KPMG Australia tackles tax tasks with KymTax

KPMG Australia has launched its tailored generative AI tool, KymTax, developed for its tax professionals to assist with administrative tasks.

Unveiled on Tuesday, KymTax is said to help KPMG’s tax teams through a combination of uses such as research, knowledge management platform and acting as a content generator.

It can also produce tax-focussed content for presentations and emails plus deliver answers to specific questions on current tax issues.

The professional services firm said KymTax, “is a personal tax researcher, helping tax professionals comb through tax legislation, guidance and training materials and precedent documents.

“It will be used to craft high-quality first drafts of tax advice, based on facts presented by tax specialists, that can then be adjusted and adapted for client purposes.”

Back in May 2023, KPMG already updated its generative AI technology KymChat to search across its quality and risk manual and independence policies.

John Munnelly, KPMG Australia's chief digital officer told Digital Nation there is also “KymComply, KymIgnite – and more – probably half a dozen with at least six more in development.”

Munnelly added KymTax is “built on top of the Kym Platform which started with a conversational interface.”

“KymTax is the second generation. The first KymChat solutions were Everyday AI solutions, technology that everyone across the firm would use.

“KymChat is an example of us moving into Specialised AI solutions – specifically KymTax is targeted at Tax professionals.

“You need to be a tax professional with the requisite skills and tax knowledge to use KymTax,” Munnelly said.

The tool has been built on a custom dataset comprising years of KPMG’s internal tax documentation and pulls data from the likes of ATO’s Legal database with the Federal Register of Legislation and will use that for first drafts of documentation.

KymTax stems from KPMG’s internal ‘ChatGPT Illuminate’ challenge, designed to identify business use cases for generative AI within the business.

It was built by KPMG’s Connected Technology Group in collaboration with the firm’s tax and legal and enterprise divisions.

KPMG Australia's national managing partner for tax and legal, Ben Travers said, “KymTax will enable us to work smarter, reducing time spent on manually researching and consolidating a range of data sources, freeing up our people’s time to focus on high-value, strategic work for our clients, while making sure our advice always aligns with the very latest tax developments.”

“We’re taking our existing knowledge base and ingesting it into the solution – it’s not coming from ChatGPT – the reference material and the context behind how it generates its advice comes from our internal KPMG know-how.

“It’s our people who have made the decisions and created the framework and the AI works to find the data, read and summarise documents. KymTax is like giving every tax professional in our firm their very own research assistant,” Travers added.