Stuart Tait, Matthew Pearson and Matthew Fenwick moved on to explore the growing impact of AI in corporate tax functions.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, clients have been keen to understand what GenAI can do for tax. Two and a half years on, the first use cases are beginning to emerge. These include producing documents such as master files and service level agreements for transfer pricing.
Over the next few years, however, it is expected that AI’s effect on tax operations will be transformational.
When it comes to technical research, the technology is already outperforming humans at answering certain queries.
AI’s natural language comprehension means it can very rapidly process vast amounts of policy documentation, case law, regulation, and so on. And it can accurately isolate the relevant information in response to particular questions. AI solutions are achieving 98% accuracy when answering queries about specific aspects of tax regimes.
For the moment, however, they’re less effective at tasks like identifying the tax risks associated with financial transactions. That still requires input from human experts.
But this is likely to change. Not long from now, tax teams will be able to input their technical knowledge into AI tools, making that expertise readily accessible to everyone in the team.
That will fundamentally change the nature of the work that tax professionals do, Stuart predicted; how they go about interrogating data will soon look very different.
Tax teams will no longer have to ask developers to code tools that can resolve their queries. AI-powered software will run the necessary code, find the answers, and present them in an intuitive, visual format.
As a result, every tax practitioner will need to know how to work with data, rather than relying on data specialists.
Stuart’s advice was to get tax teams using AI solutions as soon as possible. Stand up a secure GenAI environment and let them start innovating straight away, he told the audience. The more they experiment with the technology, the more use cases they’ll discover with the potential to revolutionise tax operations.
