KPMG US doesn’t only want its tax pros using software — it wants them building it, too.
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In January and February, the company completed a six-week pilot involving about 30 tax experts working in small teams with engineers to vibe code workable software prototypes.
Many of the participants, who included associates and managers, didn’t have deep technical backgrounds, Brad Brown, the company’s chief digital officer for tax, told Business Insider.
“By the end of six weeks, they were vibe coding solutions,” he said. “Right before your eyes, you’re starting to see the evolution of how they were going to deliver services.”
The employees worked in groups of four to six, building tools that automated tax and compliance processes, integrated data from multiple systems, and generated analytics and content that once required “extensive” manual effort, a spokesperson said.
Before, someone on the tax side might have wished for software to perform a certain task, but would have had to rely on technical talent to get it done. Now, the tax people can “do the ideation piece” and then take a first pass at producing what they’d like to see, Brown said.
Getting workable tools
He said the approach lets workers create “lightweight, workable tools” they can hand off to software engineers to develop versions with the requisite safeguards and infrastructure.
During the pilot, a manager from the company’s tax tech team served as a coach and mentor for each team, helping when participants hit technical snags. Most of the tax workers had about two to six years of tax-related experience.
The participants had access to three vibe-coding platforms and other software that professional developers use. They completed the projects through a mix of in-person, virtual, and self-guided work.
Brown said that vibe-coding a prototype and passing it off to tech teams to flesh it out helps the company roll out new tools faster.
Some of what the teams built during the pilot is now incorporated into software that KPMG clients use to manage tax workflows and data.
Vibe coding means workers can continue developing other software tools while needing “minimal guidance” from the company’s tech team, the spokesperson said.
It’s a process that the number crunchers-turned-builders enjoy, Brown said.
“They’re super engaged,” he said, adding that it’s partly because they’ve sped up how quickly new tools reach the market.
‘The 10x consultant’
The company said it’s considering forming about a dozen teams of some 30 workers that would combine tax professionals and software engineers to develop AI-powered software tools.
Vibe coding is blurring the line between experts and developers. It lets people who know a problem best turn their ideas into software — or at least prototypes — with little or no coding experience. And now some companies, like the identity verification startup Checkr, are asking workers without technical backgrounds to try their hand at building new tools.
Brown said that the ability for tax teams to quickly generate ideas and prototypes echoes the discussions happening in Silicon Valley about how the output of talented engineers is multiplying.
“We’re almost getting to like the 10x consultant,” he said.
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