When Adam Tahir ’18 (accounting and finance) was working his first job at Titan Shops as an international student from Pakistan, he completed his first tax form through TurboTax, inputting his W-2. “It was a little scary,” Tahir recalls. “What if I inputted it incorrectly? Would I go to jail if I did it wrong? Would it invalidate my student visa? I called my friend’s dad, who is a CPA, and he assured me I was so bottom of the totem pole that TurboTax was more than sufficient, and no one cared.”
Fast forward a decade, and after more than six years in the international tax practice at Big Four accounting firm EY, the CSUF College of Business and Economics alumnus is now launching Bizora, a major AI-focused tax fintech that aims to be the go-to source for tax questions not only in the U.S. but around the world. Bizora V1.0, a simple AI-assistant focused on answering straightforward tax queries, launched in February, with a flagship debut on June 30. A broader more intelligent model is expected at the end of the year.
“This new AI assistant stores and analyzes hundreds of thousands of tax documents from across the web,” explains Tahir. “Every few months, we scrape everything and upload again. And this ranges from the IRC code to the state documents and tax forms. When tax professionals use Bizora, they can get annotated citations on tax questions. That’s a big help because veteran competitors such as Bloomberg charge about $5,000 per user and their work style hasn’t changed since the 1970s. Deep tax research from ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude is only about 5% accurate. Basic tax research online is about 75% accurate. We want to be 95% accurate by the end of the year.”
As in most fields, Tahir sees a path for AI to replace much of the traditional human research, but this will require much better models and machine training than what exists presently. Tahir hopes Bizora will be central to this revolution.
Giving back to Cal State Fullerton is central to Tahir’s mission. While working for EY, where his partner was a fellow CSUF accounting grad, Tahir regularly supported the accounting program at CSUF and spoke at a master’s seminar encouraging accounting undergrads to consider the M.S. in Taxation graduate program.
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