Ask a tax department to move faster on AI, and it will. That's the strange thing about this moment — nobody in corporate tax is short on urgency. Indeed, almost two-thirds (64%) of tax & accounting professionals say they're under real pressure from finance and leadership to show AI is delivering, according to Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals Report. That's the highest financial-pressure number of any corporate function measured in the report — higher than legal and higher than risk & compliance.

That pressure isn't vague discomfort — it's corporate finance and leadership expecting AI to translate into visible cost control. Essentially, they want to see the tax function doing more work without more budget, and doing it now.

What's odd is what happens when you ask a tax department a second question: How many departments have actually seen the financial fallout of moving too slowly? Just 45% say they have. A gap of nearly 20 percentage points between the pressure a department feels and the consequences to which it can point.

That gap is worth contemplating. It's easy to read as good news — the sky isn't falling — but harder to read as what it probably is: Move faster has become the reflexive short-hand answer to a pressure nobody's fully unpacked. Speed is easy to ask for, because it's easy to measure. Value, on the other hand, is harder.

The department doesn't want what the mandate is asking for

Here's the part that should stop a CFO mid-sentence: Many tax professionals themselves aren't asking to go faster. When the same survey asked which AI path practitioners personally wanted for their function, only 30% chose the productivity-first option — using AI to absorb more volume without gaining more headcount.

A majority, 54%, said they wanted the opposite kind of shift — less time on compliance administration, more time on structuring and tax advisory. Less throughput, more judgment.

That's not a department resisting change. Indeed, many department leaders already know what they want change to look like; however, that's not the mandate being handed down. When leadership measures success in speed, and the workforce is optimizing for depth, you don't get alignment. Rather, you get a department that hits its numbers and still feels like it's failing, because the metric was never the point.

The bigger firms are seeing the same pattern. EY's 2025 Tax and Finance Operations Survey found that tax leaders said they expect AI to free up roughly 23% more time for strategic work — the same shift toward judgment-driven activity for which tax professionals are already asking. (And that seems to underscored the finding of the 2024 Future of Professionals Report that cited a savings of up to 12 hours per week within the next five years.) Clearly, the ambition lines up; however, the mandate, measured in speed, doesn't.

That mandate mismatch is also a retention risk, not just a strategic one. Professionals who adopt a tool because they're told to — rather than because they've watched it improve their work — don't stay bought in for long. What's measured and what's meaningful eventually diverge, and that produces more than bad metrics. It produces attrition.

Why the fast lane runs out

There's a structural reason the speed-only path stalls, visible in the Future of Professionals Report's own framework, which deliniated three stages of AI maturity:

• Scale — doing more with the same headcount
• Elevate — shifting effort toward higher-judgment work, and
• Reimagine — rebuilding the workflow around what AI now makes possible.

Most worrisome, just 12% of tax professionals say Reimagine is their current reality.

Scale is real progress. Yet it's also where faster mandates quietly stop, because a faster version of the existing workflow is easier to deliver than a redesigned one. Scale alone doesn't lead anywhere else on its own. Getting to Elevate — the destination that 54% of tax professionals say they actually want — requires rethinking what the workflow is for, not just accelerating it. A department that optimizes for speed and stops there hasn't moved toward Elevate. Instread, it's found a comfortable plateau.

There's also a trust ceiling that pure speed can't get past. Deloitte's research on AI-enabled tax transformation found that 77% of tax leaders won't hand a process to an AI that's showing less than 90% accuracy — a bar that reflects how exacting and regulated tax work is. You can't speed your way past that threshold; it has to be built, which is exactly the redesign a just go faster mandate skips.

The bottom line

The gap between pressure and reality isn't proof that corporate tax departments are falling behind. It's proof that the finish line has been drawn in the wrong place. Speed is easy to demand and easy to measure — which is exactly why it's become the default ask, not because it's what the function needs, or even what leadership wants once you ask them to be specific.

KPMG's 2026 Global Tax Readiness Dividend backs this up from a different angle: Organizations in the top quartile of tax readiness — coordination, data, governance, workflow maturity — are 4- to 6-times more likely to outperform peers on workforce capability and enterprise value than those chasing speed alone. Readiness beats velocity; however, it just doesn't fit as neatly on a dashboard.

Those corporate tax departments that come out ahead won't be the ones that hit their speed targets first. They'll be the ones that use the time that AI frees up to do the harder, more valuable work their own people are already telling leadership they want to do. They'll also be the ones that measure themselves by such value metrics, instead of against a clock that someone else is watching.

You can find out more about the challenges that corporate tax teams are facing today here