of year end.

AI Connector is built on the same foundation as the rest of Dext's AI: more than 16 years and 2 billion receipts and invoices spent training models specifically for accounting, rather than general text. It’s built to support a practice’s judgement, not replace it. AI does the retrieving, and the practice still does the deciding. The feature is read-only and permission-aware, surfacing only the data a user already has access to inside Dext, with no elevated access and no ability to make changes.

Commenting on the launch, Sabby Gill, CEO of Dext, says, "General-purpose AI is already part of how many practices work, but it doesn't know a practice's real numbers. AI Connector closes that gap: it puts the same Dext data our users already trust into the AI tools they're already using, so the answer they get back is grounded in their own practice, not a guess. This is an early step, and one we expect to build on."

How it works

Partners connect once, authenticating through their Dext account. AI Connector is listed in the Claude directory and in ChatGPT’s plugins, and works with Copilot. Once connected, partners can ask their AI tool about clients, compliance, workflows, data health or team performance in plain language. The AI tool retrieves the relevant data from Dext and answers using it, read-only, and limited to what that user already has permission to see.

AI Connector authenticates through a partner’s existing Dext account and only surfaces data that the user already has permission to see. Only the specific data needed to answer a given question is retrieved, and that response is then processed by whichever AI provider the partner has chosen to connect, OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft, so that provider’s own data policies also apply to that exchange. Dext recommends partners review their chosen AI provider’s enterprise data policies, many of which offer options where data isn’t used for training.

Stephen Edginton, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Dext, says, "AI Connector is built to retrieve, not to decide. It's read-only and permission-aware by design, so a partner gets an answer from their own Dext data, and the practice keeps every judgement call. That's the model we believe AI in accounting should follow, and we’ll keep investing here to unlock further value for our users.”