Avalara Helps Global Businesses Move Faster as Tax and Compliance Complexity Accelerates

Fortnum & Mason and ASOS share how automation helps them grow across markets

Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, opened its CRUSH Europe customer conference by showing how businesses can use automation and agentic AI to manage growing tax and compliance complexity while moving faster across markets. Fortnum & Mason and ASOS joined Avalara at the conference to share how their organizations are using compliance automation to support global growth as regulatory requirements become increasingly digital, interconnected, and real-time.

Selling at speed and global scale

Fortnum & Mason, a 315-year-old British institution, ships to customers in nearly 90 countries. Automating sales tax, import tax, and duties calculations, including the complex classification of food and non-food goods, allows the team to focus on serving customers and delivering exceptional products and services. The company shared its story at Avalara’s conference.

“When delivering across multiple countries and some unique destinations, accurate tax and duties calculations are essential,” said Nataliya Schipka, Director of Finance at Fortnum & Mason. “Automating cross-border compliance allows us to focus on serving customers wherever they are, rather than being constrained by the complexity of compliance.”

Fortnum & Mason was joined at CRUSH Europe by ASOS, one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers. Operating at the pace of global fashion means launching products, entering markets, and adapting to regulatory change quickly, while delivering a seamless checkout experience for customers around the world. ASOS uses compliance automation to support that speed and scale without relying on added headcount simply to keep pace with growing complexity.

Their experiences reflect a broader challenge facing businesses across Europe. Tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time, while businesses are under pressure to move faster. For years, software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks and systems has remained manual. Avalara believes meeting that challenge requires rethinking how the work gets done.

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New purpose-built agentic AI solutions for tax and compliance

At CRUSH Europe, Avalara showed how agentic AI can help close those gaps by orchestrating work across tax and compliance processes and systems.

Avalara Aviator, which is generally available today, is the company’s new agent hub for tax and compliance. It’s designed to turn days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action. Intelligent agents can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action, while bringing people in when judgment or approval is required.

Among other compliance operations, Avalara Aviator can map products to tax codes, validate exemption certificates, auto-generate tax matrices, configure custom rules, and analyze results across applications. It is grounded in trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, deterministic technology, and governance Avalara has built over more than 22 years, informed by more than £2.1 trillion in transactions Avalara handles annually.

Versori by Avalara, Avalara’s agentic integration fabric, addresses another critical part of that challenge: bringing tax and compliance intelligence into the systems and data where businesses already work. In an agentic world, compliance work won’t always begin inside compliance software. It may start in an ERP, an e-commerce platform, a finance system, or an AI agent. Versori uses specialized AI agents to research, build, test, and deploy production-grade connectors in days rather than months at a fraction of the cost of traditional integration tools.

“AI is changing how work gets done across every industry,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara, in his CRUSH keynote. “But agentic AI is different. It can execute multi-step work, continuously monitor what is changing, and bring people in when judgment or approval is required. The opportunity is automation and control, not one at the expense of the other. In tax, the calculation still has to be right. The filing still has to be defensible. And the person accountable is still a person.”