Studying finance and tax regulations in Indonesia often feels like chasing a moving target. Just when you think you understand one rule, a new regulation appears—longer, denser, and written in legal language that seems designed to test patience rather than comprehension. In 2025, this challenge intensified as the government continued its tax reform agenda and rolled out multiple new regulations. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) quietly became my most reliable study partner.
Throughout 2025, Indonesia introduced a series of significant tax regulations, particularly around VAT, tax administration, and the Coretax system. These included Directorate General of Taxes Regulation No. 1 of 2025 on VAT invoicing, PER-7/PJ/2025 and PER-8/PJ/2025 on Coretax administrative procedures, PER-11/PJ/2025 expanding asset disclosure requirements, PER-15/PJ/2025 addressing e-commerce income tax collectors, and PER-18/PJ/2025 defining concrete data for tax audits. Based on professional tax alerts and regulatory tracking, at least seven major tax regulations were issued during 2025 alone. In other words, staying updated was not optional—it was survival.
Before AI, researching these regulations meant opening multiple government websites, downloading dozens of PDF files, and cross-checking whether a regulation was new, amended, or already obsolete. One regulation could easily cost half a day just to locate and confirm. With AI, that entire process is reduced to a focused search that delivers the latest regulations, their background, and their relevance in minutes. The difference is not subtle; it is transformative.
Understanding the regulations used to be the real time trap. Many tax regulations span dozens of articles and hundreds of pages, filled with cross-references that send you flipping back and forth like a legal ping-pong match. AI helps by cutting through the noise and summarizing the core message: what changed, who is affected, and what needs attention. Instead of spending hours decoding legal phrasing, I can grasp the essence of a regulation in one sitting—and actually remember it.
AI also excels at organizing regulatory chaos. It helps group regulations by topic, compare old and new rules, and even estimate how many regulations were issued in a given year. This turns regulation tracking from a reactive task into a structured system. Rather than worrying about what I might have missed, I can see the regulatory landscape as a whole.
The time savings speak for themselves. Without AI, searching for regulations typically takes four to six hours, reading and summarizing them another twenty to twenty-five hours, and cross-checking their validity three to four hours more. With AI, the same work can be done in roughly one and a half to three hours. In total, I estimate that AI saved me around 30 hours in 2025—the equivalent of nearly a full workweek reclaimed from administrative grind.
In the end, AI does not replace professional judgment or technical expertise. What it does is remove friction. It turns regulatory learning from a slow, exhausting process into a focused and efficient one. For anyone studying or working in finance and taxation in Indonesia, AI is no longer just a helpful tool—it is the difference between drowning in regulations and actually understanding them.