Wolters Kluwer to work with OpenAI to develop new features

Ah, yes, another day, another corporate announcement that AI is coming to… tax software. Wolters Kluwer, the Dutch purveyor of professional information that makes accountants' hearts flutter, has announced an 'expanded enterprise collaboration' with OpenAI. This is not just a partnership, mind you — it's a 'pipeline of new generative and agentic AI-based features.' Because what the world desperately needs is an AI agent that can prepare your tax return with the same accuracy it uses for poetry. Imagine the annual letter from HMRC: 'We regret to inform you that your AI assistant has claimed you are both a limited company and a charitable trust.

But let's be generous. Perhaps this will genuinely streamline the hellish process of corporate tax compliance. After all, Wolters Kluwer's tools are used by professionals who currently spend their days wrestling with spreadsheets and legislation. The dream is that AI will unearth every deduction and flag every risk. The nightmare is that the AI will 'hallucinate' a new tax loophole that gets the client audited, and then an actual human will have to explain to a judge that 'the model suggested it.' The press release offers no timeline, no demo, and no clarity on whether these features will actually work. But it does have 'enterprise collaboration' and 'AI-native' — two phrases that together mean 'we have no idea what we're building yet, but investors like it.'

And of course, OpenAI is the partner. The same OpenAI that has been sued for copyright infringement, that has seen its models go rogue, and that is currently busy trying to convince the world that AGI is just around the corner. So a company that cannot consistently tell truth from fiction is going to build the next generation of tax software. What could possibly go wrong? The regulators will catch up in about a decade. In the meantime, Wolters Kluwer will 'leverage the power of AI' and accountants will brace themselves for a new kind of headache. Cheers to progress — may your refunds be large and your audits few.