ClearTax supports more than 200,000 gig workers filing their taxes with Azure OpenAI Service

Simplifying finance on a grand scale

Founded in 2011, ClearTax leads with a clear mission to help millions of Indian citizens and businesses save money and time while they navigate necessary but often arduous financial tasks. It does so by building trusted, useful, and insightful platforms for its clients to manage and simplify their finances and improve their relationship with money. The company entered the market with an income tax filing platform and now offers a full suite of financial services including goods and services tax (GST) filing, invoicing, and mutual funds.  

As much a financial services company as it is a technology company, ClearTax experiments with generative AI and other state-of-the-art technologies for new products. It pioneered those efforts within its B2C business and plans to port the learnings and product success into its B2B vertical. After ClearTax gained confidence working with AI agents, it shifted to making a product that could scale across tens of millions of users. The result, born at a company hackathon, is a generative AI-powered, WhatsApp-based income tax filing application targeting low-income and first-time filers—many of them gig workers. 

More than 20 million Indians find themselves in this group where a part of their hard-earned money gets deducted as tax. They are unable to claim it back, having never filed a tax return due to various barriers. The process has traditionally created confusion among gig workers who may think tax deductions are coming from their employer rather than the government. For its part, the government has faced difficulty tapping into this market and onboarding gig workers into its services, making ClearTax’s offering a first-time product that could unlock an entirely new audience for the technology and financial systems in India. 

Within two months of the company’s first tax season with the generative AI platform live, ClearTax had helped more than 200,000 people with filing their returns, with a combined INR300 million (USD3.4 million) in refunds made eligible to customers as a tax benefit. “Our greatest problem was the virality of the product and having to scramble to serve the scale that kicked in intrinsically without us having to do much,” explains Satwik Gokina, Senior Data Science Manager at ClearTax. “That is where Microsoft Azure came into the picture.” 

Responding to virality with advanced models, hands-on support 

To maintain stability as more customers came to the platform, especially during spikes in the final days of the tax filing season, ClearTax needed a robust cloud platform that supports the latest and most advanced language models alongside strong function calling capabilities. These needs led ClearTax directly to GPT models and Azure OpenAI Service.  

Prior to Azure OpenAI Service, ClearTax found itself rapidly hitting usage limits, despite selecting the largest tiers from an earlier provider. “We were stuck at an impasse where our traffic was doubling nearly every four hours and we didn’t know who to contact,” explains Gokina. “The Azure team was completely game and jumped on a call to outline the process and solve for our problem. From there, we had access to a highly secure consumer scale platform.”  

ClearTax and Microsoft worked together to get new services running, expand those services across dozens of geographies, and ultimately enter and execute an enterprise agreement. “In every instance, we were laying down the tracks as the train was coming on to it, and our Azure team was really vital to the product’s success,” says Gokina. “No startup would say no to virality, so keeping the lights on was the first focus and our leaders were very thankful for it.” 

Adapting and responding to customers in the palms of their hands 

For anything chat-based, applications have to be able to adapt to users and all their variable inputs. “The driver of our whole workflow is AI,” explains Gokina. “If we’re expecting a customer to first share their date of birth and then their tax identification number but they start at a completely different place, we’re able to respond.” ClearTax used the latest Azure OpenAI Service GPT-series language models, reducing its costs by more than 600 times it reached the live iteration. “The GPT-4o mini model is working very well, it is cost efficient and gives us the confidence that we can scale to any number of products because costs are not an issue,” says Nitin Jain, Senior Engineering Manager at ClearTax. Using the latest GPT models also helped ClearTax reduce latency by 60%, which it says is a game changer in a chat-based platform. 

All these technology feats come to life for customers through an approachable, convenient, and mobile WhatsApp-based interface. “Distribution is king, and 95% of our user base in India who have smartphones have WhatsApp,” explains Ayush Batra, Lead Product Manager, Innovation and Growth at ClearTax. “This gives us an automatic platform and market to reach their mobile phones directly. It also provides a lot of capabilities and features which are intrinsically localized already, including support for documents, images, and transcripts of different languages, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel again.” 

Connecting to the full financial ecosystem 

ClearTax engineers are now fully trained on Azure and can independently operate and manage servers, modify content, and create their own dashboards to monitor usage. Adding new features and patching existing ones can also be done with no downtime. “We’re bringing in new financial solutions like personal finance and microloans, doubling the number of Indian languages we support, and making our user experience more robust by further improving latency and using more of the interactive messaging features available in the WhatsApp environment, including emojis,” says Batra. 

Once customers receive their refunds, they can take advantage of all the different services ClearTax has added to continue unlocking their full potential. “That’s where our new features and product expansions fit into our strategy. When these gig workers, low-income earners, and first-time filers are financially included, this becomes an income proof for them and all the banks and banking systems in India can offer better loan rates and financial assets,” says Batra. “That’s why our overall GDP impact for India is close to 15 times the USD3.4 million in refunds we’ve made accessible.”