The HMRC Salesforce contract, worth up to £2bn over 15 years, will move legacy tax systems onto one platform with AI tools to triage taxpayer queries.
Salesforce has been chosen by HM Revenue & Customs to overhaul how the tax authority manages its dealings with taxpayers, under a 15-year agreement worth up to £2bn announced today.
Salesforce will become HMRC’s strategic enterprise customer relationship management (ECRM) provider. The company said it would move HMRC’s legacy systems onto a single platform that gives staff a full view of each taxpayer’s interactions across every contact channel, with the aim of resolving more queries at first contact.
According to Salesforce, the UK tax system serves more than 34 million citizens and five million businesses. The company said legacy systems and fragmented channels had made it difficult to deliver efficient services to taxpayers.
The platform will use Salesforce’s Agentforce AI agent software, alongside its Public Sector Solutions, Marketing Cloud and Data 360 products. Salesforce said Agentforce would assist HMRC caseworkers by automating routine administration, triaging inbound queries and routing complex cases to specialists.
The company said the AI tools would operate within tightly governed workflows and that human oversight from trained HMRC staff would remain part of every taxpayer decision. It added that the platform has encryption and role-based access controls built in.
Salesforce said the system would support HMRC’s ambition for 90 per cent of its services to be delivered digitally by 2030, while maintaining support for people who need extra help.
HMRC’s Transformation Roadmap, published in July 2025, set a target of at least 90 per cent of customer interactions being digital by 2029-30, up from around 76 per cent at the time. The roadmap said HMRC would begin work in 2025-26 to introduce a new customer relationship management system, with an initial phase focused on procuring the technology and migrating Inheritance Tax onto it.
The department has separately announced plans to move most of its paper correspondence online.
Kendall Collins, chief executive of Missionforce and Government Cloud at Salesforce, said: “Governments around the world are entering a new era of transformation powered by trusted AI, one that puts citizens first, makes public services simpler to access and more seamless.”
“HMRC is a global leader demonstrating what’s possible when governments embrace innovation with people and trust at the centre,” he added.
Quantexa, the UK decision-intelligence company, will work on the deployment, providing tools that Salesforce said would automatically connect complex data and spot patterns of fraud. Salesforce said this would give caseworkers real-time risk scores and help uncover hidden fraud networks, supporting HMRC’s efforts to recover uncollected revenue and close the tax gap.
HMRC estimated in June that the tax gap reached £59.2bn in 2024-25, or 6.4 per cent of all tax due, with small businesses accounting for 62 per cent of the total.
Salesforce has also committed to allocating 15 per cent of its professional advisory services work to UK small and medium-sized enterprises, which it said would give local businesses a direct role in shaping HMRC’s digital platform.
The company pointed to its $6bn, five-year investment in the UK covering 2023 to 2028, and said its venture arm, Salesforce Ventures, had invested more than $200m in UK AI companies.
Salesforce said it would work with schools, employment services and its customer and partner network to widen access to AI and digital skills, including apprenticeship routes aimed at young people, neurodivergent people and under-represented groups. The company said this supports its wider commitment with the government to train 10 million workers in AI by 2030.
Zahra Bahrololoumi, president and chief executive of Salesforce UK & Ireland, said: “HMRC provides essential services to millions of individuals and businesses, collecting the revenue that funds public services and supporting economic growth. This transformation is vital to helping power the UK’s success.”
“Technology is only one part of the value this contract will deliver,” she added. “By directly supporting the Government’s digital skills agenda, we have an opportunity to open doors to high-growth tech careers, expand access to AI capabilities, and help build a more diverse, skilled digital workforce for the entire nation.”
