Assessing AI’s Impact on Tax Roles

How will an organization’s adoption of generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) affect individual roles in the tax department?

It’s a timely question—and a pervasive one: CFOs, CIOs, sales VPs, CMOs, chief risk officers, internal audit heads, and other organizational leaders are asking the same question about jobs and responsibilities in their realms. To get answers, we’ve been asking Vertex customers about their adoption of AI and taking note of what we see within the companies we interact with throughout our ecosystem.

Most Tax Teams Are Still in Wait-and-See Mode

We asked Vertex customers about their AI deployment activities during a recent webinar for Vertex Community members. Vertex Community is a centralized hub offering customers easy access to knowledge, training, support, product updates, and peer collaboration. In the Vertex Community forum, customers can exchange ideas and best practices, network with one another, discuss industry topics, and connect with our thought leaders.

Here’s how more than 300 webinar attendees—including indirect tax leaders and professionals, C-suite executives, and other business leaders—described their tax department’s 2025-2026 AI plans:

• Outside of Tax: AI is being considered/used in areas outside of tax—just waiting for it to come to us (selected by 24.8% of attendees)
• Evaluating: Have reviewed and seen some business cases that might work for tax and looking to integrate soon (24%)
• Waiting: A lot has been written and talked about, and we’re going to see what is developed, tested, and used by our peers in other tax departments before we buy (21.6%)
• Active: Currently implementing or using AI technologies to assist in the research, planning, compliance, or audit process (18.8%)

The remaining portion of respondents selected “other/unsure.” These results suggest that most tax groups are waiting and evaluating AI tools. This generally tracks with what my colleagues and I see inside tax groups, which includes:

• A desire for blended skills: Tax groups are searching for professionals with deep tax expertise combined with AI familiarity and experience. These tax technologists are expected to use AI tools for document analysis, account reconciliation, and similar tasks.
• Positioning AI as an enabler: We see AI being used to support, rather than replace, tax roles and responsibilities.
• An emphasis on documents and advanced data analytics: The primary uses of AI within tax groups currently tend to involve anomaly detection, document drafting, classification, translation, and summarization.

Getting Beyond the Pilot Program Trap

Most organizational AI deployments are not yet delivering expected results, according to a recent MIT Media Lab study focused on generative AI pilots. While that survey has earned its share of headlines, its primary takeaway is less about AI itself than how these tools are being deployed (as one-off pilot programs that are not necessarily connected to business value). In response to MIT’s study, two INSEAD professors writing in the Harvard Business Review suggested that business leaders “should ignore hype-driven distractions and instead view AI as one tool in the larger shift toward digitally driven organizations, where success depends on using technology to transform operations and serve customers better.”  To that end, one business luminary, Ruth Porat, President and CIO of Alphabet and Google, suggests that organizations should fundamentally rethink their processes from end-to-end to fully realize the value that AI can bring.

That’s sound advice for tax leaders to follow as they assess, plan, and execute deployments of AI tools. Another way to set the stage for high-ROI AI is by evaluating which tasks and activities within the tax group are ripe for AI enablement.

AI heatmaps, like those described in Korn Ferry’s 2025 CHRO Survey Report (on page 10), can help on that count. These heatmaps are visual breakdowns of a job role’s tasks, which are color-coded to distinguish between activities with higher AI-impact potential and tasks that require more judgment, relationship management, and other uniquely human activities.

The value of those judgment-based activities is unlikely to dissipate in tax and finance groups any time soon, but it is clear that AI will have profound effects on the content of many tax roles.