In a recent webinar hosted by SWK Technologies, experts from Avalara shared insights into the transformative impact of AI on sales tax compliance, financial operations, and ECM management. Avalara’s sales tax automation software provides a reliable and efficient solution for calculating sales and use tax, managing exemption certificates, filing returns, and remitting payments across North America and beyond. With seamless integration into Sage Intacct, Sage 100 and Acumatica, this automated sales and use tax calculation solution enables businesses to effectively manage their tax compliance challenges. Vsu Subramanian (Senior Vice President of Content Engineering), Kael Kelly (GM Tax Exemptions, IRS Forms, & Tax Research Product Lines), and Lisa Cunningham (Senior Product Manager of Exemption Certificate Platform) discussed how AI is reshaping operational efficiencies and strategic decision-making within Avalara’s ecosystem, and how this will affect ERP users.
Recap of the Webinar
Use this recap to skip to the sections that matter to you:
The Age of Generative AI (3:50 – 13:20)
Visu and Kael discuss the transformative impact of AI, distinguishing it from Machine Learning (ML) and highlighting the unique capabilities of generative AI. They emphasize the rapid adoption of AI technologies, setting the stage for an in-depth look at advancements, distinctions, and applications of AI and ML in the modern technological landscape.
- Advancements in AI are revolutionizing the technological landscape (3:52)
- Although similar, there are distinctions between AI and Machine Learning (ML), with AI focused on human-like interactions and ML on predictive analysis. (4:50)
- Generative AI displays humanlike properties by solving non-repetitive cognitive tasks (6:20)
- ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history (12:22)
AI Impact on Finance, Accounting, and E-commerce (13:21 – 31:28)
In this section, Kael delves into the significant influence of AI on finance, accounting, and e-commerce. The discussion covers how AI technologies, including Autonomous Finance and Composable Finance, are reshaping operational efficiencies and strategic decision-making. You’ll learn how AI enhances workflow automation, reduces costs, and drives impactful insights in these fields.
- Autonomous Finance involves self-learning software optimizing front, middle, and back office operations (14:01)
- AI can aid in making strategic commercial decisions and optimizing processes (15:35)
- Composable finance emphasizes a modular tech stack over a single, standard platform, allowing for greater agility and adaptability to change (17:03)
- AI enhances operational efficiency by automating workflows, leading to significant cost reductions and higher ROI (19:03)
- AI accelerates strategic decision-making and process efficiency, enabling faster financial closes, streamlined planning, and more impactful business insights (19:29)
- Potential generative AI use cases (20:55)
- For strategic finance, AI may generate scenarios, summarize information, and draw initial conclusions for capital optimization (21:20)
- In financial planning and analysis, AI could create initial versions of plan and forecast models for expense budgets and forecasts (21:35)
- AI could review contracts and highlight key areas (21:48)
- AI might advise on the optimal mix of liquidity needs (22:10)
- AI could enhance investor relations by predicting analyst questions and suggesting possible answers (22:35)
- AI’s ability to process unstructured & multimodal data changes everything (22:55)
- An example of a tool leveraging multimodal data and automation to scale internal processes for sales, marketing and operations (24:00)
AI for Avalara (32:40 – 36:30)
In this section, Vsu dives into how Avalara utilizes AI to enhance its tax compliance services. Avalara employs various AI techniques, including classification, deep learning, and generative AI, to drive improvements across operations. By leveraging these advanced methods, the team at Avalara aims to boost operational efficiency, expand compliance coverage, and provide a more streamlined experience for customers.
- Avalara employs generative AI for various applications, including tax code classification, harmonic system classification, rule analysis document classification, and recently added AI chatbots (33:58)
- Diverse AI techniques are utilized at Avalara, including classification, understanding unstructured content, deep learning, and generative AI (35:40)
Avalara Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) Demo (36:35 – 44:06)
Lisa’s demonstration of Avalara’s Exemption Certificate Management (ECM) system highlights its capabilities in storing, tracking, and managing sales tax exemption certificates. The ECM tool uses AI to simplify compliance, recognizing diverse state requirements and automating tasks like form pre-filling and certificate validation. Explore how Avalara’s intelligent automation enhances accuracy and reduces manual effort in managing tax exemption certificates.
- Store, Track and manage Exemption Certificates (36:55)
- AI identifies varying state requirements for exemptions and handles jurisdiction-specific forms, some of which expire annually (37:59)
- Avalara’s AI saves time by identifying form types and pre-filling details, even in complex cases (39:55)
- The ECM intelligence and automation engine automates the monitoring, replacement, and validation of certificates (42:30)
Avalara’s ChatGPT Plugin Demo (44:14 – 50:00)
In this section, Vsu explores how Avalara is harnessing the power of generative AI through their ChatGPT plugin. This demo showcases the plugin’s capabilities as a sales tax calculator, leveraging Avalara’s extensive compliance content and ChatGPT’s advanced conversational abilities.
- Avalara’s ChatGPT plugin serves as a sales tax calculator, providing answers to specific sales tax inquiries (45:00)
- The AI tool can be used to compare sales tax in different locations (45:57)
- A specialized chatbot responds to conversational taxability questions with accurate citations to avoid misinformation (47:48)
Q&A Session (50:05 – 56:10)
- How can people access the Avalara ChatGPT Plugin? (53:45)
- Are the taxability decisions in the Avalara ChatGPT plugin limited to a data like ChatGPT limiting its information to 2021? (54:33)
Learn More About Avalara and AI Integrations for ERP
Navigating complex tax regulations can be challenging, especially as your business expands across different regions. That’s why it’s crucial to utilize robust sales tax software like Avalara for your e-commerce and finance operations. Ready to harness the power of AI in your tax compliance strategy? Contact us today to discover how Avalara can streamline your tax processes and learn more about its seamless ERP integrations with Sage and Acumatica.