Avalara launches Aviator AI hub for tax compliance

Avalara has launched Avalara Aviator, an agent hub for tax and compliance that brings together specialised AI agents to handle compliance workflows.

The product targets work that often falls between established tax software tasks such as tax calculation, return filing and exemption certificate management. Finance teams still spend time on configuration, report interpretation, approvals and business rule design, and Aviator is intended to address those gaps.

Users interact with the system in plain language through an orchestrator AI agent called Avi. Avi can call on what Avalara describes as lead agents for research, certificates and returns. The software validates data, reconciles information, identifies issues and carries out compliance work, while leaving final decisions to staff.

The initial release supports compliance operations including product mapping to tax codes, transaction and tax liability reporting, exemption certificate validation, tax matrix generation, analysis across multiple applications and custom rule configuration.

In one example, a customer describes a tax rule in plain language. The system then drafts the rule, tests its effect on historic transactions and highlights conflicts with existing rules before a user approves any change.

Avalara is providing the product to existing customers at no extra cost during its initial rollout. It also plans to extend the use of AI agents across more of the compliance process and into enterprise resource planning, eCommerce, finance and collaboration software.

Trust focus

The launch comes as tax and compliance teams face growing digital and real-time reporting demands across multiple markets and sales channels. Avalara argues that generic AI tools can struggle with multi-step work that requires continuity, context and close links to core business systems.

Aviator is built on more than 22 years of compliance data and draws on Avalara's existing tax and compliance platform. The company says it processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls each year and supports millions of businesses worldwide.

"Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done," said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara.

"Avalara Aviator fulfills that need. It's built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing and every report. That's what enables us to turn days of manual compliance work into minutes of confident oversight," Sarrazin said.

Customer view

A beta customer said the tool had changed day-to-day tax work by helping identify issues earlier in the process. The customer also pointed to the need for systems that support audit preparation rather than simply responding to direct queries.

"As a tax accountant focused on audit readiness, I need tools that go beyond answering questions to help me think about the ones I haven't asked yet," said Preya Chandan, Senior Tax Accountant at Singer Equipment Company.

"Avalara Aviator does that in one place, explaining taxability in plain language, surfacing considerations I might have missed and providing trusted research I can rely on for detailed, defensible work," Chandan said.

Finance adoption

Analysts are also watching how AI is moving into regulated finance processes, where reliability and governance remain central concerns. Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC, said adoption had moved past the experimental stage.

"Agentic AI adoption in finance has moved well beyond exploration, and the question is now how to scale its use broadly," Permenter said.

"Finance teams are prioritising agentic AI because they see it as an important operational capability. Scaling that impact depends on security and compliance, data quality and governance, and reliable outputs. That's why many finance organisations lean toward agent capabilities that sit directly alongside their core SaaS systems, where existing security controls and financial data models are already established," he said.

Avalara presented the launch as part of a broader effort to move tax and compliance software beyond discrete task automation and towards systems that can manage linked workflows. Future enhancements will include functions designed to detect discrepancies caused by business changes and recommend fixes before they lead to filing problems.

The software is also intended to produce a record of each action that users can review and defend. For finance departments facing growing scrutiny over indirect tax, filings and exemption documentation, that audit trail may be as important as the automation itself.