How TaxSlayer Enables AI Innovation and Browser Choice with CrowdStrike

TaxSlayer is moving quickly to embrace AI. As a fintech software development company providing do-it-yourself and professional tax preparation solutions, the company sees AI as a way to improve both employee productivity and customer experience.

“There’s strong leadership support for adopting AI and integrating it safely into our day-to-day operations,” explained Mike Blache, CISO at TaxSlayer. “We’re committed to using AI to enhance the experiences of our employees and customers while ensuring we meet all compliance requirements.”

For Blache, the challenge was how to enable AI safely. Employees wanted to use different AI models for different jobs, while product teams were building customer-facing AI bots to help deliver support more efficiently. The business needed flexibility to innovate, but the security team needed visibility and control over how sensitive data was being used.

TaxSlayer chose the CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform to strike that balance, enabling users to work the way they want while protecting data and reducing operational complexity.

TaxSlayer initially tried to standardize employees on a single approved AI tool, but the approach quickly proved too rigid.

“We quickly realized that AI is not one-size-fits-all, and different job roles benefit differently from different AI models,” Blache said. “I had to step back and figure out how we could allow users to work the way they want, but still protect the organization.”

That shift led TaxSlayer to CrowdStrike Falcon® Guardian, which gave the team immediate visibility into how employees were using AI and the ability to apply protections to prevent sensitive data from being exposed through prompts or public models.

“The visibility was insane,” Blache noted.

This visibility allowed TaxSlayer to move from restriction to enablement. The team could support multiple AI tools, evaluate new models like Anthropic’s Claude, and still enforce data protections — even when employees interacted with public AI services.

“We can still provide data protections against the prompts and make sure our proprietary data remains private,” Blache said.

For Blache, this flexibility is essential to modern security. “Rather than telling people they have to do things a certain way, I prefer to work together to find solutions that fit their needs while maintaining the right level of security.”

TaxSlayer applied the same philosophy to browser security. The company had explored enterprise browser options, but forcing employees into a single browser conflicted with how people worked.

“We needed a solution that would allow us to secure not just the browser we provide, but any browser that the person decided they wanted to use,” Blache said.

TaxSlayer adopted CrowdStrike Falcon® Secure Access for its ability to secure existing browsers rather than replace them. What stood out was the approach: extending protection to the browsers employees already used instead of forcing them into a new environment.

“It basically turned every single person’s browser into an enterprise browser without requiring them to change a thing,” Blache said.

For TaxSlayer, both AI and browser security reinforced the same principle: security should adapt to the business, not the other way around. But enabling this flexibility at scale required consistent visibility and control across users, devices, and environments.

AI and browser security are the most visible examples of TaxSlayer’s approach, but they’re built on a broader foundation: consolidating security to gain unified visibility and control.

The company’s relationship with CrowdStrike began with a need for better endpoint visibility as TaxSlayer expanded beyond its Microsoft-centric roots into Linux, Kubernetes, and multicloud environments. The team adopted endpoint security to close those gaps, then expanded into identity protection and cloud security as new requirements emerged.

Consolidation quickly became a priority. “We had 20 or so dashboards that people were having to monitor,” Blache said. “When you have more dashboards than you have people, it becomes very challenging to manage.”

Rather than continuing to layer on disconnected tools, TaxSlayer used the Falcon platform to address new challenges within a unified environment. Over time, it adopted CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, CrowdStrike Falcon® Fusion SOAR, and CrowdStrike Falcon® Data Security. Each addition reduced complexity while improving visibility.

Operating a small team at scale requires discipline, especially as the business grows more complex. “I tell my team if you do things more than once, you should automate it,” Blache said. “We need to operate efficiently and make the most of our resources.”

That focus on efficiency is directly tied to TaxSlayer’s consolidation strategy. By bringing more data and workflows into a single platform, the team can move faster, automate more, and reduce the friction of switching between tools.

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM played a key role in that effort. By leveraging data already native to the Falcon platform, TaxSlayer reduced the cost of duplicative ingestion while improving access to security telemetry across systems.

“We saw a huge cost savings because we weren’t having to pay for ingesting our Falcon platform data. All of it was already in the SIEM,” Blache said.

The team also uses Falcon Fusion SOAR to automate vulnerability workflows, ticket creation, and alert enrichment. Analysts can begin investigations with the context they need already in place, rather than pulling information from multiple systems.

That unified data model is also laying the groundwork for what comes next. With more security data centralized in one place, TaxSlayer is positioned to take advantage of emerging capabilities like the agentic SOC.