Three Ways AI Empowers Tax

As I mentioned in another post, Vertex subscribes to a measured and thoughtful approach to developing new solutions that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI). We’re implementing AI via specific use cases that ultimately help our customers notch productivity gains, generate new insights, and strengthen their overall tax technology strategies. 

In this post, I want to highlight three areas in which we believe AI technologies will prove most valuable from a tax automation perspective:

• Content curation: Internally, we've found that AI plays a crucial role in improving productivity to gather pertinent legislative data. This enhances our processes to provide and continuously update tax rates, rules information, and related forms within our indirect tax solutions. Using AI internally improves the efficiency of serving our customers.
• Co-pilots: AI assistants that interact with software and end users via a conversational interface. The purpose of these interactions is for the AI assistant to answer end-users quickly and accurately. We prefer the term “co-pilot” to assistant because co-pilot describes a relationship in which humans remain in control while using AI assistance as much, or as little, as needed. A tax professional might ask our co-pilot how to configure the system for a particular tax scenario, to double-check the setup of a complex tax calculation, or for help regarding software configuration changes that may need to be made when a company expands into a new geography. The conversational nature of generative AI will equip our users with quick, context-sensitive answers without them having to learn how to perform special exports and other types of complex reporting to access the same information. 
• New insights: Our customers generate high volumes of tax-related data, including transaction data on the calculation side, and returns and filing information on the compliance side. Additionally, our customers have a growing need to understand what this data is telling them. AI will provide them insights regarding how to troubleshoot reconciliations, improve forecasts and strengthen a range of related decision-making. Its anomaly detection capabilities will flag potential configuration issues or unusual trends for further review. 

I also want to emphasize that we’re not working alone on AI. As we progress on our shared journey with our customers, we will continue to tap the AI learnings and expertise of our extensive partner ecosystem. The software businesses, system implementers and consulting firms that we partner with are also figuring out how to integrate AI capabilities into their offerings to further improve the experiences of our shared customers.