Accounting Giants Ramp Up AI for Tax Prep in Bet on the Future

The Big Four accounting firms are ratcheting up their embrace of AI.

At EY, IBM’s watsonx AI tool is helping to address some of the biggest challenges accounting firms face: reduced budgets, limited talent and ever-increasing complexity in regulations, EY tax official Martin Fiore says, and it’s doing that even as it helps to eliminate the kind of filing errors that would trigger audits in various jurisdictions.

Tasks that used to take two weeks like producing K-1s, a tax form filed by partnerships and others, can now be done in a day, said Dom Megna, the US tax AI leader ...