The Tax Institute makes 40k tax papers available on AI platform

SavvyWise already answers only from a closed set of authoritative sources, including legislation, case law, ATO rulings and exclusive commentary from Cartland Law, and cites the primary source behind all answers.

The IP ownership will not change under the agreement, and the Tax Institute will retain its rights and control over the resources, while SavvyWise will be the only AI platform licensed to access the content.

Papers are cited verbatim, while the authors are credited and the content is kept out of the broader generative AI models.

According to SavvyWise, the Tax Institute chose the platform as its system is “deterministic” and gives the same answer to the same question every time and shows each reasoning step, so the practitioner can see how a conclusion was reached before applying their own professional judgement.

SavvyWise explained that it uses current generative AI alongside tax lawyer and search specialists to undertake the work, with the system running on standard computer processors rather than graphic chips that are used in large language models, which it said is more sustainable. The system has been built in Australia by an Australian team, making it sovereign AI designed for Australian tax law.

The alliance will start with a pilot phase, and TKE subscribers can continue to keep uninterrupted access through the existing system and can opt in to trial the new version, with full rollout once user testing has been completed.

Commenting on the alliance, CEO and co-founder of SavvyWise Drew Pflaum said: "Most AI on the market is very sophisticated guesswork based on patterns learnt from training data. It can be very useful, but is also fundamentally different from AI expert systems.

"An oversimplification of this fundamental difference is as follows: Ask an LLM system ‘what is 1 + 1?’ and it’ll almost always return 2. However, there remains a possibility it’ll answer ‘window’ because it’s read the joke ‘1 + 1 = a window’. 

“Ask an AI expert system ‘what is 1 + 1?’ and it’ll always answer 2. It cannot answer ‘window’. That’s the same certainty you get from using a calculator to add 1 + 1. That’s the certainty tax practitioners need."

“Some of the best tax minds in the country have spent a week or more writing each of these papers. Some of the policy being revisited in Canberra today was argued over in the 1980s, and those arguments are sitting in TKE. Until now, finding the right paper has been hard work. Now it takes seconds.“

The Tax Institute CEO Scott Treatt said the alliance has come in the wake of the pace of change currently facing practitioners.

"Tax touches everything, and the volume of legislation, rulings and cases practitioners need to stay on top of keeps growing. Our members have been asking us for years what we’re doing about AI," Treatt said.

"We chose SavvyWise because accuracy and protecting the intellectual property in TKE were non-negotiable.”

Kelly Partners senior tax partner and tax lawyer Tony Nunes said access to the Tax Institute’s library through SavvyWise would change how quickly practitioners arrive at the right answer.

"The Tax Institute’s database is one of the most valuable resources our profession has,” Nunes said.

“Having a tool as powerful as SavvyWise that can search it, cite it and show its reasoning means our team spends less time hunting for material and more time advising clients.”

The SavvyWise system will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at The Tax Institute’s Noosa Tax Convention on 18 November.