The tech-savvy tax professional: The skills you actually need

Key takeaways:

• • • Prompt engineering pays off — Tax professionals who master clear, contextualized AI instructions see immediate gains in output quality and speed.

    • AI doesn’t replace professional responsibility — Every output that carries your name requires your verification and your judgment.

    • Link learning to a real problem — The most effective way to build needed skills is to focus on your current workflow, not to chase every new tool as it emerges.

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For tax professionals, technical excellence used to be enough. Know the code, understand the cases, apply the rules correctly — that was the job, and it was sufficient. It isn’t anymore. Not because the technical knowledge matters less, but because the professionals competing for the same work increasingly bring other talents to the table, such as the ability to do in an hour what used to take a day; to provide insights from data that would have taken a week to compile manually; and to deliver polished, well-reasoned analysis at a pace that wasn’t possible five years ago.

This rarified capability doesn’t come from intelligence or experience alone; rather, it comes from skills — specific, learnable, practical skills.

The data bears this out. Improving efficiency through technology has been the top strategic priority for firms for three consecutive years, with 44% of firm leaders citing it as their primary focus, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2025 State of Tax Professionals Report. Indeed, 47% of tax professionals surveyed said investing in AI should now be a top priority — and yet, 18% of firms still use no automation at all.

This gap between intention and capability is real, and it sits squarely with the individual tax professional.

The skills most needed by today’s tax professionals

To help close this gap and improve tax professionals’ overall work value, there are several specific skills that demand attention, including:

Prompt engineering: The skill nobody takes seriously until they see what it does

The name doesn’t help — but set that aside, because the underlying skill is straightforward: giving your AI tools clear, precise, well-contextualized instructions that produce outputs that are worth using.

Most people start badly when approaching a blank AI screen. They type something vague, get something generic, and conclude the tool isn’t useful. That conclusion is wrong, because it was the instructions given, the prompt, that was the problem. Specify the entity type, jurisdiction, tax year, audience, and format. Then tell the tool what you need and why. The difference in output quality is not marginal.

Of course, it’s important to remember that AI will tell you things that are wrong with complete confidence. It will cite an amended provision, apply a rule from the wrong jurisdiction, or construct a plausible analysis on a flawed premise — all without flagging any of it. The professional responsibility to catch it remains entirely upon the user. That’s not a flaw in the tool; it’s a reminder that expertise isn’t being replaced here — it’s being put to better use.

Data literacy: The capability gap most tax professionals don’t know they have

Tax work is data work. Today, what has changed is the expectations around the volume and complexity that professionals are now required to handle, interpret, and present, often with fewer resources than a decade ago.

Advanced spreadsheet proficiency is the starting point, and the emphasis on advanced is deliberate. The features that most professionals have never explored are precisely the ones that separate those who spend three hours processing data from those who spend 20 minutes. The ability to build visual dashboards that communicate tax data clearly — effective tax rates, provision variances, deferred movements, and more — is increasingly an expectation in corporate environments rather than a differentiator. For those professionals who handle large datasets or complex scenario modeling, even a foundational understanding of scripting and automation represents a significant capability uplift.

The Tax Professionals Report found that 57% of firm leaders cited getting better use out of existing technology as their top investment priority — more than those planning to buy new systems. The problem, in other words, isn’t the tools; it’s having the skills and the understanding to use them.

Workflow automation: Reclaiming time from work that shouldn’t exist

Look at any tax workflow closely and you’ll find steps that are repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming — not because they require a tax professional’s skilled judgment, but because nobody has stopped to ask whether these routine tasks could be done differently.

Again, the harder part of improving your skill set as a tax professional isn’t learning the tools; rather, it’s developing the habit of process analysis, a way of thinking that will allow you (among other things) to distinguish between steps that require genuine expertise and steps that are simply consuming time.

AI judgment: Knowing what to trust and what to verify

This is the skill that determines whether AI makes you more effective or creates problems you didn’t anticipate. This means validating outputs against primary sources before they reach a client. It means recognizing that AI reflects training data that may be outdated or jurisdiction-specific in ways that aren’t readily apparent in the output. And it means knowing when a task is too nuanced or too high stakes for AI to handle reliably.

Professional responsibility does not transfer to the tool itself. If an AI-generated analysis carries your name, it is your analysis.

Communicating and staying current

As routine tax compliance work becomes more automated, the premium on communication rises sharply. The Tax Professionals Report found that three-quarters of clients now strongly desire advisory services beyond tax preparation from their outside tax professional — yet most tax firms still derive their greatest profits from simple tax return preparation.

Those professionals who can close that gap are those who can translate technical work into clear, confident guidance that their clients can act on.

Going forward, the tools will keep changing. Identify the problem in your current workflow that costs the most time, find the skill that addresses it, and build from there. The professionals who will define the next decade will combine this deep technical knowledge with the ability to work faster, more clearly, and more adaptively than those who came before them. That combination is not yet common, but it’s also not out of reach.

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For more on how tax professionals are navigating technological change, visit the Thomson Reuters Institute’s Tax Resource Center or download the full 2025 State of Tax Professionals Report