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      Chris Rogers and Christoph Steiner look at the importance of AI personas, and what tax leaders should think about when designing them.

      Deploying AI tax tools is all well and good. But knowing how to get the most out of them is another challenge altogether.

      With generative AI roll-outs taking place at lightning speed, tax leaders often ask us: “Now my organisation has invested in AI solutions, what do we do with them?” The answer is to contextualise them – by building tailored AI personas for your AI in tax use cases.

      A persona gives your AI model a defined role and anchors it in curated knowledge, expertise and background material. This guides how the solution goes about answering queries; what information it draws on; and how it interacts with users.

      Without that specific context, an AI model is little more than a chatbot, capable only of giving generic answers. Enhancing it with relevant content and customised instructions grounds its responses in a specialist domain such as tax.

      Christoph Steiner
      Christoph Steiner

      Chief Technology Officer, Tax & Legal

      KPMG Switzerland

      Chris Rogers
      Chris Rogers

      Partner, Global Compliance and Transformation, Tax & Legal

      KPMG in the UK

      Personas with purpose

      AI personas are the bridge between AI and your tax team. So how do you design them while ensuring that they’ll deliver your use cases?

      Here are a few key considerations:

      • Content: curate and update

        Carefully curate the specialist content your AI personas should use to answer queries. In a tax context, that will include the latest laws and guidance, your organisation’s policies and processes, and so on.

        Keep this material up to date as the legislative landscape and your internal environment evolve.

      • Purpose: keep it tight

        Defining an AI persona’s role too broadly is a common pitfall. So narrow each one’s purpose down to a particular task: a number of focused personas are better than one catch-all remit.

        That said, a tightly defined role will still work in more than one context. A memo-writing persona, for example, can be used to explain indirect tax positions, transfer-pricing policies, and more.

      • Process: one or many?

        Is the persona for a standalone activity? Or is it part of an agentic system, where linked AI tools share tasks and work out how to complete tasks?

        For a standalone persona, set the boundaries – for instance, assess the corporate tax impact of a transaction, but not the VAT outcomes. In an agentic system, clarify the persona’s role within the whole end-to-end process.

      • Users: tailor the outputs

        Instruct your personas to adapt the tone, quality and level of detail in the content for different audiences. For instance, your CFO will want high-level summaries, while your audit colleagues will require in-depth, technical information.

      • Guardrails: set the boundaries

        AI tools aren’t infallible – like humans, they make mistakes. So set limits on your personas, like not inventing answers to queries the tool can’t resolve or not elaborating beyond what’s in your source content.

        Also, establish controls for their use, like the need for tax professionals to check responses.

      • Transparency: know the ‘why’

        Traceability and auditability are crucial in tax. Your AI model mustn’t be a ‘black box’ that churns out answers in ways that nobody understands. Decisions supported by AI must be fully explainable if they’re to withstand scrutiny from tax authorities.

      • Experience: define the deliverables

        Decide how your team and AI solutions should interact. Define the ideal structure and format of the output, keeping in mind the audience for them. Do you just need an executive summary, a memo, or a full detailed analysis?

      Please get in touch to learn how KPMG can help you harness the power of AI in tax.

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      Christoph Steiner
      Christoph Steiner

      Chief Technology Officer, Tax & Legal

      KPMG Switzerland

      Chris Rogers
      Chris Rogers

      Partner, Global Compliance and Transformation, Tax & Legal

      KPMG in the UK

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