Corporate tax professionals have a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). Over the last decade or so, AI has been pitched as everything from an existential threat to a potential industry savior. Now that the hype machine has slowed and corporate tax teams have been able to actually start using AI-powered tools in their day-to-day work, they’ve become the unlikely champions of AI-led innovation in the modern corporation.
In fact, when it comes to adopting generative AI (GenAI) tools for research, analysis, and data summarization tasks, corporate tax professionals are leading the way, according to a new report conducted by researchers at Thomson Reuters. An impressive 92% of corporate tax professionals report that they believe GenAI is applicable to their work, a rate that is higher than their counterparts in corporate legal (90%) or corporate risk (88%) departments.
What’s more, corporate tax professionals are leading in advocacy, with 75% now supporting the use of GenAI for industry work, up from 60% last year. That’s higher than the rate of tax firm (71%), law firm (59%) and corporate legal department (57%) advocacy for GenAI adoption, which raises the question: what is driving this overwhelming support for GenAI in the corporate tax department?
The Right Climate for Growth
The pace of acceptance of AI in tax departments may initially seem out of step with the cautious wait-and-see approach that these departments have historically adopted toward new technologies. However, their optimism for AI can be attributed to a perfect storm of regulatory and economic uncertainty.
To begin, it’s tax and finance professionals who find themselves taking on an increased burden as the business landscape grows ever more complex. Everyone from the VP of tax to data analysts to project managers has seen their roles and responsibilities become increasingly intertwined and expand well beyond the boundaries of what was once considered the norm. From data management to sustainability to unprecedented international trade strife, business leaders are facing a regulatory landscape that seemingly changes with every news cycle.
Additionally, these departments face historic challenges in attracting and retaining talent, forcing everyone on their teams to do more with fewer resources. With its ability to streamline many of the most time-consuming aspects of professional work, such as sifting through reams of spreadsheets to find a single anomaly or ingesting and interpreting a mixture of international regulations and compliance requirements, AI is quickly winning hearts and minds by providing professionals with more time to think.
These twin forces of increased complexity and growing capacity constraints create the perfect environment for technology adoption to flourish, particularly as AI technology matures. As I discussed previously when describing the rise of agentic artificial intelligence, new capabilities have shifted the focus away from fears of potential failures, revealing practical applications instead and engendering a sense of relief among an overextended workforce. As technology like agentic AI rapidly dissolves the boundaries between different information sources and workflow management solutions, corporations begin to see tangible examples of what the future could really look like.
Additionally, the tax professionals in these departments are becoming less concerned about losing their jobs to AI. Among the firms already using GenAI in their day-to-day work, the most common applications are tax research (77%), tax return preparation (63%), and tax advisory (62%). As tax departments are being asked overnight to take on bigger, more forward-looking responsibilities—such as ensuring all their subsidiaries and third-party vendors comply with the latest wrinkle of sustainability regulation or forecasting the next country to strike a tariff trade agreement—some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks can be delegated to better, more refined AI solutions.
Vetting Vendors Becomes Critical
Of course, we know enough now not to expect the growth of AI to create a technological utopia. With every step forward, there is potential for a host of pitfalls. That’s why it’s incumbent upon corporate leaders to be open to progress while ensuring that the challenges they face internally don’t compel them to rush into adopting solutions that are not yet ready for prime time or battle-tested to perform specific tasks.
There is a bit of a Gold Rush mentality playing out in the AI space right now, and – in many cases – new tools are being developed faster than businesses and their clients can effectively evaluate them. In fact, 82% of corporate tax professionals we surveyed said they did not know whether they had any formal policies in place for how their outside tax firms should be using AI. It’s important for firms to develop guardrails for the use of AI and to ensure that the solutions they are utilizing can be trusted for professional-grade work.
We are at an exciting turning point in the evolution of the corporate tax department, where the decisions we make today will help define the future of the profession.
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