Intuit Embraces Generative AI, Aims to be Customers' Pocket Financial Assistant

Financial software giant Intuit announced a significant leap into generative artificial intelligence (AI) software, intending to incorporate new experiences across its product lines, which include TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp.

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi believes this development could revolutionize the company's offerings, fulfilling the vision declared over four years ago to "become the financial assistant in the pocket of our customers…to help them make decisions, put more money in their pocket and help them thrive."

Goodarzi detailed the company's existing use of AI to assist its small business customers in particular, navigating an overwhelming quantity of data. According to him, Intuit currently has 400,000 customer and financial attributes for each small business, plus 55,000 attributes per tax customer. The company is already generating 730 million AI-driven customer interactions annually, and 58 billion machine learning predictions daily.

The introduction of generative AI functionality should enhance the usability of all of Intuit's products, a move that Goodarzi anticipates will bolster the company's top-line growth. He notes that Intuit currently caters to about 5% of its total addressable market, worth around $300 billion. With AI's assistance, Goodarzi envisions Intuit reaching 20% of the market, effectively quadrupling its current size.

Intuit has yet to reveal specific use cases for its generative AI; however, Goodarzi offered insight into the company's proprietary generative AI operating system, named GenOS. He envisages the software enabling Intuit to construct large language models targeting tax, accounting, marketing, cash, and personal financial tasks.

GenOS comprises four components. GenStudio will facilitate experimentation and refinement of generative AI experiences for Intuit's developers, while GenUX will serve as a library of user-interface components. GenRuntime is an "intelligent layer" purposed to select the appropriate large language model in real-time, ensuring users receive accurate responses. Lastly, the large language models themselves will "provide actionable insights and invoke actions like contacting human experts."

Intuit has invested in generative AI and creating large language models over the last two years, a move Goodarzi believes will spark "a technology platform to ignite customer-facing innovation going forward."

As for pricing, Goodarzi doesn't anticipate offering advanced and cheaper basic versions of the software, instead incorporating it as part of the overall user experience. He expects that the additional costs of building and maintaining these models will be offset by accelerated growth rather than price increases.

In the coming months, Intuit plans to unveil more details on the new customer-facing experiences, promising natural language queries of the company's applications, and alerts from the software making specific financial suggestions for customers.