In this day and age where finding information is not hard – especially with the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence, where should one find reliable information about tax?  

I’m old enough to recall a day when the internet was not instantly available, and tax practitioners needed to research in-house / firm libraries that was facilitated by librarians and administrative assistants who would diligently spend hours updating loose-leaf publications that would be received by mail every month or so.  Those would be the “updates”.  Practitioners would spend hours searching indexes with key topics looking for reference materials / cases / writings that might be on-point.

When the internet became a thing, some practitioners were concerned that they were going to be replaced.  Hardly.  While information was more available and certainly much more quickly, the complexity of tax material was still daunting for many which required the continued existence of professional advisors.  Kind of like doctors.  Much more medical information was readily available but it hardly replaced the need for doctors.  

What the advent of the internet did, however, as I’ve written about many times over my career, is the access of readily available information created the “internet expert” in many topics, including tax.  To this group, if the internet says something, well, it’s a complete picture and certainly accurate.  For the critical thinker, however, we know better than that.  

That’s how I view the first iteration of generative AI and tax.  Some of the large language models, like ChatGPT, Grok, Praxity and others are amazing at answering and providing references to questions but they are hardly complete and sometimes misleadingly inaccurate.  Professional versions are better but currently the only credible one on the market in Canada, the U.S. and U.K is “Ask Blue J” a product put out by Blue J Legal. It is available to professionals by subscription.  It is quite amazing.  Like most generative AI models, it’s not perfect but it is damn good.  Ask Blue J is functional like ChatGPT whereby it enables sophisticated questions to be answered in a conversational style with references available at a click.  

Will Ask Blue J replace tax professionals like me?  Hardly.  But will it make my life easier and perhaps more efficient?  Absolutely.  I can envision future iterations of AI enabling specific client facts and objectives to be fed into the model with optimal structures being presented.  This level of AI will be scary good but it still won’t replace tax professionals.  Nothing replaces experience, a critical mind, feelings and empathy.  

For example, sometimes the optimal answer – confirmed by AI – might be “X”.  After considering the emotions and facts involved, the tax advisors’ clients may not like the consequences of “X”.  While the financial implications of “X” might be hard to argue with, the “soft-side” of that answer may be debatable.  It will be the ongoing job of the tax professional to continue to advocate for their client and ensure that they see the big and overall picture along with a continuing detailed eye.  Until AI can replicate feelings and empathy, there will always be a role for the technical tax professional who advocates for their clients.  

In the meantime, the advent of generative AI being so readily available is a game-changer for tax professionals.  It is as big or bigger than the advent of the internet.  Waiting to get involved is not a recipe for success, relevance and longevity.  Instead, it is my opinion that tax advisors should jump into the swimming pool and learn how to swim quickly.  For those strong swimmers, you’ll learn it quickly.  For those not so strong swimmers, it may take longer, but you’ll eventually get the hang of it and learn how powerful it can be.

In my quest for Canadians – and the worldwide population overall – to increase their financial literacy, the use of AI can be a helpful tool towards that goal.  Ditto for tax professionals.  Jump into that swimming pool today.