Singer Equipment Puts Agentic Tax Compliance to Work | Avalara CRUSH 2026

Hey everyone. We're back here at the Omni in Fort Lauderdale covering Avalara CRUSH North America. It's a great conference.

We've been having some great conversations, so much learning going on, and it really amazes me when you dig into a particular vertical or a particular segment of market, but what you see there carries over across the whole market. I want to introduce you to my next guest. Her name is Priya Chandan, and Priya is with the Singer Equipment company.

And let's welcome Priya first of all. Priya, thanks for joining us here at Avalara CRUSH. It's so nice to have you here.

My pleasure. Yes. How's the conference been so far?

I know it only started this morning, basically, but how's it going? This morning has been phenomenal, actually. The energy was just absolutely amazing.

Yeah. That video that they showed just introducing Aviator with- The "Top Gun" video? It was fantastic.

I just had the two guys here before you- Yeah ... with their "Top Gun" jackets and everything. I thought it was actually a live action movie- Oh, yeah ...

with the energy and the bursting end of... And they brought a live bike in. I was just told that the bike had no fuels in it, but- Not allowed.

Right. Sure. I asked if we could actually see it live and go for a ride, because that looks absolutely amazing.

It looked very cool, yeah. Only if they give you one of those jackets, though. I don't know if I wanted an orange jumpsuit, but- Well, the jumpsuit, no, but they had beautiful leather Barbour jackets with sheepskin.

Yes. They looked pretty. Yeah, they looked good.

Very sassy, actually. Yeah. But, Priya, I wanted to give our audience a sense of you, right?

What's your role with Singer Equipment? I'm a senior tax accountant. And give us a...

You don't have to go into a lot of detail, and I don't mean to embarrass you, but give us your journey. Give us a sense of how you got here. So, my exposure to sort indirect tax has been from EY.

And from EY, that was in New York. I moved from New York, and then I came here to Pennsylvania just before the pandemic, and I worked for only just several companies prior to that. And then from there, I'm here at Singer Equipment.

I've only been here for approximately 18 months. But the journey in itself has been instrumental. This company has been in existence for over 100 years.

It started off as a mom-and-pop store, and they've grew exponentially through mergers and acquisitions. Because of the growth and placing themselves number one in so many places in the market, our tax landscape has not necessarily played catch up, and that's the absolute truth. We've used a lot of band-aid situations and all that stuff before.

But we've been an Avalara customer since 2011. Oh, right. Just coming in, this is my third company working with Avalara, so I've been...

You want to end-to-end all of the technology, the different platforms, what they can do. So for right now, we're using Avalara for certificate management, which is absolutely growing, the AvaTax portion of it, the transactional analysis, and most recently, we've added the ATR, the research tool. Now, I like to tell people that I'm an accountant and the accountant of books.

And so this tool itself has been an interesting evolution, I should say. It's great to not have to go to 15 different places to find that one answer where it's here. Mm-hmm.

And what I like about this also is that it takes you to the most recent authority. Everybody has an opinion. If you put a question out there, most times they'll give you a response.

A search engine or a research tool will give you that response. But what I wanted was that independent collaborator, and I got that from this. And so I like that.

I like that I can speak to all the jurisdictional authorities with their own authority, and here is where I'm getting this from. This is not someone's opinion or go to see if this person is a creditor. So it was, this, it has been an impressive tool, and this has been an impressive journey altogether, bringing all of this together.

It's a lot to unpack there. Sorry. It's okay.

Let's take it one... You know what they say about how do you eat an elephant, right? One spoonful at a time.

Let's take this one spoonful at a time. Want to talk a little bit about Singer Equipment. You said they grew by M&A.

Give us an idea of the kinds of businesses they're in. Yeah. They're probably in all different facets of all different industries.

Restaurants, stadiums, schools. So any of the designs and kitchens and the equipment also, they're probably there, probably here, and on the... We never know.

But there are two sets of business that, or streams of income. It's a distribution business, which is the selling of the actual equipment- Mm-hmm ... which is like your stove, your refrigerators, your- Appliances and so forth.

And then the actual installation portion or contract side. Sort of a services. Right.

So, and some of the work that we've done, sorry, I can't recall any by name right now, but some of the work that we've done has been quite impressive. You mentioned the let's call it hodgepodge patchwork nature of where you guys were with taxes and compliance, which is not unusual for a company that does a lot of M&A. Mm-hmm.

Because you kind of take your acquisitions where you find them, and they bring baggage with them, right? And there's always a period. You know what they say about M&A, the first six months, leave it alone after you close, and then you can start integration.

And so there is this integration period where you do try to standardize on company-wide platforms, but it's not unusual in an M&A-built company to support a plethora of different platforms, of different software programs, of different processes and policies. Of course, it's a nightmare, right, from a management point of view, because you do want to try to standardize. And that sounds like something that Avalara, not even talking about the new AI product, Avalara itself lent itself well because it covered almost every contingency that you guys were running into.

Of course. Yeah. They've actually really have been the anchor that we needed, and they're continuously growing, and I'm so happy to be a part of this.

