Will AI File My Taxes Next Year?
Predicting the future of DIY taxes for tech workers
I did it! I finished filing my taxes.
Once again I used TurboTax.
I still believe that if you are smart enough to work in big tech you are smart enough to do your own taxes. For the average W2 FAANG worker, their taxes are simply not that complex. Sure, the numbers can get big, but that doesn’t mean the complexity increases. (Just be aware of the common gotchas).
That said, I’ve moved on from the idea that everyone should do their own taxes. If throwing money at the problem gives you back time and peace of mind, that is a perfectly rational trade. I just hate when I see fear mongering that you need a professional.
But this is 2026, so we need to talk about AI.
Is next year the year AI does my taxes and I stop using TurboTax?
I put the question to LinkedIn and here are the results.
Most of you think I’ll use TurboTax again. But an AI tax preparer is honestly not as far off as I expected. On Threads, TurboTax held up about the same, but AI pulled much further ahead of the CPA crowd.
Reflecting on my own experience this year, I did not use AI to file my taxes, but it replaced more than 90% of my Google queries. Instead of getting pulled into IRS PDFs, forum rabbit holes, blog posts, and tax subreddits, I used Gemini and ChatGPT to work through the arcane edge cases.
But next year?
I have a few predictions.
Prediction 1: TurboTax pulls an AI rabbit out of their hat
Inertia is a hell of a thing. When something has mostly worked, the default is to keep doing it. So the default is that I stick with TurboTax.
But this year made something very clear: instead of relying on Google searches, forum rabbit holes, and TurboTax support threads, I relied on AI whenever I got stuck. That creates both a huge risk and a huge opportunity for TurboTax.
Why should I need a third-party AI tool hovering over my browser when TurboTax could build this directly into the product? They’ve already been investing here with Intuit Assist and have now gone even further with OpenAI. (Though I couldn't benefit from it this year; I still use their desktop software, which somehow lacks basic 1099 importing functionality.)
That is the real question. TurboTax has the trust, the accuracy checks, the distribution, and the existing workflow. The question is whether they are willing to disrupt their own model, especially when so much of the current value prop comes from upselling live help.
I know there are a lot of smart people at Intuit thinking about this already and a team with a fun AI first code name tackling what “AI FIRST TAX” looks like. The question is whether they can move fast enough to surprise me by next tax season.
The biggest issue with AI and taxes is trust. If TurboTax can integrate AI in a way that feels native and trustworthy, they have a massive advantage over random AI tax startups asking you to upload your Social Security number, your spouse’s Social Security number, your kids’ Social Security numbers, and the rest of your most sensitive financial data.
That is why I think this is still TurboTax’s game to lose.
Prediction 2: AI Tax Review Tools Explode
Even if you do not use an AI tax preparer next year, I am extremely confident that most of the FAANG FIRE audience will end up using some form of AI-driven tax review. So even if you are not relying on AI to take all your forms and complete your return, you may still use it to review the output from TurboTax or whatever software you use and check for mistakes.
This is basically a code review exercise, which is something AI should be pretty good at. It also feels extremely solvable.
There are a handful of gotchas in FAANG employees’ taxes where AI could catch huge issues almost immediately:
Hey, those RSUs you uploaded have a $0 cost basis; this is probably wrong.
Hey, it looks like you added ESPPs but you didn’t make any adjustments.
Hey, it looks like you did a backdoor Roth, but you entered it wrong and you got taxed on the entire amount.
I already have very specific ways people can check these manually, but that still requires them to go digging through their tax forms. If they can just upload everything to a tool and have it flag the obvious issues, boom, you have either saved them thousands of dollars or caught a costly mistake before they file.
I wish TurboTax did this natively, but whether it comes from TurboTax or not, I think a huge percentage of you will be using tools like this next year to review your return. And once people get comfortable using AI for review, it becomes a lot easier to imagine them trusting a full AI filing solution after that.
Prediction 3: None of This Should Exist
Think about how much mental energy, engineering talent, and startup money is being poured into AI taxes right now. None of this should even exist.
The government already has most of the data. Your W-2s. Your 1099s. Your brokerage forms. For most people, the correct system is obvious: send them a completed or near-completed return, let them review it, make any edits, and be done.
Instead, we created an entire industry around forcing people to rebuild their financial life from scratch every April. And now we are throwing AI at a problem that never should have existed in the first place.
/rant
A few quick hits that are top of mind:
If you are married and earn >$1.5M in California, you should look into whether it makes sense to file as 'married filing separately' instead of 'jointly'. I know multiple households who made the switch, saving themselves upwards of $10k.
If you were shocked by your tax bill, you should understand what caused it and why it might not be a big deal.
If you left California or New York and don’t understand why they are still taxing you…
lol that rant really hit home. It’s exactly the reason why I switched away from turbo tax out of principle. I refuse to give intuit more money to lobby against my interests