Alarie: Pure AI engineers won't solve tax research without deep domain mastery
Ben Alarie · He "kind of" had PMF for 8 years—until, after a rebuild, he raised $100M | Ben Alarie, Founder of... · PMF Show · Oct 20, 2025 · at 10:37
Ben Alarie, founder and CEO of Blue J, explains why domain expertise is a major barrier preventing pure AI engineers from building specialized vertical AI products in tax.
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“Might it be somebody who's more kind of pure tech, like an AI or machine learning background? And again, I thought, well, probably not because they would need to know a lot more tax law than they do. It'd take them a decade to catch up to where I was in my understanding of tax law. And probably they're not just not all that interested in learning tax law and they wouldn't really understand the pain of tax research, right?”
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