Avalara Aviator Adds AI Agents Without Replacing Tax Logic | Avalara CRUSH 2026
Keep Tax Calculations Predictable, Make Workflows Smarter
Tax calculations cannot depend on an AI model’s best guess. That principle anchors Hugo Sarrazin’s vision for Avalara’s next phase. At Avalara CRUSH 2026, the company’s CEO joins Techstrong TV’s Alan Shimel to discuss Avalara Aviator. Their conversation explores a shift toward agent-driven workflows that preserve predictable calculations and human accountability.
Sarrazin explains that AI is not replacing Avalara’s core tax engine. The underlying calculations and filing processes must remain consistent. Instead, agents can handle surrounding tasks that previously required spreadsheets, manual data gathering and disconnected systems.
The goal is to give tax professionals more time for risk management and strategic work. Users still review results and make decisions. Sarrazin emphasizes audit trails that record the work and help preserve accountability.
Connect Specialized Agents and Business Systems
Avalara Aviator brings an orchestrating agent together with specialized agents focused on particular domains and tasks. Sarrazin describes a layered design that coordinates work behind a simpler user experience. Customers can explore the underlying complexity without needing to manage every interaction themselves.
The discussion also covers Versori, the integration company acquired by Avalara. Connecting business systems traditionally involves understanding APIs, writing connectors and maintaining them as requirements change. Sarrazin describes an AI-driven approach that helps discover systems, plan integrations, generate code and support the resulting connections.
That integration work matters because compliance depends on information spread across multiple applications. Easier connections could help customers and partners spend less time maintaining interfaces and more time improving business processes.
Expand Compliance Capabilities Without Losing Customer Trust
The conversation reaches beyond sales tax into returns, property tax, hospitality and international e-invoicing. Sarrazin sees growing e-invoicing requirements as an important opportunity for Avalara and a practical challenge for businesses operating across borders.
He also discusses the importance of delivering working products rather than relying on ambitious roadmaps. Customer testing helped reveal problems and shape improvements before the conference demonstrations. He acknowledges that more capabilities remain to be built.
For smaller businesses, the value is access to capabilities they may lack the staff to manage internally. For larger organizations, it is a chance to reduce operational friction across complex systems. Sarrazin’s central message is that automation must build on customer trust, not take it for granted.
Transcript
Hey everyone, we're back here continuing our coverage of Avalara CRUSH North America. If you were wondering, I asked this during a break, we say North America because there is an Avalara CRUSH Europe, and that's coming, I think, October 8th. It's in London.
So for those of you who are watching this and may be over in Europe, and particularly in the UK, you can head over to Avalara CRUSH London, October 8th. Let me introduce you to our next guest. He's kind of the star of our show.
If you watched Techstrong TV before, we had the pleasure of having him on a couple of times leading up to CRUSH. Hugo Sarrazin. Yep.
And he says it so much-- Can you say your name for me, please? Sarrazin. He says it so much better than I can.
I have more practice. Well, you do have a little bit. Even with practice, I couldn't do it.
My tongue just doesn't go there. But Hugo, it's a pleasure to meet you in person. It's a pleasure.
Thank you for joining us. I got to tell you that I thought I knew Avalara before I came here, but now I feel like I really know Avalara, having spent two days here talking to customers and Avalarians, as they call themselves. That is what we call ourselves, yeah.
And finding out more about the business. For those of you who haven't seen any of Hugo's Techstrong TV interviews, he has an impressive, by far, to say the least, resume and background. Give people a little bit of your background, Hugo.
Oh. All right. Well, I'll do the short version.
Go ahead. I've been 30 years in technology- Mm-hmm ... across so many different parts of the technology landscape.
But at heart, I'm a nerd. Mm-hmm. And I'm a proud nerd.
I love technology. You and me both. And it's just so much fun.
And robots were my thing. I can go all the way back to the space shuttle. Really?
I even programmed some lines of code that went into the Canada arm at the time. So- Really? Yeah.
I remember the Canada arm. Yeah, it was a thing. I think the lines of codes were commented out.
But nonetheless, then I came here to the US, and I did a master's and a PhD in using robotics in the aerospace industry of all things. And then I just hung around in Silicon Valley and just worked with some of these iconic companies over the years. I've been the president of other software companies, CEOs.
