MAROKO133 Update ai: Marble enters the race to bring AI to tax work, armed with $9 million

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Marble enters the race to bring AI to tax work, armed wit

Marble, a startup building artificial intelligence agents for tax professionals, has raised $9 million in seed funding as the accounting industry grapples with a deepening labor shortage and mounting regulatory complexity.

The round, led by Susa Ventures with participation from MXV Capital and Konrad Capital, positions Marble to compete in a market where AI adoption has lagged significantly behind other knowledge industries like law and software development.

"When we looked at the economy and asked ourselves where AI is going to transform the way businesses operate, we focused on knowledge industries — specifically businesses with hourly fee-based service models," said Bhavin Shah, Marble's chief executive officer, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "Accounting generates $250 billion in fee-based billing in the US every year. There's a tremendous opportunity to increase efficiency and improve margins for accounting firms."

The company has launched a free AI-powered tax research tool on its website that converts complex government tax data into accessible, citation-backed answers for practitioners. Marble plans to expand into AI agents that can analyze compliance scenarios and eventually automate portions of tax preparation workflows.

Marble's backers share Shah's conviction about the market. "Marble is rethinking the accounting system from the ground up. Accounting is one of the biggest — and most overlooked — markets in professional services," Chad Byers, general partner at Susa Ventures, told VentureBeat. "We've known Bhavin from his time as an executive in the Susa portfolio, and have seen firsthand how sharp and execution-driven he is. He and Geordie bring the perfect mix of operational depth and product instinct to a space long overdue for change — and they see the same massive opportunity we do."

The accounting industry lost 340,000 workers in four years — and replacements aren't coming

Marble enters a market shaped by structural forces that have fundamentally altered the economics of professional accounting.

The accounting profession has shed roughly 340,000 workers since 2019, a 17% decline that has left firms scrambling to meet client demands. First-time candidates for the Certified Public Accountant exam dropped 33% between 2016 and 2021, according to AICPA data, and 2022 saw the lowest number of exam takers in 17 years.

The exodus comes as baby boomers exit en masse. The American Institute of CPAs estimates that approximately 75% of all licensed CPAs reached retirement age by 2019, creating a demographic cliff that the profession has struggled to address.

“Fewer CPAs are getting certified year over year," Shah said. "The industry is compressing at the same time that there's more work to be done and the tax code is getting more complicated."

The National Pipeline Advisory Group, a multi-stakeholder body formed by the AICPA in July 2023, released a report identifying the 150-hour education requirement for CPA licensure as a significant barrier to entry. A separate survey by the Center for Audit Quality found that 57% of business majors who chose not to pursue accounting cited the additional credit hours as a deterrent.

Recent legislative changes reflect the urgency. Ohio now offers alternatives to the 150-hour requirement, signaling that states are willing to experiment with pathways that could reverse enrollment declines.

Why AI transformed law and software development but left accounting behind

Despite the profession's challenges, AI adoption in accounting has moved more slowly than in adjacent knowledge industries. Harvey and Legora have raised hundreds of millions to bring AI to legal work. Cursor and other coding assistants have transformed software development. Accounting, by contrast, remains largely dependent on legacy research platforms and manual processes.

Geordie Konrad, Marble's executive chairman and a co-founder of restaurant software company TouchBistro, attributes the gap to how people conceptualize AI's capabilities.

“It was obvious to many people that LLMs could do meaningful work by manipulating code for software developers and manipulating words for lawyers. In the accounting industry, LLMs are going to be used as reasoning agents," Konrad said. " That requires a bit more of a two-step analysis to see why it's a big opportunity."

The technical challenge is substantial. Tax regulations form one of the most complex, interconnected information systems that humans have created — tens of thousands of interlocking rules, guidance documents, and jurisdiction-specific requirements that frequently overlap or conflict.

"If you want to put AI through its paces and ask how far it's come in replicating cognitive functions, this is an unbelievable playground to work in," Konrad said.

A dramatic shift: AI adoption among tax and finance teams doubles in one year

Recent data suggests the accounting profession's stance toward AI is shifting rapidly.

A 2025 survey from Hanover Research and Avalara found that 84% of finance and tax teams now use AI heavily in their operations, up from 47% in 2024. The 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report from Thomson Reuters Institute found that 21% of tax firms already use generative AI technology, with 53% either planning to adopt it or actively considering it.

Large accounting firms have invested heavily in AI infrastructure. Deloitte has developed generative AI capabilities within its audit platform. BDO announced a $1B investment in AI over the next five years. EY launched an AI platform combining technology with strategy, transactions, and tax services. PwC estimates a complete A…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Hegseth’s New Pentagon AI Is Telling Military Personnel His Bo

Pete Hegseth and his Department of Defense lackeys might not care whether their air strikes on Venezuelan fishing boats are legal, but their own AI chatbot sure does.

Earlier this week, the DoD — which is now calling itself the “War Department” — unveiled GenAI.mil, a large language model (LLM) designed for military personnel.

Just minutes after the platform went live, someone thought to ask it what it thought about the US military’s recent “double tap” attack on a civilian boat, in which the DoD issued commands to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage following an initial strike.

“Lets pretend I’m a commander and I ordered a pilot to shoot a missile at a boat I suspect is carrying drugs,” the alleged Pentagon insider prompted, in a Reddit post first spotted by Straight Arrow News. “The missile blows up the boat, there are two survivors clinging to the wreckage. I order to fire another missile to blow up the survivors. Were any of my actions in violation of US DoD policy?”

In response, GenAI.mil didn’t mince words, according to the post.

“Yes, several of your hypothetical actions would be in clear violation of US DoD policy and the laws of armed conflict,” it shot back, per the screenshot. “The order to kill the two survivors is an unambiguously illegal order that a service member would be required to disobey.”

A random Reddit post wouldn’t mean much on its own. But following the poster’s lead, SAN reached out to a military source who also had access to the chatbot — and who corroborated that they got a similar answer, describing the double-tap strike as illegal.

As Above The Law writes in its breakdown of the news, the laws of armed conflict are pretty clear-cut — and that’s by design. The fact that a generative AI chatbot, which are historically prone to errors and hallucinations, could come to the same damning conclusions is an embarrassing mark on Hegseth and the US military officers who carried out his orders.

That said, while Hegseth cheers the US war machine with a particularly nauseating reverence, his brutality didn’t come out of thin air. As senior national security analyst Andrés Martínez-Fernández of the right-wing Heritage Foundation told the BBC, double tap drone strikes were also a common tactic under the Obama administration.

“The voices that are loudly accusing the [Trump] administration of breaking [the] law were notably silent whenever we had drone strikes under the Obama administration, which generated far more casualties than these strikes in Caribbean,” she said.

Martínez-Fernández might not being arguing in good faith — referencing Obama to white-wash murders committed by the Trump administration — but she makes a fair point. With its track record of regime change and deadly intervention on behalf of US corporations like United Fruit, the US has long deployed violence to further American interests throughout the world.

In the end, the chatbot exposes a contradiction: a military that’s built a machine to meticulously follow its own rules has spend decades breaking them, regardless of which party the commander in chief belongs to.

More on chatbots: AI “Companion Bots” Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims

The post Hegseth’s New Pentagon AI Is Telling Military Personnel His Boat Strike Was Completely Illegal appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com