It almost seems quaint now to look back at my predictions from 12 months ago about what the biggest tax stories of 2016 would be. At the time, I was expecting new legislation around tax inversions, more global head-butting between regional tax authorities over country-by-country reporting requirements, a bunch of new “Netflix-style” taxes on cloud-based content, and a continued roll-out of new carbon taxes.

These were all right, but the biggest prediction of all last year was that tax would loom large in the U.S. presidential election. At the time, there were still 13 candidates actively campaigning and I quipped that against the backdrop of his many bold pronouncements, Donald Trump’s tax plan was comparably tame.

Let’s see how tame things are this year as he and his team set about rewriting the U.S. tax code.

With all eyes on Trump and his bold plan to take the U.S. corporate tax rate down to 15% while introducing a special reduced tax rate for income repatriated into the U.S. from overseas, 2017 is certain to be a year of big tax stories with big consequences for business. But Trump is really only one piece of the story. On a global basis, tax conflict and a constantly evolving set of tax laws have set the stage for a monumental year of big tax stories. Following are my predictions for some of the biggest.

1) U.S. Lowers Corporate Tax Rate to 15%, Global Businesses Yawn

The headlines surrounding the Trump tax plan have all focused on the fact that the U.S. corporate tax rate, which is 35%, is one of the highest in the world. By cutting it to 15%, the Trump administration would bring the U.S. rate more in line with some of the lowest tax regimes in the world, like Switzerland (8.5%) and Ireland (12.5%). In fact, with Switzerland reportedly overhauling its business tax laws and raising tax rates to 16% for businesses operating in the region, a U.S. tax of 15% would indeed be quite competitive with the rest of the world.

What this observation misses, however, is that few U.S. corporations pay anywhere near the 35% corporate tax rate. A March 2016 study by the Government Accountability Office found that, for tax years 2008 to 2012, profitable, large U.S. corporations paid on average 14% in federal taxes. They did this, of course, by taking advantage of tax deductions for carried losses, tax incentives, and profit shifting.

Ultimately, any change to the U.S. corporate tax code will likely be accompanied by a corresponding closing of tax loopholes, resulting in a net even swap for companies transitioning from the old rate to the new one. What’s more, the elaborate structures many companies have built to take advantage of current tax law will be slow to unwind, resulting in a relatively subdued response to a seemingly dramatic change to the tax code. BlackRock CEO Lawrence Fink underscored this last point when discussing Trump’s plan earlier this week, suggesting that many of Trump’s growth initiatives could take longer to implement than many investors are pricing in right now.

2) Global Trade Gets Messier

The operational mechanics of importing and exporting goods around the globe have never been easy. According to the 2016 Global Trade Management Survey from Thomson Reuters and KPMG International, an intense reliance on manual processes for tasks such documentation and licensing and product classification along with a tangled web of international regulations have conspired to make global trade more complicated than ever. Sixty two percent of those surveyed say they expect it to get worse in the next three to five years.

Add the doctrines of a U.S. presidential administration that has threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, and tenuous relationships between global superpowers like the U.S., China, and Russia, and the business of moving materials from port-to-port is likely to get a lot more complicated and a lot more expensive in the year ahead.

3) Start-Up Has Near-Death Experience with Taxes

The growing conflict at the intersection of innovation and regulation has been gaining prominence for a few years. The classic example of this, of course, is Airbnb, the vacation rental and home sharing site that was effectively outlawed in New York because its business model disrupts the century-old regulatory and tax infrastructure that governs the traditional hotel industry.

But the issue is much bigger than Airbnb. Visitors to last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas were wowed by the largest-ever display of Internet-connected everything, from the “smart hairbrush” to the complete wired home. As my colleague Steve Mendelsohn recently observed, Internet connectivity can trigger dreaded telecom tax rates for entirely new classes of products that never had them before. Essentially, the addition of the Internet to an object can convert it from being a product to being a service, one that derives its value from a communications-based functionality. That has the power to turn the fledgling Internet-of-things movement into a major tax obstacle for some of the smaller innovators currently operating in the space.

As we head into 2017, the pace of innovation is still far outstripping the pace of regulation, potentially creating life-or-death circumstances for start-ups that get caught in the cross-fire.

4) The Robo-Accountants Arrive

Last year brought us the final blow in the epic battle between man and machine when Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence software beat the world champion in Go, an ancient Chinese board game similar to chess but with much more complex movements. Will this be the year that the promise of artificial intelligence for business lives up to the hype and gives us our first robo-accountants, robo-lawyers, and robo-marketers?

While we aren’t expecting the lifelike – and impossibly good-looking – “hosts” of HBOs Westworld to start opening up tax preparation shops on every corner, the underlying artificial intelligence technology behind breakthroughs like Google’s DeepMind and Amazon’s Alexa are currently being leveraged to help accounting professionals gain better insights and anticipate challenges. As my colleague Brian Peccarelli recently explained, “Accounting professionals will be spending less time combing through spreadsheets and more time cultivating the kinds of valuable insights that will help their customers anticipate hurdles and alter course before those hurdles become real problems.”

5) Corporate Tax and Corporate Reputation Will Become Synonymous

Government authorities around the world have used the accusation of tax avoidance as a blunt instrument to shame large corporations into paying their fair share of corporate taxes for years. President Obama set the high water mark for the effectiveness of this tactic when he launched an anti-inversion campaign in 2014 by coining the term “corporate deserters” for companies that moved their headquarters overseas to take advantage of lower taxes.

Since then, a parade of high profile executives have taken their turn in front of government hearings and under the media spotlight as officials condemn their use of legal, but politically unpopular tax strategies. The phenomenon is not unique to the U.S. The UK has taken the issue even further by requiring all large companies to publicly report their tax strategies on their corporate websites or face a penalty.

Now, with a president-elect who has already begun publicly shaming the world’s largest companies on Twitter, the direct link between corporate reputation and corporate tax strategy is sure to become even more pronounced. Tax lawyers, judges, spreadsheets… They won’t help. If there is a whiff of a company not paying its fair share, the punishment will be a high profile public drubbing that will have the power to impact everything from stock price to consumer sales.