And I just saw an opportunity to come here to Avalara that is just incredible. You mentioned you're discovering it. I discovered it a few years back, and it's so many things.
Mm-hmm. It is so many things. Obviously, it's known for its tax calc engine.
It is the flagship that we've built, and many people know us for that. And did you know, and maybe somebody else in another interview mentioned this, on Black Friday, we power more transaction than the sum of Stripe, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce- Combined, yeah ... combined.
There you go. It is absolutely insane. And then we do it at a scale, every transaction is 10 milliseconds.
I think the Black Friday number alone, was it $5 billion in change? It is- Something, some crazy number like that? So that's what we've built over so many years.
The thing works. It's multi-cloud. It works across all our- Mm-hmm ...
four clouds. It's hot transit. I am so lucky to be working with a big product that is that robust, that scalable, and we've got millions and millions of customers we're supporting every year.
That's kind of cool. But that's not all. And it's amazing.
We help customers do their return because we can see these sales tax transaction. We help them with their property tax. We do their 1099.
We do e-invoicing around the world. It's like a huge thing that's happening. Every e-invoice needs to be digitized, it needs to be sent to the government, so we work with that.
We do cross-border taxes. We do tax research. It's like the Harvey of sales tax.
It's very broad, and I could keep going. Oh, no. We've spoken.
If you don't mind- Please ... I'll finish it up for you. Yeah, please.
Let's see. So that is number one, that e-invoicing thing. Yes, there is a mandate to go to electronic with it.
Mm-hmm. But for many of us out here who've traveled the world, you know about VAT taxes, right? Absolutely.
We all go to the airport and we get it put back on our credit cards and everything. But those VAT taxes aren't just on individuals. Virtually every transaction- Yeah ...
whether it's in Europe or places like Brazil or Mexico or whatever, they all have these e-invoice or VAT taxes involved there. And in speaking to, I forget who it was now, the GM of sales tax, but he's also running international- Yeah, Greg ... yeah, Greg.
The e-invoice business could wind up being bigger than the sales tax business at some point. It is so big. Every country around the world is at their own speed.
Every government's different. But there are mandates. They're going to force these companies to trade with each other this way, and there are many reasons why they do that.
It's more efficient, and it's easy to blend. But it's also a way for them to eliminate fraud- Yes ... because everything gets documented, and you need to send- No more under the table.
Yeah ... you need to send something to the government every time. So it's happening, and it's a European thing.
It's a LATAM thing. It's an Asia thing. So every US company has to deal with this, too.
If you're going international- If you're dealing-- This is like the GDPR, right? Yes. " Well, if you have customers who are in Europe, you're subject to it.
No. It's a real thing. It's the same thing.
Yeah. There's a saying... I'm Jewish, and during Passover, there's a song that they sing called "Dayenu," which is, basically, if that's all you'd done, it would've been enough.
If that's all Avalara did- Oh, no ... it would be enough. Oh, let me give you some more, for just for fun.
But it's not, yeah. It's not. So in POS systems- Yeah ...
we have products in there. So we can help merchants keep the money to pay their sales tax. Yeah.
So we create these temporary accounts. We're helping them with royalty franchise payment, and the list goes on. And then we can do in lodging.
I was just going to say hospitality. So the official word is hospitality, I've been told. That is correct.
Yes. But, well, just before you- Yeah ... we had Nicole on.
Yeah. 10,000 different jurisdictions just in the US alone. And you'll pay a different tax depending what time of year it is, what time of day it is, how big the hotel is- Yes ...
what side of the street it's on, what the weather is. It's mind-boggling. Quite frankly, before something like AI comes out to try to help you with this, I don't know how people did it.
I don't know how hotels did it. It is really hard, and we made a business for so many years creating these specialized products that understands these rules, that curates the rules, that keeps them updated, and we're really good at it. But we couldn't do everything.
We couldn't do everything, and unfortunately, in some cases, there's some gaps that people need to download stuff in Excel and do something or connect things, and this is where AI is so cool. It's not going to replace the core. No.
The core has to be deterministic. And if you're a techie, you know on Tuesday, when you calculate your tax, it has to be the same as on Wednesday at 2:00. Mm-hmm.
