Renato Carneiro didn't choose tax. He took a summer internship for extra cash while a friend interned at the same firm, and twenty years later he's Vice President of Tax at eXp World Holdings, leading international tax across roughly 30 countries. His path ran through KPMG, WarnerMedia, and Newell Brands, from state compliance into transfer pricing and then into the international work that eventually sent him to Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, and across Latin America.
In this episode, Adam sits down with Carneiro to trace that path and pull out what actually built it: a habit of chasing what he didn't understand instead of avoiding it, whether that meant crashing career fairs at schools he didn't attend or owning a mistake in front of his firm's SVP of tax. The conversation turns, in its second half, to a sharper question: what happens to that same habit of learning-by-doing once AI can produce an answer before a junior associate has done the work that used to teach them why it's right. The core message: curiosity, not tenure or AI adoption itself, is what separates practitioners who keep growing from practitioners who stall.
Key takeaways
- Carneiro built his career by treating every unfamiliar concept as a problem to chase rather than a wall to avoid, from an accidental tax internship to a VP seat.
- He landed an interview at Goldman Sachs, a firm that never recruited at his school, by showing up uninvited to career fairs anyway.
- His team runs a custom GPT that handles foreign vendor withholding questions, cutting a daily email exchange with accounts payable to roughly once a quarter.
- He doesn't believe AI will replace tax professionals. He believes professionals who know how to use AI will replace the ones who don't.
- A mentor's response to his first real mistake, "nobody's perfect, and if you were, I wouldn't be able to afford you," still shapes how he leads his own team.
About Renato Carneiro
Renato Carneiro is Vice President of Tax at eXp World Holdings. He moved to the United States from Portugal at age nine, spent over 20 years across KPMG, WarnerMedia, and Newell Brands, and now leads international tax for a company operating in roughly 30 countries.
Key learnings
Tax picked him, not the other way around
Carneiro didn't want the internship that started his career. A friend was interning at the firm, the position paid, and that was reason enough to say yes for a summer.
"I always say I didn't pick tax. Tax picked me." — Renato Carneiro, VP of Tax at eXp World Holdings
What followed was a pattern, not a plan. Every later pivot, state compliance into transfer pricing, then into full international tax, started the same way: something he didn't understand, and a refusal to leave it that way. He puts it plainly for anyone earlier in their career: the associate who doesn't understand a position isn't behind. They're one honest question away from the next piece of the puzzle.
Don't accept the "no"
Carneiro went to a school the Big Four never recruited at. Rather than treat that as a ceiling, he found out where those firms were holding career days at other universities and showed up.
- Recruiters were consistently surprised he'd gotten in without attending the school.
- His answer was simple: "Well, you're here. So I was interested in seeing if I could pursue a role here."
- That approach got him an interview at Goldman Sachs, a firm with no connection to his university at all.
The habit generalizes past recruiting. He challenges a "no" the same way whether it's a locked door or a technical position he doesn't yet understand: respectfully, but rarely as the final word.
Curiosity paid for the passport
Transfer pricing pulled Carneiro into international work, and international work put him on planes to Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, and across Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. For someone who came to the U.S. as a child immigrant, the travel carried weight beyond the job itself.
"I remember when I got to go to Hong Kong on business, and of course you get to fly business class, which is amazing. That experience in itself is like, wow, okay, maybe I made it..." — Renato Carneiro, VP of Tax at eXp World Holdings
Speaking Portuguese made his time in Brazil easier, including navigating a cultural norm his American boss wasn't ready for: a colleague greeting Carneiro with a kiss on the cheek, and, in Carneiro's words, "the look of dread on my boss's face." He doubts a role like his would carry the same amount of travel today, since video meetings have replaced a lot of what once required getting on a plane.
AI will not replace tax professionals. It will replace the ones who ignore it
Carneiro's team already runs a custom GPT that resolves foreign vendor withholding questions for accounts payable directly, checking treaty status, form requirements, and payment purpose without a human in most cases. What used to be a daily back-and-forth with AP is now roughly one email per quarter.
The line that matters more than the efficiency gain is how he frames the risk to careers going forward:
"I don't believe AI is going to replace everyone, but I think somebody who knows AI will replace you." — Renato Carneiro, VP of Tax at eXp World Holdings
For firm leaders, that reframes the AI conversation. The question isn't whether to adopt AI. It's whether your team can use it well enough that someone else's team doesn't out-work yours with it.
The knowledge gap AI creates, and how to close it
Carneiro learned tax by doing tax returns line by line, catching notices, and sitting through meetings where he understood, at best, half the conversation.
"Most of my learnings was all through the doing... You understand more when you work through it." — Renato Carneiro, VP of Tax at eXp World Holdings
That's the gap he sees forming under AI: a junior associate can now get an answer before they've built the judgment to know whether it's right. His fix isn't to avoid the tool. It borrows from self-driving cars: Waymo can drive the route, but that doesn't mean you stop learning to drive. Pair AI with real training, and keep asking questions out loud instead of assuming everyone else already knows.
"Nobody's perfect, and if you were, I wouldn't be able to afford you"
Early in his career, Carneiro made a mistake on a tax return that both he and his director missed. It went all the way to the firm's SVP of tax before anyone caught it.
"She said, I just want you to know that nobody's perfect. And if you were perfect, I wouldn't be able to afford you." — Renato Carneiro, recounting a lesson from an early mentor
The moment reframed mistakes for him, not as permission to repeat them, but as permission to make them and learn. He still tells his own team it's fine to say "I don't understand this," and he watches for the people in any room who seem to know everything. They don't. They just don't lead with what they're missing.
The next tax fight: BEPS, Pillar Two, and profits nobody wants to share
Carneiro sees a clear trend: foreign jurisdictions want a bigger share of the profits U.S. multinationals generate, particularly now that companies like Netflix are profitable after years of losses nobody wanted to subsidize.
"Everybody wants to upside, which is interesting because this is where my transfer pricing side of the brain is like, but economically, it doesn't make sense." — Renato Carneiro, VP of Tax at eXp World Holdings
He expects continued controversy around Pillar Two given real uncertainty in the U.S. position on the framework, and the same pressure playing out domestically as individual states push for a larger share from multinationals. He also flags AI-enabled audits as the next real shift: tax authorities connecting data across treaty partners well enough to run far more targeted, comprehensive audits than they can today.
How to apply this
- Build a repeatable AI tool for one routine, high-volume question your team answers on repeat, the way Carneiro's team did for vendor withholding.
- Require junior staff to work a sample of returns or positions manually before leaning on AI output for the same task.
- Normalize asking "I don't understand this" out loud in team meetings and reviews.
- Track state-level and Pillar Two developments in the jurisdictions where your firm has real exposure, rather than trying to monitor everything at once.
- Treat AI literacy as a review criterion for promotion, not an optional skill.
Curiosity is still the skill that compounds
Twenty years in, Carneiro's throughline isn't a specific technical skill. It's the habit of treating every "I don't understand this" as a prompt to dig rather than a reason to disengage, whether that shows up as a mistake he owns, a door he walks through uninvited, or a tool he's willing to learn even after two decades in the field.
Research the technical questions behind gray-area international tax positions in Bizora, where every answer traces back to primary authority instead of a summary of a summary.