Let artificial intelligence handle one of the two certainties in this world

Taxes are one of consumers' most complex financial transactions, thanks to a tax code that is 80,000 pages long. Gang Wang explains how Intuit built the industrys only Tax Knowledge Engine, a constraint-based engine that encodes changing financial regulations and provides the foundation for a host of artificial intelligence technologies that save customers time and money.

Americans spend 7 billion hours every year filing taxes. It is often the most complex financial transaction a consumer does all year, in part due to a tax code that is 80,000 pages. And despite (or because of) its complexity, the tax industry is perfectly suited for artificial intelligence. The progress in tax filing artificial intelligence is a yardstick of what’s to come in the consumer finance software industry. In response to the AI technology transformation, Intuit TurboTax has been on a journey to transform its offerings with artificial intelligence technologies to be highly personalized and require minimal user effort. Instead of “do it yourself,” it’s “do it for me.” The company has set a bold, disruptive vision, which aims to give customers what they’ve always wanted—taxes filed with minimal effort, thanks to never-enter data. This vision is not too far off, thanks to Intuit’s Tax Knowledge Engine. Rather than a collection of screen-by-screen paths that users can take, the engine is now modeled with human logic, constraint-based and goal-directed. The engine constructs the customer’s path dynamically, given everything Intuit knows about them at any point along the way. The technology provides the foundation for intelligent systems and rules-based knowledge engines across the product, enabling features such as smart reminders and intelligent error detection, which automatically checks a tax filing to spot any omissions or errors, and also underlies ExplainWhy, which provides personalized, bite-sized explanations behind deductions, credits, and tax refunds. The Tax Knowledge Engine has reduced lines of code by 10x and helped to reduce tax filing time by up to 40%. Gang Wang discusses Intuit’s progress so far and its vision to build a general intelligence in the field of tax filing, which includes efforts to: