Description: Sure, AI offers convenience. But what customers need in certain situations is confidence. Mike Halvorsen, VP of Customer Experience at H&R Block, is building products for every demographic in America, which includes people who've trusted the same tax pro for 30 years and people who've never filed before. Their research keeps pointing to the same finding: where and how AI gets applied matters enormously. And the answer looks different for every organization. For H&R Block, the opportunity isn't to automate the human out of the experience. It's to use technology to get a trusted expert in front of the client faster than ever before.
What H&R Block’s customers are saying about AI
H&R Block has research teams in Chicago actively talking to customers right now, trying to understand what clients expect from H&R Block when it comes to AI. The finding has been consistent: people are comfortable using AI to answer inconsequential questions on their own time. They are not comfortable with H&R Block using AI to do their taxes. Two concerns keep surfacing: fear that it will get something wrong and no one will be accountable, and distrust about where their personal data goes.
“I trust the person that I can see and talk to with my data more than this technology.”
That’s the brief that is guiding part of their team’s focus today. Some distrust is present and H&R Block is designing around it rather than potentially cutting out that portion of their customer base.
Proprietary knowledge allows for more trustworthy answers
One place where AI is already proving its value is in the hands of the tax pros themselves. H&R Block has built an AI-enabled tool that draws on what Mike describes as “our corpus of data around tax” to help pros quickly surface answers to genuinely complex or unusual questions. All of it is proprietary rather than being pulled from the web.
“Most of our tax pros can answer almost any question posed to them, but it’s always good to have that ability when something really complex or unique comes up.”
The broader principle applies well beyond taxes: there’s a meaningful difference between giving your team access to AI and giving them access to AI trained on the knowledge your organization has spent years building. One is a general-purpose tool whereas the other is an extension of institutional expertise.
A more timely question: what’s the UX of engaging with H&R Block inside ChatGPT?
As people increasingly use LLMs to think through their tax situation before they ever visit a company’s website, H&R Block is working through what it means to show up in that moment. If someone is asking tax questions in ChatGPT and it becomes clear they need to set up an appointment, can that appointment happen right there? Without sending them to a website they’ve never navigated before?
Mike has been in early conversations with teams at Google about incorporating a live human tax expert into AI Mode and Gemini experiences, so that when questions reach a certain level of complexity, an H&R Block pro can step in directly. The tax filer is the one most likely to make mistakes without guidance, and a human expert in the loop catches those errors in real time. This is a question every product team is going to face eventually: as your customers’ first interaction with your category moves into LLMs, what does discovery, trust-building, and conversion look like when it happens somewhere other than your own product?
Technology should only enhance the human connection
For most H&R Block clients, taxes represent the biggest financial transaction of the year. Given that, the product strategy isn’t about removing humans from the experience, it’s about using technology to get the right human in front of the client faster and more consistently than before.
“We’re trying to use technology to create a human connection, more than technology to replace the human in the experience.”
It’s a lovely reframing for any product team that has been handed an AI mandate without a clear brief on what problem it’s actually solving. The question worth asking first is what your customers are coming to you for. And whether the thing they need most is speed, or simply a faster path to the person who can actually help them.
H&R Block has offices within five miles of nearly every citizen in the United States, and tax pros who are members of the communities they serve. That physical, local presence is something no technology-first competitor can replicate quickly, and Halvorsen’s argument is that the strategy should be to accentuate it rather than retreat from it. As AI raises the floor of what any digital experience can deliver, the known and accountable human relationship becomes the stronger differentiating factor.
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