AI does the tedious work. People do the judgment.

Most of a compliance cycle is repeatable: collect the data, prepare the workpapers, run the checks, chase the statuses, draft the summaries. This is exactly the work AI is now genuinely good at — fast, tireless, and indifferent to how boring the task is.

What AI is not good at is the last step. Knowing whether a return is defensible to a tax authority is not pattern-matching; it's judgment built from years of seeing what goes wrong. A signature is a decision, not a process step.

So the design rule I build by is simple: automation prepares, humans decide. Every AI-assisted module I build ends at a human review gate. Not because the model is weak, but because accountability can't be delegated to it.

Teams that split the work this way get both halves of the bargain — the speed of machines on volume work, and the confidence of a human signature on everything that files.