3 min read
Avalara shipped an AI-native customer workflow on Vercel.
Avalara connects businesses to more than 1,400 systems to automate tax compliance around the world. It’s a massively complex ecosystem that spans ERP systems, finance platforms, and compliance tools, all talking to each other.
For Chief Strategy and Product Officer Jayme Fishman, the path forward is modernizing how Avalara builds. His mandate is to drive digital transformation, with a sharp focus on AI and innovation.
Enter Vercel’s v0, which translates plain language into working prototypes. Within months, the team built two new patent pending products—and along the way, changed how the company builds.
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Seeing is believing
Before v0, bringing an idea to life required a mountain of slides, careful specs, and ample interpretation. Fishman might have a strong vision, but getting started meant writing everything down, then waiting for designers and engineers to bring it to life.
“It could be a significant delay before we even had a conceptual mock-up.”
That changed overnight.
One of Avalara's biggest challenges was supporting customers who could be plugging into more than a thousand different systems. "We could provide technical documentation and show customers what to do," Fishman said, "but we couldn't see what they were doing. Once they left our system, we lost visibility… and the ability to help."
Fishman imagined a solution that could meet customers where they were. What if Avalara built a Chrome extension that could live alongside a user's workflow, walk them through each step of an integration specific to the systems they were using, and stay behind to answer any questions? He described it to a teammate, who went straight into v0.
"The next morning, there's a video in my Slack. It shows exactly what I described the night before," Fishman recalled. "I showed it to my exec team, and all the light bulbs lit up."
Link to heading“I can describe what I want and wake up to a working demo. It’s tectonically shifting how we build.”
That demo—built in v0—became the basis for a new patent, a production build, and a press release, all within about 60 days. “It was one of those moments,” he said, “where you realize you don’t need to talk people into an idea if they can see it.”
Link to headingDriving alignment with product design
Like many SaaS organizations, Avalara’s product and design process used to depend on long handoffs. Product managers wrote PRDs. Designers translated them into Figma files. Engineers reviewed and rebuilt. “There’s desire and intent,” Fishman said, “and then there’s what actually happens—where everyone gets tagged in late and we lose momentum.”
With v0, that flow changed completely. Product leads now start directly in the tool, describing what they want in plain language and watching v0 translate intent into a functioning interface. “It’s like you can will it into existence,” Fishman said. “You describe the problem, and five minutes later, you’re looking at a solution.”
For designers, the shift has been equally dramatic. “You can just grab someone, show them what you mean, and start iterating,” Fishman explained. “It takes something that used to be async and turns it into a real conversation.”
Link to headingA new way of building
Across Avalara, prototypes have replaced concepts. Fishman calls it “a cultural accelerant.”
The results speak for themselves: two patent-pending products created in roughly 60 days, faster design and validation cycles, and a company-wide shift toward building through iteration, not interpretation.”
About Avalara: Avalara connects businesses to more than 1,400 systems to automate tax compliance around the world.