Pune, India – Avalara has introduced Avalara Aviator, an agent hub that brings together specialised AI agents to support tax and compliance workflows while keeping human oversight over decisions.
Unveiled at Avalara’s conference, the platform is designed to coordinate tasks that have traditionally required manual work between individual tax and compliance processes. Avalara said Aviator can interpret context, coordinate workflows, monitor variations and take actions, while people retain control over decisions requiring judgement.
The company said the platform is built on more than 22 years of tax and compliance data and maintains an audit-defensible record of actions.
“Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara.
“Avalara Aviator fulfils that need. It’s built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing, and every report. And that’s what enables us to turn days of manual compliance work into minutes of confident oversight,” Sarrazin continued.
AI agents across tax and compliance workflows
Avalara said tax software has traditionally automated individual tasks such as tax calculation, return filing and exemption certificate management, while finance teams have continued to handle activities between those processes manually.
Aviator uses Avi, an orchestration AI agent that allows customers to interact with the system using natural language. Avi can work with specialised “lead agents” covering areas including tax research, certificates and returns.
The agents can validate and reconcile information, surface insights and execute compliance-related tasks, while customers retain control over decisions requiring human judgement.
The initial version supports several compliance operations, including mapping products to tax codes, reporting transaction and tax liability data, validating exemption certificates, generating tax matrices, analysing results across applications and configuring custom rules.
For example, a customer can describe a tax rule in natural language. Avi can then draft the rule, simulate its potential effect on previous transactions and identify conflicts with existing rules before the customer reviews and approves the change.
Avalara said Aviator is initially being provided to existing customers at no additional cost. The company plans to extend its agentic capabilities across more areas of tax and compliance, as well as into ERP, e-commerce, finance and collaboration platforms.
Focus on oversight and explainability
Avalara said Aviator combines agentic AI with its existing compliance infrastructure, proprietary data and insights developed over more than two decades.
The company said the platform is designed to provide source-backed and explainable outcomes that can be reviewed and defended, rather than relying solely on generic AI responses.
“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, Inc. and an Avalara Aviator beta customer.
“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 continued.
“Agentic AI adoption in finance has moved well beyond exploration, and the question is now about how to broadly scale its use,” said Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC.
“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,” Permenter continued.
Avalara said future enhancements will expand Aviator’s capabilities, including features intended to identify business changes, recommend fixes and detect anomalies before they result in filing liabilities.
The company described these planned capabilities as part of a broader move towards agentic tax and compliance systems that can monitor operations and recommend actions while retaining human oversight.
