Sam Guevara Of Ryan: How We Leveraged AI To Take Our Company To The Next Level

In the ever-evolving and never-ending landscape of business, staying ahead of the curve is a prerequisite for success. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from being a futuristic concept to a daily business tool that executives can’t ignore. In this interview series, we would like to talk with business leaders who’ve successfully integrated A.I. into their operations, transforming their companies in the process. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Guevara.

For more than 20 years, Sam Guevara has transformed clients’ tax operations and improved performance through the use of technology, automation, and process improvements. He is currently Principal and Vice Practice Leader of Tax Technology at Ryan, where he leads a team specializing in providing innovative tax technology solutions ranging from emerging technologies to data and analytics to augmented intelligence.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! To set the stage, tell us briefly about your childhood and background.

Well, I am a true Gen X-er — I grew up in a divorced household where my dad was an entrepreneur and huge old school team sports fan and my mom was head of HR for an organization; I have four sisters. This type of childhood made me consistently look and prepare for new opportunities. I always looked to contribute as a team member and valued people for their alternative opinions.

From my upbringing, I grew up more rapidly than others my age and played a role model for my sisters. This included making decisions and maturing well beyond my years. It was this type of environment that built the foundation for many of the core values I live by today.

What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?

When I played baseball in college, I was a utility player — a typical “jack of all trades, master of none.” As a senior state tax auditor, I supported several industries without a targeted focus on one specific industry segment. Working in technology, I was very curious and able to produce intriguing ideas but could never get to the right answers by myself.

These experiences all combined to define me as the person and leader I am today. Being able to approach a problem from a variety of angles, being naturally curious about what people do and how they do it, and being able to effectively communicate with people much smarter than me to help solve problems have shaped my leadership style.

We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one mistake that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?

I was very fortunate to have this happen early on in my career. Early in my public accounting career, I had to terminate an underperforming resource. The termination process didn’t go well, and this person left with a bad experience both personally and professionally. Two years later, this person was at a prospective client opportunity and was an influencer in the decision-making process for our technology services. Unfortunately, we were not engaged for any services, but it taught me a lesson that everyone you come across in your professional career can have an impact on your success. Treat people with dignity, respect, and value all their contributions regardless of their known impact. You never know when their ideas, position, or knowledge can be contributors to your success.

A.I. is a big leap for many businesses. When and what first sparked your interest in incorporating it into your operations?

In my current world at Ryan, a global tax services and software Firm, we live in a world of transaction tax complexities such as “what is it that you are buying or selling?”, “where are you sourcing that tax?”, and “how is that item being used?”. With the amount of publicly available data, AI has paved the road for the amount of data a user now has access to for making the right decision.

At Ryan, we started with product mapping, which allowed us to leverage large language models (LLMs) to enrich an incoherent product description into something that a tax user could understand. This enrichment could include other attributes such as manufacturer, size, weight, ingredients, etc. An age-old problem in the world of tax is now being solved through AI capabilities.

Now, we have turned our sights to more complex issues that have arisen from the digital age, such as where a transaction should be sourced based on our digital mobility. If I am accessing technology, applications, or other digital content in various jurisdictions through a mobile device, where should I source my tax? Years ago, this wasn’t even a discussion because the technology and data were not available operationally without a significant number of complexities. Today, we are using IP [Internet Protocol] addresses and geolocation tracking information available from our clients’ IT systems to augment the information critical for making the correct tax determinations. With this type of technology, data analysis, and our product mapping AI capabilities, we are seeing significant tax savings for our clients.

AI can be a game-changer for individuals and their responsibilities. Can you share how you personally use AI and what are your go-to resources or tools?

I spend a significant amount of time developing customized demonstrations of technology-based solutions for clients. Most of these solutions require datasets and presentations that are sizable, unique, and have a specific level of authenticity to them. I am now able to leverage AI for the creation of these datasets and presentations that help in modeling out real business and tax scenarios and to understand how our solutions can solve these scenarios without touching or leveraging sensitive client data.

My preference of tools includes the popular ChatGPT, OpenAI, and DALL-E.

On the flip side, what challenges or setbacks have you encountered while implementing A.I. into your company?

