IBM’s Watson Tackles Your Taxes
H&R Block is enlisting the supercomputer and Jeopardy veteran to hang out with you and your tax preparer and ... notice stuff.
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H&R Block is out to wrest back market share from its online tax-prep rivals with such aggressive measures as free services and interest-free advances on refunds—oh, and plunking a supercomputing Jeopardy star down on the desks of its 70,000 tax preparers.
For this tax season, H&R Block has put an additional computer screen on each preparer's desk, facing the customer, and hired IBM's famous Watson computer to control what's on it. Watson's goal is to solve a problem that plagues all tax preparers, both in person and online: human error.