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Sunday, 19 March 2023

The digital nomad life is going to see some tax changes soon + Microsoft is coming out with another AI product

The tax man is tracing the footprints of digital nomads: For those who have gotten accustomed to the peace and comfort of remote work — away from their tax jurisdiction — there’s a legislative overhaul afoot that aims to bring you closer to the tax man’s radar. The discussion of tax treatments for cross-border remote work has become a hot topic as the earned income of digital nomads accounts for 1.3% of global personal income, Bloomberg reports, citing IMF data. Some businesses think that the flexibility to offer remote work “is needed to attract and retain talent in the modern economy and we want to make sure that we’re able to do that,” said a tax official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

They’re on to you: The OECD is working on a note for later this year that will list the tax challenges and scenarios associated with the post-pandemic trend of remote work in a bid help people, businesses and governments have a better idea of who should be taxed and when and where they will be taxed, according to the business information service. Currently, digital nomads working away from their tax jurisdiction in countries such as China, India, and the UK get taxed by the governments of these countries once their stay crosses a six-month threshold, according to Bloomberg.


Microsoft unleashes new fighter onto AI battleground: Microsoft Corp will in the coming months roll out Copilot, an AI-powered assistant, across its Microsoft 365 suite — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams — the company announced on Thursday. Underpinned partly by OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, the software will enable users to generate first drafts of entire documents, presentations, and emails by entering simple prompts. It can also summarize discussions and suggest actions in real time during meetings, among a host of other features, and is currently open to some 20 companies for testing before a wider launch, Bloomberg and Reuters report.

AI war tightens: The move is Microsoft’s latest bid to overhaul its product lines with AI and gain a foothold in the industry ahead of rival Google, which two days ahead of Microsoft’s announcement said it would bring a very similar feature named Magic Wand to Google Workspace, adding new capabilities to Docs, Slides, Sheets and Gmail.

Caveat: The software isn’t foolproof: “It does a lot of amazing things and gets a lot of things right, but it doesn’t get everything right,” Microsoft Vice President Jon Friedman told Bloomberg. However, Copilot prompts users to review and fact-check the drafts it generates and embeds links to the sources it uses in the process, answering the prevalent criticism that AI chatbots serve up unverifiable information. “Just like any time somebody sends me a draft — I review the

draft,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “I just don’t accept the draft.”

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