The Xero Ltd (ASX: XRO) share price has been hammered in the last six months, falling by more than 50%, as the chart below shows. A lot of that pain has seemingly been due to market concerns about what could happen with AI in the coming years.

As one of the world’s leading cloud accounting software businesses, it offers subscribers an important service.

But it’s certainly possible that the business could be exposed to future competition from AI-developed software. Of course, that doesn’t automatically mean those potential competitors will definitely win sizeable market share – they still need to market to customers and win subscribers.

In a recent note from UBS, the broker revealed that its small and medium business IT spending…