The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is implementing a Salesforce artificial intelligence (AI) agent program across multiple divisions in the wake of a mass workforce reduction earlier this year, according to a report.
The tax-collecting agency will deploy Agentforce in the Office of Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and the Office of Appeals, Salesforce executive vice president of global public sector solutions Paul Tatum told Axios in a report published Friday.
The announcement comes after the IRS slashed its workforce by at least 25% earlier this year as the Trump administration worked to shrink the size of the federal government.
Tatum said the AI agents are built with “a lot of guardrails” and are not authorized to make “final decisions” or “disperse funds.”
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“Salesforce doesn’t advocate for a blind AI processing tax returns without a human being involved in reviewing and supplementing it,” he told the outlet.
The program is designed to help overworked IRS staff process customer requests more quickly and efficiently, Tatum added.
FOX Business reached out to the IRS and Salesforce for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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Rob Fitzpatrick, senior counsel in the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, said the agency began modernizing its decades-old systems in 2023. He called the move to AI both inevitable and competitive.
“I think all of us have to realize that the change is coming,” Fitzpatrick told Axios, adding the layoffs likely stemmed from multiple factors. “You either adopt the change and make yourself more efficient so you can produce more work, or you don’t—and you leave.”
Alongside this year’s layoffs, the IRS said it was also disbanding its Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, which handles discrimination protections, audits and investigations. Remaining staff were reassigned.
At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the IRS employed about 100,000 people. Since then, roughly 12,000 have left — 7,000 fired during probation and another 5,000 departing within Trump’s first three months in office.
By contrast, the Biden administration had previously expanded the IRS workforce by about 20,000 to increase the amount of tax revenue collected by the agency.
Fox Business’ Daniella Genovese and Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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