How Petrobras Uses Generative AI to Uncover $120M in Tax Savings

Petrobras is Brazil's state-controlled energy giant, operating for over 70 years in ultra-deepwater oil and gas exploration with more than 45,000 employees. With an annual tax obligation exceeding $54 billion, the company's tax department managed some of the most complex financial compliance requirements in South America, navigating 150 pages of intricate Brazilian tax regulations across multiple tax types and jurisdictions.

Before deploying AI, the tax team processed compliance workflows manually, parsing dense regulatory documents and historical transaction data to determine the taxable base, calculate exemptions by region and sector, and compute ICMS rates per Brazilian state. The process was slow, error-prone, and labor-intensive enough that filing taxes routinely required staff to work through weekends—a pattern that had persisted for 15 consecutive years.

Petrobras's new CIO, an active AI user, saw the tax department as an ideal pilot for intelligent automation. The team inputted three months of tax data and 150 pages of regulations into a generative AI stack anchored by Automation Anywhere, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker. Bedrock foundation models, fine-tuned on historical data and regulatory guidelines, generated precise tax reports, audit summaries, and compliance documentation in Portuguese. SageMaker powered predictive models that forecasted tax liabilities and detected anomalies in real time using historical financial data and external factors including oil price trends.

Three weeks after deployment, the system had uncovered $120 million in tax savings—a result that far exceeded expectations. For the first time in 15 years, the department filed taxes within three days and did so without requiring weekend work. The automation also delivered a 40% increase in overall efficiency, with Petrobras projecting more than $1 billion in total savings by year-end.

The success in the tax department validated Petrobras's broader AI and automation strategy. The company is expanding intelligent automation into HR, finance, and procurement—aiming to replicate the gains seen in tax across every corporate function. With the operations department already fully embracing automation and generative AI, Petrobras sees the tax implementation as the turning point that brought the entire enterprise into the AI era.