Stay Curious, Take Responsibility: AI & High-Performance Tax Teams | Christian Klein
Christian Klein, VP Accounting, Reporting and Tax at Autodoc, joins Tax Leaders Unplugged to discuss how he is using AI to scale a finance and tax function under two-digit growth, and why culture decides whether that works. He shares:
- How Autodoc moved from collecting 60 AI ideas to 5 products in development, 2 of them already live, by enabling people before buying tools.
- Real outcomes, including a daily reconciliation cut from 3 hours to 5 minutes and a standing target of at least 20% efficiency gains a year.
- What it took to keep a 6,000-hour year-end audit on track after losing his accounting director with one week's notice.
Key Insights and Learnings:
- Enable people first, pick tools second. Autodoc ran a finance-team survey, opened an AI "garage", held weeklys, teach-ins and a hackathon capped at 30 seats, then attached a business case and return on investment to each use case before going live.
- Build in-house where you can. Autodoc ran 2 to 3 proof-of-concepts with an external AI vendor over 3 months, built the same thing in-house with its IT team, and got a more robust, more reliable, more steerable result with no price tag attached.
- Watch the vendor pricing model. Some providers charge a transaction fee of 20% to 30% of the efficiency gain, so Christian checks every use case against its own business case. Finance and tax rarely show the euro savings that justify that.
- The tax advisor qualification still pays off. AI can now pass the German chartered tax advisor exam, but Christian argues the qualification still builds the judgement to see where the obstacles and risks sit.
- Resilience comes from culture. A core team of 5 absorbed the director's workload and delivered the audit faster, with no surprises, because the environment lets people step into a gap when something is burning.
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Where to find Christian Klein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ch-klein
Where to find Stevi Frooninckx: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevifrooninckx
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[00:00] Introduction. Who is Christian Klein, VP Accounting, Reporting and Tax at Autodoc.
[00:44] Life outside tax. Family, repairing an old convertible, golf, a new mountain bike and learning guitar.
[02:49] Two months in Bali and Lombok with the family, phone switched off, and not remembering which office floor he worked on.
[04:56] The career path. From PwC audit in Frankfurt into industry at Home24, and why audit left him wanting ownership of the outcome.
[07:23] Earning the chartered tax advisor licence, then taking on the tax team alongside accounting, and combining the finance and tax worlds.
[09:10] The SAP implementation in 8 months, with end-to-end tests run through to the tax return to protect VAT across 19 million orders a year.
[11:25] Is the tax advisor qualification still worth it now AI can pass the exam? A colleague's move from exams to n8n and Python.
[16:19] Saving time at scale. The AR reconciliation cut from 3 hours to 5 minutes, and the 20% annual efficiency target.
[18:36] How to start with AI. The survey, the AI garage, teach-ins, hackathon, 60 ideas, business cases, and building in-house versus buying.
[24:42] Handling fear in the team. Taking the scary moment away and turning sceptics into the core AI team.
[27:12] Where the freed-up time actually goes, and a tax leader's duty to use it well.
[29:39] Tax authorities and AI. Receiving the requirements but not yet seeing the data put to use.
[33:15] Audits as a learning tool. Treating findings as the basis for improving the organisation.
[34:54] Unlocking budget. Working with compliance case by case, and funding an exploratory garage.
[37:00] The coming AI sales funnel, where the assistant buys the spare part for the customer.
[42:29] The high-performance team. Running a 6,000-hour audit a person down, and why culture is the secret.
[45:43] One piece of advice. Stay curious and take on responsibility.