Developing what we at Ryan call Augmented Intelligence solutions comes with hills and valleys. When we develop tools that use this kind of intelligence, we are always thinking about protecting our clients’ data, protecting our intellectual property, and ensuring that the tool is accurate and we follow all ethical and legal guidelines. One of the biggest challenges to this process can be time. We see a demand in the marketplace for a smarter solution, or our clients may have a specific need, but these tools that leverage augmented intelligence cannot be built overnight. It takes time, which can be one of the most challenging elements to tackle.

Let’s dig into this further. Can you share the top 5 A.I. tools or different ways you’re integrating AI into your business? What specific functions do they serve and what kind of result have you seen so far? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1. Product Mapping — Solution for determining what an item is at a line-item level based on a poorly constructed item description within a financial document such as a sales or purchase invoice. We continue to work through enriching data with elements that can help a large language model, such as ChatGPT, understand what something is by using other data elements such as manufacturer, marketing descriptions, data sheets, product ingredients, etc.

2. IP Geocoding — Tool and solution for determining location of digital users. A significant breakthrough for Ryan where we have developed various solutions that drive the location of a person’s usage of cloud-based software, IT infrastructure, and hardware peripherals. This solution has multiple tax type impacts and is critical, considering today’s mobile workforce.

3. Transaction Tax Decisioning — Multifaceted solution that evaluates transactional data elements, regulatory statutes for taxability, historic decisions, and other data attributes for making tax determinations with a high degree of precision.

4. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) — Tool and solution that aligns with Ryan’s digital transformation. Ryan is the market leader for transaction tax consulting services across various tax domains (indirect, severance, property, credits and incentives, etc.), and our key objectives are to build capabilities where we can digitize documents and provide the data elements from these documents for various tax determinations or enrichment to other business processes.

5. Teams and Zoom Business Process Documentation — Tool and solution for leveraging inherent AI tools, such as Copilot and Zoom AI, for aggregating key pieces of transcribed data as well as leveraging other AI solutions to build critical project documentation such as requirements, data visualizations, and process workflows.

There’s concern about A.I. taking over jobs. How do you balance A.I. tools with your human workforce and have you already replaced any positions using technology?

I am extremely proud to be at a Firm that has never had any reductions in force (RIFs) in its history regardless of economic conditions or technological advancements. At Ryan, we strongly believe in AI as augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. AI is not a replacement for people but rather an enabler for our people to generate ideas, have a quicker process to come to those ideas, and scale much faster because these tools empower entrepreneurialism.

Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon in the world of AI that people should know about? What do you see happening in the next 3–5 years? I would love to hear your best prediction.

I will speak from a transaction tax perspective since there are so many areas where AI will have an impact. As AI becomes more commonplace within our governments, there will be more urgency to create tax revenues through increased taxpayer compliance. With newly developed AI solutions, there will be a broad spectrum of accuracy resulting from technology firms, contracted by governments for their AI solutions, that aren’t experienced in the nuanced world of transaction taxes.

In the world of transaction taxes, there is a need to have deep tax technical experience established in “Human in the Loop” reviews for transaction data where the answer may not be supplied in the data but in other sources of information. It is this scenario where the ultimate leader in this tax domain will be determined. The firm or company that can leverage significant amounts of historic transaction and tax data within its AI capabilities, reach into a deep bench of tax subject matter experts, and pivot quickly based on complex regulatory changes will be a significant player within this space.

If you had to pick just one AI tool that you feel is essential, one that you haven’t mentioned yet, which would it be and why?

AI tools like LM Studio and Ollama are essential for non-technology people who want to begin their AI journey without being burdened with the complexities of technology.

The hardest part of AI at times is being able to be extremely descriptive with a concept or idea. We live in a world of texting, instant messaging, and other forms of shortened communication where many people using AI have stopped or never had to use that level of detail before. These introductory applications for AI will help someone to sharpen their skills with a less intimidating approach to AI.

For the uninitiated, what advice would you give someone looking to integrate AI into their business and doesn’t know where to start?

I think it always starts with understanding your basics for automation: where do you spend your time, do you have enough people to do that function, and is the data available for you to solve this problem easily.

Charting out these problems, putting a weight and impact to solving them across the organization, or as a market viable solution, and then evaluating where AI can be impactful are always where I tend to start.

Where can our readers follow you to learn more about leveraging A.I. in the business world?

We are always sharing what Ryan is up to on our website, ryan.com, and on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on LinkedIn or, if you have any business inquiries, email me at sam.guevara@ryan.com.

This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com