Ep 5 - AI for easier tax filing - Daniel Marcous - April

In this episode, we interview Daniel, a CTO who solved two of the most frustrating problems for everyday people - taxes & traffic.

Daniel Marcous is the CTO of April (AI tax-prep software) and ex-CTO of Waze (popular crowdsourced traffic app). This podcast is brought to you by Salad, the world's largest distributed cloud.

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Sound bites:

"So we don't only meet you once a year in April when you need to file your taxes where it's far too late to actually do something impactful, but we accompany you throughout the year in order to save you the big bucks and actually optimize your taxes"

"Taxes need to be 100 % accurate. You can't make mistake one every 100 users. Just not doable. So there's tons of guardrails that we've put basically everywhere so it will be accurate "

"This role called data scientist is going to slowly shrink into becoming something probably not going to remain in existence for longer the way we know it, as the power is being shifted to engineers really, really fast in everything that has to do in AI"

Takeaways

April is an AI-powered tax preparation company that offers tax solutions for financial institutions and individuals.

The use of AI in tax optimization can help individuals save time and money by automating tax planning, tax optimization, and tax filing. Bridging the gap between tax knowledge and technical expertise is crucial in building AI-powered tax software.

The role of data scientists is evolving, and engineers are becoming more involved in AI development.

Cloud costs can be managed by understanding the trade-off between business outcomes and costs and optimizing financial operations.

Choosing an alternate cloud provider should be based on the specific needs of the business and the ability to solve product requirements.

The entry barriers for entering tech are lower, and formal education is becoming less important in the industry.

Daniel's favorite tech gadget is a tag locator, and his favorite way to unwind is by watching anime TV shows.