It tries to work. It's one answer. When you submit your return, it has to be the same no matter what.
You can't have a hallucination. You can have an LLM do probability. But everything around it And that's what we just announced.
This is a really important milestone for, I think Avalara for sure, but I'm going to say at this moment in time, even in the tax and compliance industry, we're the first one to come forward and say, "It was great. Avalara came in with a cloud version, and that was a very big innovation, and for 20 years we rode that wave, and now we're ready for a new era," and it's the agentic tax and compliance. Yeah.
And we're talking about Aviator. Aviator and the Versori thing, those two kind of- Yeah. Well, Versori, and we haven't really...
I haven't had the opportunity to interview anyone from Versori yet. It's coming, but I'll give you the quick- Yeah. Talk, let them know.
what makes it special? Yeah. Both of them.
Let me kind of first... We announced two really big things that for us is the signaling of we are moving into this brave new agentic tax and compliance. The first one is Aviator.
Aviator is basically, it's our flagship product, and then we're going to bring everything together. Every one of those things we just covered are now going to live in Aviator, and we're putting in there a whole series of agents that can complete tasks on behalf of the users with the user still in control. That's where the power is.
" And therefore, we don't dilute accountability. Right. And then we also create a whole slew of audit trail, which is super important with compliance.
And then currently, it's hard to do when you save this and you save that, you forget the decision. And so we're entering a very different world for all people in tax and compliance. They can elevate their game and focus on all the strategic stuff, the risk management, and being not in a cost center or an inhibitor to the business, but to be now an accelerator.
Sure. So that's Aviator. At the same time, we have Versori.
And Versori, you're correct, we acquired this really clever company, and we took their technology, and we've taken it in a way that is fantastic. So when you do work, you need to connect systems together. And connecting a system requires understanding system A, understanding system B.
They have their own language, their own protocol. They've got manuals to explain, APIs to understand. And then you call the IT department, you put yourself in a queue to get the damn thing done, or you call a third party to do it.
Mm-hmm. And then you get it done, and then you test it, and it works, and you're happy, and then somehow you change the business strategy, you have a new product, and the connector doesn't work, and you call the person, and you... We've all been there.
Everybody's been there. It's incredibly brittle, it's slow, it's time-consuming. And what we have now introduced is a agentic integration fabric.
It's pretty sweet. So we use AI to go and do the discovery of these platforms you want to connect, to come up with a plan to build it, to create it, all the coding. Yep.
And then to create all the things that are hard, like the authentication and the infrastructure, the redundancy, the failover, and then we host that connector. Right. So now the value proposition for everybody is like, you want to connect system A with system B, we'll do it for you in days with this connector.
Or you just take- And then we don't need us to do it. We are making it available to you to do it in AI. Right.
" You don't code. You don't code anything. You just talk.
And soon you'll just speak. Yeah. But that's coming, too.
It's coming. Well, it's available, too. Mm-hmm.
" So I couldn't be more excited, and our partners are seeing this. "Oh, wow. " So, the accounting firms are really excited what it's going to allow them to do with their customers.
" Absolutely. 30, 35 years. What I've learned about technology design is the best designers design what looks simple to the user because it's very good at shielding the complexity.
Apple. Yeah. of this, right?
Make simple. My wife, our family uses Apple products. It just works, as they used to say.
Yeah. What goes on in the background, they may not even realize. To me, when we talk about Aviator, and there's some of that here, right?
You got two forward-facing agents, and people may think those are the two agents that Avalara has. No, they're just the two forward-facing agents. Yeah.
as you're talking about, that are doing these tasks. Some of them are very single, it's an agent that just does one thing, a single purpose. That's where we're going.
called Avi, cute name. Right. I think we have one here.
Yes, we got him. There's Avi. Mm-hmm.
And it is an orchestrator agent. Mm-hmm. It knows who to call to get stuff done.
Yep. Then they call these specialized agent for different domains. Exactly.
And then these specialized agents are also limited in their knowledge. They know in their domain what to do, and then they call these fleets of agents below, and these fleets of agents are single-purpose agents that kind of know how to do one thing and know how to work with each other as a team. Mm-hmm.
