HMRC has become one of Britain’s biggest AI employers
Key Points
- HMRC issued 28,000+ Microsoft Copilot licences by March 2026, scaling to 50,000 during 2026
- Ask HMRC digital assistant handled 6.3 million interactions in 2025 to 2026
- AI now used for call summarisation, complaint triage, fraud detection and property valuation
- HMRC targets 90% digital customer interactions by 2030, up from 78%
HMRC’s Transformation Roadmap update, published on Thursday (2 July), shows that the department had issued more than 28,000 Microsoft Copilot licences to staff by March 2026.
This is one of the largest rollouts anywhere in UK government, with plans to reach 50,000 by the end of 2026.
The licences are another example of an organisation systematically threading AI through nearly every function it performs, from answering the phone to hunting tax evaders.
HMRC’s digital assistant, Ask HMRC, handled more than 6.3 million interactions during the 2025 to 2026 tax year, and the department said work was underway to make it fully conversational – able to parse questions asked in a customer’s own words rather than forcing them through menu trees.
Behind the scenes, the department has been piloting AI that automatically summarises customer calls, triages complaints to route them to the right team, and even simulates difficult customers so that advisers can rehearse awkward conversations against a machine before facing a real one.
Using AI for compliance
HMRC said it was also developing tools to “assist, automate and accelerate” the work of compliance officers, alongside AI-powered systems that give caseworkers rapid guidance and more advanced mechanisms for spotting fraudulent documents.
In 2025, HMRC ran its first Closing the Tax Gap competition, inviting private firms to pitch AI and data science approaches to catching deliberate evasion. Two companies were awarded 12-month pilot contracts.
The department has also built testing environments filled with AI-generated synthetic data, allowing it, and its private-sector partners, to experiment with new tools without exposing real taxpayer records.
A new internal programme, PATH (Pioneering Advanced Technology in HMRC), applies a start-small, scale-fast philosophy to deploying whatever proves useful.
Even property valuation is being automated. The Valuation Office, which became part of HMRC in April 2026, is expanding its use of automated valuation models and an AI mail-sorting system called SmartMail, with a projected £8 million in efficiency savings by 2030.
HMRC’s stated ambition is a tax system where at least 90% of customer interactions are digital by 2030, up from 78% now. The unstated corollary is a tax authority where a growing share of the work is done by machines, with humans supervising rather than executing.
The department insisted skilled caseworkers would always make final decisions, but it’s clear that the future of British tax administration is being drafted, in part, by Copilot.
