Discover how AI is transforming corporate direct tax workflows — with real-world examples from Thomson Reuters, Neo.Tax, and Orbitax.
Highlights
- IRS Form 6765 Section G and the GloBE Information Return have added significant compliance pressure for corporate direct tax teams.
- Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE combines agentic AI and embedded CoCounsel Tax research for direct tax teams.
- Neo.Tax automates R&D credits with real-time data integration meeting new IRS contemporaneous documentation standards.
Jump to ↓
The regulatory crunch hitting direct tax right now
Thomson Reuters: From compliance to intelligent compliance
Neo.Tax: Automating R&D credits under the new IRS rules
Orbitax: International tax intelligence and the Pillar Two deadline
What’s next for AI in direct tax
Four steps to build AI momentum in corporate tax
The tax teams moving the fastest right now aren’t working harder; they’re working with better tools.
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The regulatory crunch hitting direct tax right now
Corporate direct tax professionals are navigating an unusually compressed filing environment. Two regulatory milestones make 2025 and 2026 unlike any recent cycle: the revised Form 6765 and the first GloBE Information Return.
The IRS finalized a substantially revised R&D Credit Form 6765 in February 2025. The updated form requires significantly more qualitative and quantitative reporting, including a new Section G that mandates business-component-level detail on qualified research activities. Section G was optional for tax year 2025 but becomes mandatory starting with tax year 2026 returns. For organizations relying on engineer interviews and retrospective surveys, meeting that standard will require a significant increase in time and resources.
At the same time, calendar-year multinational groups with revenues above €750 million faced the first-ever GloBE Information Return filing on June 30, 2026. The GIR required more than 100 complex data points, many of which existing systems did not capture at the time. Unlike previous compliance milestones, it drew in tax, finance, legal, and IT simultaneously.
These are not slow-moving regulatory developments. They are time-bounded pressures, and they are moving AI adoption in direct tax from a strategic option to a practical necessity.
Thomson Reuters: From compliance to intelligent compliance
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE direct tax solutions, including Income Tax and Tax Provision, cover income tax compliance and the provision process with centralized data collection and integrated workflows. The goal is agentic AI that handles the heavy lifting of data import, validation, and mapping while direct tax professionals retain oversight and focus on judgment-intensive work.
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax was embedded directly into ONESOURCE direct tax solutions in late 2024, giving in-house teams an AI assistant grounded in Checkpoint’s proprietary content. Research can now be returned as structured, citable output through a natural language query. Junior staff can work through more complex questions with cited sources, and teams may need outside advisors less often for some of them.
The Thomson Reuters partnership with Orbitax, spanning more than 15 years, extends these capabilities to international tax. Together, they have embedded global compliance data — including Pillar Two calculations — directly into ONESOURCE, so direct tax teams can manage cross-border obligations without moving between disconnected systems.
Neo.Tax: Automating R&D credits under the new IRS rules
What the new IRS standard requires
The IRS’s revised Form 6765 doesn’t just add administrative burden — it rewards a documentation standard that traditional R&D credit processes struggle to meet. Through cases like Kyocera, the IRS has signaled a clear preference for contemporaneous data over records reconstructed after the fact. Section G’s mandatory business-component reporting, effective for tax year 2026, demands the same: granular, traceable evidence of what was worked on, by whom, and for how long.
How Neo.Tax meets it
Neo.Tax is built around this standard. Its AI native platform connects directly to the project management and engineering tools where R&D work is already recorded as it happens — no retrospective surveys required. Neo.Tax ingests existing data, clusters it into IRS-qualifying business components, applies the four-part test automatically, and reconciles payroll and GL data to allocate costs. The output is audit-ready documentation that meets the contemporaneous standard the IRS now formally requires.
Real-time provision and prior-year audit support
For teams working on tax provision, Neo.Tax adds a further advantage: because it connects to live project and payroll data, the R&D credit can be visible in real time rather than relying on estimates or prior-year placeholders, which can reduce return-to-provision adjustments. And for organizations that are looking to substantiate prior-year credits, Neo.Tax can speed up recreating prior-year studies. Neo.Tax is seamlessly integrated with ONESOURCE through its partnership with Thomson Reuters, so adoption automatically populates Form 6765 including the newly required Section G.
Orbitax: International tax intelligence and the Pillar Two deadline
A workflow problem, not a research problem
For most in-house direct tax teams, the June 2026 GIR was not primarily a research problem. It was a workflow problem. Reviewing data at the jurisdiction and entity level, collecting inputs from across the organization, validating XML, and ensuring every decision is defensible under audit: these tasks require automation, not just analysis.
XatBot’s three new operating modes
Orbitax’s XatBot has undergone a significant upgrade to address exactly this. The upgrade added three integrated operating modes:
Research mode, enhanced with Deep Research capability, produces structured, footnoted reports suitable as standalone compliance deliverables.
Autopilot is a conversational workflow builder that automates multi-step tasks directly inside the International Tax Platform, including within the Global Minimum Tax solution.
Tax Flows, formerly XatBot Monitor, tracks regulatory changes across jurisdictions and proactively distributes comparison reports to stakeholders.
Tax Skills
Orbitax has also introduced Tax Skills: pre-built configurations that tailor XatBot’s behavior to specific recurring workflows, including Pillar 2/GloBE compliance, treaty analysis, and transfer pricing, triggered automatically by the context of each conversation.
Orbitax Global Minimum Tax
Stay compliant with rapidly evolving Pillar 2 global minimum tax regulations
Request a demo ↗What’s next for AI in direct tax
Transfer pricing and statutory reporting are two areas where AI-driven automation is expected to grow, with the potential to replace static spreadsheet models and reduce manual assembly before year-end close.
Across both areas, the shift is the same: AI moves from handling discrete tasks to supporting strategic decisions. Direct tax professionals gain the analytical bandwidth to act as genuine business partners, not just compliance managers working against a calendar of deadlines.
Four steps to build AI momentum in corporate tax
The clearest path to AI adoption starts with the deadlines already on your calendar.
Map your highest-friction workflows to the tools that address them directly. Form 6765 Section G and preparation for the next GloBE Information Return cycle are natural starting points.
Begin with one targeted automation; R&D credits and international tax research are proven entry points with measurable ROI.
Build a roadmap with trackable baselines: cycle time, documentation hours, and audit exposure are all quantifiable, and demonstrating improvement in each builds the internal case for broader adoption.
Prioritize vendors already embedded in your existing stack. ONESOURCE, CoCounsel Tax, and the Orbitax International Tax Platform minimize integration lift and accelerate time to value.
The tax teams moving the fastest right now aren’t working harder; they’re working with better tools.
Form 6765 Section G, the GloBE Information Return, Pillar Two — the demands on corporate direct tax teams are accelerating, and the gap between what AI can do and what most organizations have deployed is still wide. Thomson Reuters, Neo.Tax, and Orbitax are already closing that gap for direct tax teams that are ready to move.
See how Thomson Reuters and its partners can help your team prepare for upcoming deadlines while building a more strategic tax function.
Learn more about Neo.Tax for R&D credits →
Explore the Orbitax Global Minimum Tax solution →