And that's what we've assembled. It's just like a fleet of agents that are guided by an orchestrator who knows how to make amazing music. That's a great way to describe it.
But to me, that's the trademark of great design. Yeah. Make it simple for the user.
they can. But make it simple for the user to accomplish their work. Look, you can't make complex things un-complex, right?
Someone has to... It's like the thermodynamics kind of law. Right.
You can't change that. But that is the mark, I think, of a great product, right? versus out there.
it. Look, it would be very easy for Avalara to say, "We're the leader in this. We've got the scalability, the hospitality industry, the 1099 industry, the sales tax folks, cross-border, E-invoice, they're all using us, right?
" And you could rest it. And look, we've been in business a long time. We've all seen companies that ride that gravy train out.
Yeah. Right? It's a cash cow.
But you guys chose a different path, right? Yeah. You're the CEO.
You're the captain of the ship. Yep. You chose the path to double down.
Yeah. Go forward into the next level. I- Next era, excuse me.
Yeah. No, listen, I feel a very high level of responsibility. What we have built ...
is phenomenal, and the customers and the quality of the product and the employees, and we need to honor all of that. But it also is a platform to go to the next level. " Yeah.
We're going to be relevant in whatever this next chapter of the world is, and it's pretty obvious, unless you're under a rock, AI is going to be central to a lot of things. So I want to shape it. I want to define it.
I want to bring it into the market, and that's why it was so important for us to make the claims we did right now. And by the way, you've had the benefit. A lot of tech conferences talk about their roadmap, about what they want to do.
They've got cool demos. Right. We grew up in those.
Yeah. And I've been guilty as charged- Yeah ... I've done it myself.
This is one of those moments where actually the product actually does this. Right. So we were demoing on stage, working production code.
Amazing. It's pretty sweet. Yeah.
No, it's- It's pretty amazing. It's a great time to be in tech. It's a great time.
Because AI is just- And it's transformative, but I felt so proud of all the work that the team had done- Yeah, it should be ... to be able to come here and... Is it?
No, it's not finished. There's more things. " And we've had a bunch of them throughout the summers.
I've interviewed several. Yeah. They've given us feedback, and they were hard, and there were things we got wrong, and we went back to the lab, and we said, "Oh," and then licked our wound and changed things.
But now it's in a state where it's really, really good. It does things that are delightful. And then you hear, and I mean, I wasn't there for this interview, but I've heard, I was in the rooms throughout the summer, and they- Love it ...
some people are saying like, "These are things that would take me- Game changing ... hours and hours and days where I could never contemplate doing this," and now it's like a simple prompt. You know what?
It was funny, I offered you the chocolate- Yeah ... from my friend in France, chocolates here. Had a great...
So they're not a Fortune 500 company. Yeah. They're an SMB.
Yeah. SME, maybe. Yeah.
Right? As much as this kind of technology will help the Fortune 500, it truly is a lifeline to these companies, because when they are confronted with all of these sales tax cross border, that kind of situations, occupancies, lodging, they don't have the resources to throw at it. They need this- Yeah ...
force multiplier, which Aviator is for them, to just do business. Oh, yeah. Forget thrive, just to do business and not get in trouble with the IRS or anyone else.
This is game changing for them. Yeah. And our goal is to make it easy for them, allow them to scale, but keep them in control.
And listen, at the end of the day, one of the main assets on our balance sheet is the trust we've built with our customers over 22 years. That trust is the most precious thing we have. And we can build on that, but we can't take it for granted.
No. So as we build this new era, and we're building on that trust, where we're trying to protect it, we're trying to be close to our customer and make sure that it compounds and becomes even stronger. I love it.
Hugo, I promised you it would only be 15 minutes. I'm sure we're well over that already. But that's okay.
From my point of view, it's time well spent, but you probably have more valuable things to do. I've enjoyed it. But thanks for coming on here on Techstrong TV.
Look, we live next to each other here in New Haven. We sure do. Yeah.
So we'll continue this conversation, but you do have much to be proud of, man. Thank you. What a great, great job you guys are doing.
Thank you. We're here at Techstrong TV, Avalara CRUSH North America. We've got more coverage coming up.
Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
