Connected is the new normal, especially for tax departments navigating a rapidly digitizing global economy. The use of technology has changed the way companies handle their compliance requirements as organizations move from the use of manual spreadsheets to real-time compliance systems.
In this episode of the Analytics Insight Podcast, host Priya Dialani welcomes Anil Paranjpe, General Manager, India Operations at Avalara, to discuss the impact of digitization, AI, and automation on taxation across all sectors.
Priya starts the conversation with an emphasis on how traditional tax teams relied heavily on manual workflows. “Legacy tax management systems used spreadsheets and data moved manually,” she explains, “This makes the process prone to errors and compliance risks.”
She asks how emerging technologies like AI, automation, and even blockchain are reshaping the approach to tax management today.
Anil agrees wholeheartedly and highlights the shift: “It has been reactive. It has been spreadsheet based,” he says. But today, tax is evolving into a proactive, real-time function. Praising Priya’s observation, he adds, “You essentially, better than me, just explained that shift already… from reactive to real time, always on, much more automated.”
He notes how India’s rapid implementation of e-invoicing has been “breathtaking,” pushing compliance to occur before an invoice is even sent. “With e-invoicing, you have started your compliance journey already because the government now knows what the invoice is,” he explains.
Anil describes Avalara as a company “built from ground up for cloud” since 2004, long before cloud became mainstream. “Automation… accurate, real time, the most timely automation, that’s something that is built into our DNA,” he says.
From onboarding and registration to e-invoicing, exemption certificates, property tax, HS code classification, and filing returns, Avalara manages every stage of the compliance journey. “Wherever there is a transaction that has something to do with tax… we deal with that,” he explains.
The platform handles “millions of transactions a day,” ensuring accuracy and real-time compliance across ERPs, POS systems, billing software, and more.
Now, with AI, Avalara is moving toward making tax compliance “almost invisible,” embedding intelligence earlier in the process for predictive and preventive compliance.
According to Anil, AI takes the industry beyond automation. “Now we can do much more predictive,” he says, emphasizing how AI pushes compliance upstream into the transaction lifecycle, creating fewer risks and faster decisions.
This evolution, he believes, marks the beginning of a smarter, more resilient tax ecosystem where technology and human expertise coexist to deliver accuracy, transparency, and trust.