I can't tell you how excited I am to personally be a part of this and this new Aviator, this new platform. Right. It's not telling you how to do the work.

You can get so many instructions on how to do the work, but it's to actually have executable actions. Right. And that's the game changer in itself.

Yeah. Well, I think what you just described is the difference between, let's say, gen AI, generative AI, versus agentic, right? Agentic, generative AI, was very good at telling you- Right ...

" And I think the switch that we've kind of thrown is, "Okay, go make that happen now. Make it so," as Captain Picard would say, right? " Now you, Singer Equipment and yourself, you guys were kind of early adopter beta customer, because the product, to be fair, the product's not even in GA yet.

Correct. Right? It's coming in the next week or two.

But you've been using it for some time now through all the- ... the betas and give us a little bit. Have you moved from using it more as a GenAI advisor to actually deploying the agents?

Oh, yeah, definitely. So when I first started using it, obviously with anything new, you don't know the platform enough to actually- Trust it ... all of its features, and trust was definitely one of the core factors in there.

Mm-hmm. But going in, it had a lot of hiccups personally. It was the inability to download subset of reports, and the inability to access both companies at the same time.

Because right now we do have, of the different divisions across the country, we only have two of our entities that are actually on the platform. And it was not able to see that upfront. So during my testing and reviewing, and then they start making this happen, and it was like, wow, really?

I'm able to do an analysis or to see everything clearly on my dashboard without having to download a report, complete one analysis, and then do a comparative analysis with the other company. I was able to see that right there on one screen, and that was pretty impressive. But as I keep using it, it got more intelligent.

And I will say, though, that this is using our data. It's not taking data, for example, from somebody else's. And it was that confidence, the integrity, and the availability of this to actually say, "Okay, here's your data.

This is your data. " And it is also having that availability. I love it.

I want to talk to you about scalability, because to me that was a little counterintuitive. Because certainly it seems to me that an AI has a greater capacity to encompass a large volume of data and do an analysis on it than, let's say, a human can. But that's not your experience here.

That it really wasn't able to get its hands around, for lack of a better word. The system itself does come with its own limitation. And so you can't really necessarily download these large files because Excel can only- Well, this is true.

Right. So you have to take that into account to account for the scalability of what the ask is. So if the limitations or the limiters actually are with the platform itself, then you can't go beyond that.

So, it is that same analysis though in processing that volume of information at one go. So it's best to actually break it up into pieces. You can still do a comparative analysis as so.

Sure you can. Where would you like to see this go? I think the direction is already projected as being futuristic.

And I think what it's mastering right now is exactly where I will see it happening. So it's not that it's something that a goal of mine that is somewhat yet to be achieved, it's just that it's already achieved. It's just mastering that.

So in most cases, the states also themselves are actually using AI tools for audits. So how can we actually use it on the flip side for audit defensible material? Sure.

And so it is already doing that. It's already taking our data, interpret it in a certain way, and we can definitely defend this. This is the reason why you made this decision, and here is how this is applicable, so.

Mm-hmm. One of the nice things about Aviator and the whole way the system is built is it's both modular and expandable, meaning that the agents, and I don't know if you know how many agents exist. There's the front agents that you're dealing with, if you will, but there's probably over 100 agents, different kinds of agents in the back end of Aviator.

But the idea is that this goes beyond sales tax compliance, some of what the mission is now. Because once you have this level of intelligence, I can't think of a better word, I was trying to think of a substitute. Once you have this level of intelligence brought to bear with access, there's more to be done.

Of course. Indeed. And it didn't actually do just that.

It explored the impossibilities and things that, or look at the direction that I would normally not have thought of. So it really did just that. It took my data, it made it into executable actions, and then it asked for exploring all the insights.

And yeah, it is definitely intelligent, and that is exactly what I would say. I love it. I'm just trying to think, if you wouldn't mind...

Well, let me ask one other question too. Look, we're all hearing stories about security and Mythos and the Hugging Face incident, and the security of agents and AI. How much did that factor into you using the product?

I have absolute confidence, and absolute may not be in a scientific world might not be appropriate to use because there's always a margin of error, and there is always, again, that margin of error with anything. And anything we've done today in a tech world, we've had that footprint. There is still that degree of fear that it's going to be exposed somewhere, somehow.

But Avalara in itself as a company, in its ecosystem, have built the platforms in such a manner that you can have that confidence. You can go to bed and sleep soundly knowing that at least I know my data is not going to be shared, or what I've done with my data is not going to be shared. And it's my data and it's my company, and it's not going somebody else into perils.

So, yeah, it was there, but it's not a mind-boggling fear factor that played a significant role in anything that I did. Excellent. Priya, I want to thank you for coming out here, and I want to thank Singer Equipment for allowing you to participate openly here.

And congratulations to you for all you're doing and your experience so far in the world of agentic AI, right? Thank you so much. It's my pleasure.

All right. Priya Chandon here on Techstrong TV. We've got more coverage from CRUSH coming your way, so stay tuned.