AI Agents

AI Agents for Tax and Compliance

Traditional tax tools create friction across filings, reviews, and reconciliations. AI agents reduce that burden by automating execution within your existing systems, streamlining processes without disrupting the way your team works

June 27, 2025

According to The Wall Street Journal, 38% of CFOs now view industry-specific regulation as the top barrier to growth, outpacing concerns such as inflation or capital costs. However, most finance teams still manage tax and compliance in the same manner as they did a decade ago: manually, across spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected systems.

The problem isn't effort. It's infrastructure. Tax and compliance workflows are inherently deadline-driven, but they're also inflexible and high-stakes. Most hinge on manual follow-ups and scattered systems, leaving little room for error, and even less for proactivity.

That's a growing liability. Global regulatory pressure is intensifying: more jurisdictions, tighter timelines, real-time audits, and escalating penalties for non-compliance. But while the rules have changed, the resources and tools haven't. Finance leaders are expected to keep pace with expanding obligations, without adding headcount or re-architecting their systems.

AI agents offer a new path. These are not generic copilots or static bots. They plug into your systems, understand the flow of tax work, and execute behind the scenes. They chase inputs, check for inconsistencies, generate documentation, and keep the team ahead of schedule.

The shift is overdue. In a world where regulatory timelines move faster than finance teams can, AI agents introduce a model built for continuous compliance, not constant catch-up.

Why Traditional Tax Software Creates More Problems Than Solutions

Tax work isn't just complex—it's relentless. For most finance and accounting teams, it means juggling hundreds of small, manual tasks that drain bandwidth long before they reach the strategic parts of the job.

Every filing cycle triggers a scramble to gather data from multiple systems, including ERP reports, spreadsheets, payroll exports, and state-specific schedules. Reconciling balances, chasing down approvals, and reformatting the same data in three different ways to answer one question. None of this is high-judgment work—but it still takes hours.

And the tools don't help. Tax provision models live in Excel. Filings happen in third-party portals. Source data sits in NetSuite, Workday, or payment platforms that don't speak to each other. A single update—such as a reclassified vendor or new entity—can require rework across every downstream report.

It's not a skills issue. It's a systems issue. Most tax workflows weren't built to flex with business growth or real-time needs. The result is a team stretched thin, stitching together reports and chasing updates just to stay on schedule.

With limited internal bandwidth, most finance teams aren't fully staffed to manage tax complexity in-house, and they know it. According to Deloitte's 2025 Tax Transformation Trends report, 86% of respondents said they outsource at least one primary tax process. But outsourcing doesn't eliminate the internal burden—it just shifts it. Teams still need to gather data, validate inputs, and chase answers across systems. AI agents offer a better alternative: automated execution inside your environment, with no outsourcing required.

They don't just organize the work—they do it. Agents pull the data, align the formats, and surface what's missing. Instead of bouncing between tabs, finance can stay focused on high-value work—such as managing exposures, evaluating filing positions, or advising the business on how changes in tax law will impact the P&L.

The problem isn't the people. It's the architecture. And AI agents are finally giving tax teams the infrastructure to match the complexity of the job.

What Makes AI Tax Agents Different from Regular Tax Software

Tax workflows demand more than just automation—they demand context. AI agents offer just that. Unlike rules-based bots or rigid templates, agents act more like intelligent teammates. They plug into your ERP, tax tools, and document systems, monitor live data, and act on natural language prompts. Ask for an entity-level variance analysis or a current vs. deferred rollforward, and the agent doesn’t just fetch data—it calculates, formats, and flags what matters.

Agents don’t require new infrastructure. They enhance the systems you already use. There’s no reimplementation or retraining. Teams prompt, review, and move forward. In a role where every decimal matters and every hour counts, agents offer a smarter, faster way to execute the work tax teams are already doing, without the overhead.

The shift is already happening. According to Deloitte, 57% of tax leaders say AI skills are essential for today's tax workforce. That's not a future-readiness metric—it's a signal that the baseline is moving. Teams that embrace AI now won't just be more efficient—they'll be aligned with where the industry is headed.

Ask any finance team responsible for tax: the pain isn’t always in the decision-making—it’s in the prep. Before a single strategic call can be made, hours are spent just getting the numbers into shape.

KPMG puts a number on it: tax teams may spend over 70% of their time wrangling data and less than 30% on actual compliance delivery. That’s time lost not to judgment but to logistics.

This is where AI agents deliver their most immediate impact. They’re not navigating regulations or filing returns. Instead, they automate the invisible but essential layers of work, sitting between your source systems and your tax analysis. For lean finance functions without dedicated tax resources, this kind of support is a force multiplier. For more mature teams, it creates room to do the work that actually drives value—modeling exposures, optimizing positions, and staying ahead of the business instead of catching up to it.

