Exclusive: IRS deploys AI agents

The Internal Revenue Service is rolling out Salesforce's AI agent program, Agentforce, in multiple divisions across the agency, per an announcement shared exclusively with Axios.Why it matters: At a time when the IRS has seen a massive reduction in its workforce due to Trump administration layoffs, it's also using AI agents for the first time.The IRS workforce has gone down 25% in the past two years, from 100,000 to about 75,000 employees.Driving the news: The IRS will use Agentforce across the Office of Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and the Office of Appeals, said Paul Tatum, executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce.After working with the IRS for a few years to modernize some basic platform technology in those departments, the agency is now bringing in Agentforce to "augment and supplement the work of these departments," Tatum said.Agentforce will be used for tasks like case summarization and search to try to complete customer cases more quickly.The big picture: Government agencies are increasingly incorporating AI into their workflows, which is a massive boon for companies looking to expand their customer bases and provide examples of large-scale AI use to the private sector.What they're saying: "Salesforce doesn't advocate for a blind AI processing tax returns without a human being involved in reviewing and and supplementing it," Tatum said. "When the agents are built, there's a lot of guardrails put in... [they're not] allowed to make final decisions, they're not allowed to disperse funds.""It's an educational process for the public and the government on the safety and trust of the agentic technologies that we're so excited about," he said.What the IRS decides to do with its staffing levels is up to the agency, Tatum said, but the aim of the tech is to help overworked IRS agents get through customer requests more quickly and efficiently.Rob Fitzpatrick, a senior level counsel (technology) in the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, told Axios that it felt like the right time to start using this technology at the agency. In 2023, the IRS started modernizing its decades-old systems, Fitzpatrick said, and he had initially resisting using AI. But now he said he feels "it would be negligence if I didn't start now using those AI tools to take our automation and now go head-to-head with some of the law firms."The bottom line: Fitzpatrick, who's been at the agency for 38 years, cast these changes as inevitable, and said layoffs at the IRS were likely due to factors beyond embracing AI. "I think all of us have to realize that the change is coming," Fitzpatrick said. "You either have to adopt the change and make yourself more efficient so that you can produce more work, or you don't, and you leave."

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