H&R Block answers tax questions using gen AI

Proceeding with caution

While H&R Block’s leadership and board were enticed by the possibilities of gen AI, Lowden notes he had to address some concerns before they fully bought into the project, especially with regard to safety and data privacy.

“No one wants to implement AI that has a high risk of bias,” he says. “We were careful to lay out governance and controls around those things. There were also some concerns about accuracy and using a public corpus of data, of course, so we used our own data that’s built in-house.”

Lowden’s team started working on AI Tax Assist in earnest in August last year.

“In this company, if we’re embedding something in core tax, it has to be very well-baked by December,” he notes. “It was a pretty short timeframe from ideation to delivery.”

Given the speed required, Lowden established a specialized team for the project to encourage a culture of experimentation and “moving fast to learn fast.”

“You throw away the structures you have everywhere else; you get a small tiger team with your best talent, lay out clear objectives, and get out of the way,” he says. “In this case, while we have the same roles involved that many of our product teams have, such as product, experience design, engineering, and data science, we worked differently by keeping the team small and isolated from all the operational stuff that gets in the way.”