The Third Option for Corporate Finance Teams

For years, tax teams have faced a tradeoff.

Option 1: Keep it manual. Use Excel to wrangle data, rely on inboxes for follow-ups, and track deadlines in shared calendars. It works, but it’s brittle—and every added entity, jurisdiction, or change in tax treatment turns routine work into a scramble.

Option 2: Invest in a dedicated tax platform. These tools promise structure, but come with steep implementation costs, rigid workflows, and limited flexibility. Often, the software ends up dictating the process—not the other way around.

AI agents offer a third path.

Think about what a typical week looks like for a tax manager. One day they’re pulling state-level balances for the controller. The next, they’re trying to explain a sudden spike in income tax expense. Later, they’re fielding a question from FP&A about deferred liabilities. None of this is “filing work”—it’s data work. And it’s time-consuming.

Now imagine those same questions handled by an agent. One prompt pulls the right balances by entity and quarter. Another generates a variance analysis with highlights. A third surfaces stale accounts or missing data points—all without the team chasing down reports across systems.

The team still uses NetSuite. Still uses their compliance software. But now, they’re not the glue holding it all together. This isn’t a rip-and-replace. It’s a rethink. AI agents introduce structure without rigidity. Flexibility without fragility. They scale with the complexity of the business, without turning your team into process managers.

Tax Automation Examples Using AI Agent Prompts

Below are real examples of how AI agents support core tax workflows—by pulling data, identifying patterns, and surfacing actionable insights from your existing systems:

Income Tax Payable

Pull our current Income Tax Payable by entity and compare it to last quarter. Flag any variances over 15%.

→ Retrieves balances from the ERP, runs a quarter-over-quarter comparison and highlights material shifts for review.

Deferred Tax Liability

Summarize changes in Deferred Tax Liability this quarter by account driver (e.g., depreciation, amortization).

→ Breaks down movement by underlying drivers to pinpoint what's driving deferred activity.

Sales Tax Payable

List open balances in Sales Tax Payable by jurisdiction and note any periods with no activity in the last 3 months.

→ Scans GL by tax region to flag gaps or risks of missed filings.

Valuation Allowance (Deferred Tax Asset)

List all Deferred Tax Asset components with a valuation allowance applied and include the amount and basis for each.

→ Surfaces DTA sub-accounts with valuation allowances and pulls supporting context from notes and memos.

Income Tax Expense (Current)

Compare booked Income Tax Expenses (Current) vs. cash paid YTD. Show any timing gaps by month.

→ Aligns P&L tax expense with cash payments to expose timing differences and support audit prep.

Moving From Tax Compliance to Tax Strategy with AI

In most companies, tax is a race against the clock. Each deadline kicks off a scramble to pull reports and close gaps, followed by a brief pause before the next cycle begins. It's not that teams lack capability. It's that the process leaves no margin for anything beyond execution.

AI agents shift tax from periodic to continuous.

Instead of waiting for the quarter-end to reconcile or respond, agents monitor in real-time. They surface risks as they emerge, not weeks later. They keep documentation aligned with filings as they're built, not reconstructed after the fact. Moving from reactive to always ready frees up more than just time. It restores control.

One firm cited in Forbes found that piloting AI tools saved their team an average of 41 minutes per person per day—or roughly 250 hours per year. Compounded across a whole team and multiple years, that's not just saved time—it's reclaimed capacity. It's the difference between a team that's constantly reacting and one that has the space to plan, shape filing strategies, and stay ahead of business needs.

When agents handle the mechanics, tax teams can focus on higher-leverage work, such as evaluating exposure in new markets, shaping filing strategies across jurisdictions, and identifying optimization opportunities before year-end. These aren't aspirational tasks, they're the parts of the job that move the business forward. The ones that often get deferred because the system won't let go of the basics.

The most significant outcome of adopting AI agents isn't just more efficient tax prep. It's a stronger tax function—one that's trusted, forward-looking, and able to partner with the business before the deadline hits.

Why Concourse

Concourse builds AI agents specifically for corporate finance teams—including the high-friction, high-stakes workflows that define tax and compliance —enabling them to optimize their operations.

Our agents plug directly into your ERP, tax engines, and approval systems. They don't require a new platform or a long implementation cycle. You keep your existing tools—agents make them smarter.

Setup takes minutes. Output improves immediately.

If your tax team is still spending hours chasing inputs, formatting filings, or preparing for audits, there's a better way.

Join the waitlist or reach out to hello@concourse.co to see what agents can do for your tax team.