Durham, N.C. – September 23, 2026 -- Avalara, Inc. unveiled Avalara Aviator, an AI agent hub designed to cut manual tax and compliance work from days to minutes, at its CRUSH customer and partner conference.
Avalara Aviator connects specialized AI agents to close gaps between automated compliance tasks
For years, tax software automated discrete steps such as calculations, filings, and exemption certificate management, leaving finance teams to manually bridge the gaps, chasing approvals, interpreting reports, and building business logic. Avalara says it is the first company to unify specialized AI agents, compliance workflows, and its trusted tax technology into one connected agent hub. Customers interact via Avi, an orchestrator agent that delegates to lead agents overseeing research, certificates, and returns, validating and executing work while leaving judgment-based decisions to humans.
The platform draws on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data
"Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done," said Hugo Sarrazin, CEO of Avalara. "Avalara Aviator fulfills that need. It's built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing, and every report." The initial release supports mapping products to tax codes, reporting transaction and tax liability data, validating exemption certificates, auto-generating tax matrices, analyzing results across applications, and configuring custom rules. In one workflow example, a customer describes a tax rule in plain language; Avi drafts it, simulates its impact on past transactions, flags conflicts with existing rules, and activates it only after customer approval.
Avalara Aviator rolls out free to existing customers ahead of a broader platform expansion
Avalara is delivering Aviator initially to existing customers at no additional cost, with plans to extend agentic capabilities across the compliance lifecycle and into ERP, e-commerce, finance, and collaboration platforms customers already use. General availability is set to follow next month's Avalara CRUSH Europe event.
Beta customer reports faster audit-readiness workflows
Preya Chandan, Senior Tax Accountant at Singer Equipment Company, Inc., a beta customer, said the tool "explains taxability in plain language, surfacing considerations I might have missed, and providing trusted research I can rely on for detailed, defensible work."
IDC analyst ties adoption to security and governance standards
Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC, said finance teams are scaling agentic AI as an operational capability, but success depends on "security and compliance, data quality and governance, and reliable outputs," prompting many organizations to favor agents integrated directly with core SaaS systems. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually across millions of businesses worldwide. Upcoming enhancements include self-healing agents designed to detect business changes and recommend fixes before discrepancies become filing liabilities.