How Clear is using AI Agents to simplify tax filing in India

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Clear's CTO Suvesh Malhotra highlights the importance of cultural commitment and infrastructure in achieving AI success. After two years of development, the company launched AI tools, including a WhatsApp tax-filing service, demonstrating that genuine utility in AI requires more than just hype.

Suvesh Malhotra, CTO, Cleartax speaks to Abhishek Singh, Dy Editor, LiveMint and his co-panelists at the Salesforce Strategic Leadership Dialogue

Most companies talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the disruption that it is causing, but Suvesh Malhotra, Chief Technology Officer at Clear, believes the real shift happens only when experimentation meets infrastructure. At a recent Salesforce X Mint Leadership Dialogues session, Malhotra pulled back the curtain on how one of India’s leading FinTechs moved beyond the AI hype to build tools that actually work for the average Indian.

The journey has not been travelled overnight. For Clear, it took a combination of bold leadership decisions and two years of heavy lifting behind the scenes to create a platform where AI is no longer just a buzzword, but a fully functional assistant.

The power of commitment and culture

Malhotra emphasised that the first hurdle for any organisation is cultural. For many enterprises, the hesitation to allocate budgets often stems from waiting to see a proven impact, which is a chicken and egg kind-of scenario that can hamper the innovation process.

“Until unless people realise that AI is a reality and force the way to start doing experimentation, I think that transformation does not happen,” Malhotra said. He highlighted a recent internal hackathon at Clear where over 600 employees, including non-technical staff, built more than 100 AI agents in a single day.

This spirit of experimentation is what led Clear to launch an agentic tax-filing service on WhatsApp two years ago, a move that specifically benefited India’s growing gig economy. “A lot of gig workers for the first time had the ability to file taxes easily because WhatsApp was the interface,” he said.

Building the data

While commitment initiates the journey, Malhotra argued that infrastructure is what sustains it. Without a robust way to handle data, AI agents often remain clueless and unable to deliver tangible value to the end user.

To solve this, Clear spent two years developing a proprietary technology called GL Stream. This system connects to various Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms to extract, transform and normalise data, ensuring that AI agents have the necessary context to function effectively.

“Until unless you have the right infrastructure, agents don’t give value,” Malhotra further said. This technological foundation has now been packaged into clear-tax.ai, an AI-native platform designed to assist CFO offices with tax, accounting and complex data harnessing.

The future

The dialogue underscored a clear message for Indian leadership – AI success is a marathon, not a sprint. By combining leadership commitment with a deep investment in data infrastructure, companies can move beyond the hype of AI and into a phase of genuine utility.

As Malhotra concluded, the synergy of these two ingredients, namely commitment and infrastructure, is key to unlocking the future of financial management.

Note to Readers: This article was produced as part of Salesforce's Strategic Leadership Dialogue. Mint is a media partner.

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For about a decade, Livemint—News Desk has been a credible source for authentic and timely news, and well-researched analysis on national news, business, personal finance, corporates, politics and geopolitics. We bring the latest updates on all the listed companies on BSE and NSE, startups, mutual funds, Union ministries, geopolitics, and untapped human interest stories from around the world, helping our readers to stay informed on the latest developments around the globe. Our Coverage Areas 1. Companies: Comprehensive news and analysis on listed and unlisted companies, corporate announcements, corporate chatter, C-suite, business trends, hiring alerts, layoffs, work-life balance, world's top billionaires and richest and more. 2. Personal finance: Insights into mutual funds, small savings schemes like - PPF, SSY, post office savings scheme, stock to watch, personal loans, credit cards, top bank FDs, real estate, income tax and more. 3. Politics: Comprehensive coverage of general elections, state elections and bypolls, Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabha, Parliament, PMO, PIB, finance ministry, home ministry, among other union ministries and government departments. 4. National News: From metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and e to untapped stories from rural India, we cover human interest, health, education, crime and courts, and law and order, among other areas of public interest. 5. Economy: In-depth analysis of India's macro and micro-economic indicators like- GDP, inflation, forex, fiscal deficit, current account deficit, interest rate cycle, economic recovery, RBI circulars, indirect taxes, GST, Insolvency and Bankruptcy imports, exports and everything that impacts Indian economy. 6. Geopolitics: Well-rounded and deeply researched coverage on US News, Oval Office European Union, Ukraine Russia War, middle-east crisis, royal families and global leaders like - Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping and premiers of other leading economies in the world. Meet the Team 1. Gulam Jeelani, Political Affairs Editor 2. Sugam Singhal, Senior Assistant Editor 3. Chanchal, Assistant Editor 4. Sanchari Ghosh, Chief Content Producer 5. Pratik Prashant Mukane, Chief Content Producer 6. Sayantani Biswas, Chief Content Producer 7. Ravi Hari, Deputy Chief Content Producer 8. Garvit Bhirani, Deputy Chief Content Producer 9. Akriti Anand, Senior Content Producer 10. Jocelyn Felix Fernandes, Senior Content Producer 11. Swastika Das Sharma, Content Producer 12. Mausam Jha, Content Producer 13. Riya R Alex, Trainee Content Producer

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