Our digital future

The next five years will be a period of significant technological advancement for professional services including the tax arena. It is hard to predict precisely what new developments will emerge but we can look to current and recent trends to guide our predictions for the future digital landscape and the ways in which it will impact the profession.

Of the general trends outlined earlier, we believe there are five main areas of technological advancement that will materially affect the tax profession in the future:

1. Data – big data sets, massively improved performance and memory capacity at scale
2. Process automation – robotic process automation and integration of financial and other systems
3. Decision making – AI augmenting compliance and consulting capabilities
4. Democratization of knowledge – publicly available and easily accessible knowledge and information: A “Google for tax rules”
5. Open networks – talent sourcing, crowd problem-solving and sharing ecosystems