Tax & Legal reimagined
A vision of the future enabled by AI
What does the future of Tax & Legal look like? It’s a question we’re helping clients to answer in the Agentic AI era. At the same time, we’re optimising, transforming and reinventing our own practice. It’s not about adopting tools to improve what we already do; it’s looking at everything through a new lens and redefining what is possible in professional services. It’s about bringing everyone together to design generations of judgement into everything we do. It’s turning capabilities into value.
From developing our own people’s skills, so they can work alongside agents, to shaping responsible use across the tax system, we want to fully harness the power of AI for our firm, our people, and our clients.
A catalyst for reinvention
AI is helping our people, removing friction and saving time, cost and effort. For many tax clients, it’s transforming manual workflows, like scenario analysis. But it also opens up opportunities to do things that have never been possible, in markets that haven’t been explored.
Through our Future of Tax offering, we’re working with organisations to define their vision for AI, from redesigning end-to-end processes to rethinking entire operating models. For example, during our work with a leading private capital organisation, we brought together business, tax and technology teams to explore how AI could reshape their tax function. Through structured workshops and engagements, we defined a roadmap and identified opportunities for implementation – setting a clear pathway from experimentation to action,
“The tax function is going to look fundamentally different five plus years from now,” says Zandalee Claassens, chief of staff, Digital and AI at Deloitte UK. “We’re helping clients remove hurdles to their ambition, whether they’re at the early stages of engaging with AI, or pioneers.”
“The first step is gap analysis. Then, we activate proof of concepts before launching a bigger programme to unlock a new world of real-time tax. But the function cannot transform in a bubble. We look across an organisation’s whole back office, and at external factors, to develop the roadmap,” she continues.
Our clients are also benefiting from Deloitte Legal’s strategic relationship with leading AI platform Legora. In partnership, we’re providing hands-on support so businesses can move from pilot to scale.
“Clients need to reimagine themselves, then work backwards to understand what their journey will look like,” continues Zandalee. “We’re enabling those lightbulb moments.”
“We want to make sure that people understand you need the whole ecosystem to work together with AI. It's not just something you sprinkle over what you currently do.”
Zandalee Claassens, Chief of Staff, Digital and AI for Tax, Deloitte UK
Putting people at the centre
With different companies at varying stages of AI maturity, we have to be at least as advanced as our most progressive clients.
Within Tax & Legal, we’re building skills and embedding the technology in our everyday work to transform how we deliver services. This includes rolling out Microsoft Copilot for all our people and making Legora available to teams to help them draft, review, compare and analyse legal documents faster and more efficiently.
Immersive training sessions have equipped our colleagues to lead in an AI-enabled world. Recognising that AI fluency will become a core skill for tax and legal professionals, we’re also redesigning how we develop our employees. This includes revamping our Analyst Academy, augmenting classroom learning with AI experiences and simulated scenarios, where people work in sync with technology.
The focus is not just on developing technical skills, but improving business judgement, decision making and the knowledge needed to operate AI in client environments.
“We are capturing the expertise and experience of our people from across Deloitte and building it into the AI tools and systems we use every day,” says Hayley McKelvey, Chief AI Officer at Deloitte UK.
Together with our clients, we can design conscious enterprises, combining intelligence with judgment, innovation with responsibility, technology with trust. That is our next chapter.
From imagination to impact
As Hayley and Zandalee point out, navigating AI isn’t a solo effort – it requires everyone.
With regulators and professional bodies, we’re sharing our perspectives on how the technology can be used responsibly across the system. This includes working with the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) to influence how qualifications evolve to keep pace with the changing landscape.
Alongside our client work, we're exploring the creation of a Tax & Legal AI Research Institute to explore the impact of AI on the profession, share emerging insights and help shape a responsible future for Tax & Legal.
“The next generation of enterprise won't be defined by AI alone, but by judgement, awareness, creativity, empathy, learning, and intentional action,” continues Hayley.
AI is already changing how Deloitte’s Tax & Legal business works. But its real value lies in what it unlocks next – new ways of thinking, new ways of delivering, and new opportunities to reimagine the future.
