8DECEMBER 2019The Promise ofArtificial Intelligenceto Solve Tax ProblemsBy Jeff Saviano, Global Tax Innovation Leader, Ernst & Young LLP Today, AI technology solutions are successfully tackling real-life problems all around us, every day. AI is proving to be impactful in solving medical conundrums, recommending movies (that I actually want to see), and may soon drive me to the office in an autonomous vehicle. It is exciting to witness firsthand how this powerful technology is transforming industries and improving lives.I am a tax lawyer by training and, like many tax professionals, I find myself constantly seeking creative ways to solve tax problems. So, how can AI technology be applied to tax? To help address this question, I decided to go back to school and enroll in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) course "Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy." Here are my observations from that course. I came away from this MIT course with the belief that AI has the potential to have an oversized impact on tax problem solving. It is now clear to me that AI will affect taxation from quite a few different vantage points. There is plenty of research on the prospect when general AI solutions will equate to human natural intelligence, but that day has not yet arrived. Instead, as we near the end of 2018, there are tremendous opportunities for narrow AI tools that are uniquely developed and trained to solve specific problems.Machine learning and natural language processing will undoubtedly have a profound impact on tax. Taxpayers will utilize natural language processing to extract and analyze unstructured data, and assist in tax determinations or produce tax returns. In addition, so much of core tax work today involves the mere classification of transactions, assets or people for tax purposes, that machine learning solutions are ripe to predict the associated tax treatment in this regard.AI will also profoundly impact employment. Traditional tax professionals within corporate tax functions will be complemented with computer and data scientists adept at applying AI tools. These data workers will solve tax problems through AI/data analysis first, and specialized tax knowledge second. They will recognize that the issue of how AI will impact tax employment isn't about machine vs. IN MYOPINION
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