The key thing that any tax leader needs to do is set the tone from the top. They need to have a curious mindset that they're willing to embrace new ways of working that will mean they get the maximum impact from it.
We surveyed tax leaders as part of our global tax benchmarking survey, and whilst almost 70% said they were intending to use generative AI in their tax function over the next 1 or 2 years, 50% of them felt like either knowledge of AI tooling and what's available or knowledge of how practically to use AI in their function were stopping them from adopting at scale.
The initial barrier that most tax functions will face in adopting AI will be, how can they get access to the technology in a safe and secure way that means that they can trust that they can share their data with these tools.
Once they've established a way to get access to the technology safely, I think the key will be understanding where AI can be used.
As the technology’s evolved and become more capable, we've started to see newer use cases becoming available to tax users.
We're seeing real applications in things like transfer pricing, where we can automate the review of TP documentation to ensure it's compliant with the regulations.
VAT, where we're dealing with a lot of transactional data, the ability for generative AI to augment the information it's presented with, and apply a layer of tax determination over the top of that is hugely powerful.
And in the corporate tax world, we're able to gather data from returns where we are able to satisfy multiple different reporting obligations from a single deliverable.
Adopting AI in the tax function has a wide variety of benefits. For me, one of the biggest is the people component to it.
You will end up with your team working more on the value add, interesting elements of their role and less on some of the more mundane, mechanical aspects.
So I think that will lead to a more engaged, more satisfied workforce.
Crucially, for tax leaders, AI will enable them to cover more ground with the same number of people, which is increasingly becoming important.
At KPMG, we've developed a range of different approaches to help clients at any stage of their AI maturity journey.
We can start with things like our AI immersion sessions, which bring in relative beginners to AI and get them hands on with the technology over the course of a single day, building out their own use cases.
Or we can run more in-depth workshops for our clients, often as part of a wider transformation strategy within the tax function.
As we look forward even 5 to 10 years, I think what we'll see is what we're calling ambient AI, where AI doesn't even need to be initiated by a user.
It's linked to your systems, and it's operating almost in the background without specific prompting.
So that, to me, makes the future work of a tax professional incredibly exciting.
So if we can help tax leaders to demystify the process of executing the technology, I think we'll really start to see adoption increase in the profession.
