Our Approach to AI: Why Vertex Is Building a Tax AI Platform

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the tax industry's favorite talking point. Every technology provider now claims to be "doing AI", and much of the conversation has been reduced to a race to launch new features or showcase the latest chatbot.

At Vertex, we believe that framing misses the bigger opportunity. Rather than adding it as a bolt-on capability to an existing product, we’re building AI into the fabric of everything we do, through a unified platform approach designed specifically for the complexities of tax. Our aim is to build AI that tax teams can trust in environments where accuracy, explainability and accountability matter. 

A platform approach to tax AI, not a patchwork

A platform may not seem like the obvious choice, especially when point solutions can launch faster and market themselves more easily. But by closely coupling our AI Platform with our Cloud Platform, we're building a broad, unified intelligence layer. One that extends into the ecosystems our customers already use and across the end-to-end tax applications that they rely on.

Tax data typically doesn't sit in one place. It moves across applications and systems. If your AI only sees inside one application, it’s only ever getting a small corner of the picture. It might catch an issue in one application while missing the same issue showing up somewhere else entirely, simply because it never had visibility into that part of the process.

An intelligence layer that spans the full workflow creates the opportunity to connect information, identify patterns and support tax professionals across their workflows, rather than within a single isolated task.

Where AI shows up for tax professionals

We're exposing AI capabilities across the Vertex portfolio in three key areas.

• Smarter, built-in assistance - AI should make existing tools easier to use, not force people to learn entirely new ones. By embedding intelligent assistance directly into familiar workflows, users can access support within the applications they already rely on.
• Agentic tax workflows - AI agents can help monitor activity, identify anomalies and highlight issues that may require attention. Imagine an agent reviewing a stream of transactions, spotting unusual tax treatment and surfacing it before it becomes a filing issue. The important distinction is that people remain firmly in the loop. AI can surface recommendations and automate routine tasks, but tax professionals retain oversight,  judgement and accountability for decisions.
• Intelligent insights and analysis - Tax departments generate enormous amounts of operational data. AI creates new opportunities to turn that information into meaningful insights, helping organisations identify trends, uncover risks and make faster, more informed decisions.

What's underneath the AI tax platform

The Vertex AI Platform is built on three foundational components: human and agent user experiences, an enterprise runtime environment and a governance layer.

The first component focuses on how people and AI work together. This includes intelligent assistance, human-in-the-loop processes and multi-agent orchestration that allows different AI capabilities to collaborate while remaining transparent to users.

The enterprise runtime environment goes beyond operational infrastructure. It incorporates learning loops that help the system become increasingly aware of each customer's context, workflows and data environment over time. Rather than remaining static after deployment, the platform is designed to continuously improve its ability to support users and their specific needs.

The third component is governance. In tax, trust cannot be an afterthought. Governance is designed into the platform from the beginning to support explainability, auditability and regulatory requirements from day one. In highly regulated environments, organisations need confidence not only in an outcome, but in their ability to understand, validate and defend how that outcome was reached.

That foundation of trust shapes every other layer of the platform.

The foundation underneath it all

Of course, none of this works without high-quality data and domain expertise. Vertex draws on decades of tax knowledge, content and rules covering more than 20,000 jurisdictions worldwide. That experience forms a knowledge foundation that helps fuel the AI Platform and differentiate it from general-purpose AI tools.

A generic AI model can generate a paragraph about VAT in seconds. Whether it can consistently support tax decisions with the level of accuracy, transparency and context required in enterprise environments is a very different question.

For tax professionals, reliable outcomes depend on more than language generation. They require trusted content, deep domain expertise and the ability to understand how a conclusion was reached.

That is why we believe the future of AI in tax must be built on a tax-specific foundation.

Why AI in tax matters right now

There is a great deal of noise in the market about what AI in tax actually means and how organisations should evaluate emerging capabilities.

Our view is straightforward. The long-term opportunity is about building the platform, governance framework and knowledge foundation required to bring trusted AI into the tax function at enterprise scale.

This is where Vertex stands today. As tax processes continue to evolve alongside advances in AI, our approach will continue to evolve as well. But our focus remains consistent: combining trusted data, built-in governance and human expertise to help organisations realise the benefits of AI with confidence.