The success of Intuit’s AI-driven platform strategy is evident in its double-digit growth in total revenue and operating income. In Q3 fiscal 2024, the company’s total revenue increased by 12% to $6.7 billion, with the Small Business and Self-Employed Group revenue surging by 18% to $2.4 billion.
During an interview at the VB Transform 2024 event, Nhung Ho, VP of AI at Intuit, discussed how the company continues to refine its approach to using gen AI and machine learning to optimize personalization strategies. Intuit’s goal is to simplify personal finance while empowering small business customers with AI-based automation.
Intuit has democratized AI across all its applications, giving small businesses real-time data and greater insights to maximize their earnings and discover new revenue opportunities. In September 2023, the company launched Intuit Assist, its first gen AI-powered financial assistant for small businesses and consumers. This tool, integrated with Intuit’s proprietary Generative AI Operating System (GenOS), delivers personalized financial insights and recommendations across products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp.
Ashok Srivastava, Intuit’s chief data officer, described GenOS as an operating system for gen AI, comparable to MacOS or Windows. This infrastructure coordinates the actions of large language models (LLMs) and provides assistant, management, and monitoring capabilities.
One of the most notable applications of gen AI within Intuit’s product lineup is TurboTax. This past tax season, 24 million customers experienced a generative AI-powered explanation of how their taxes were calculated, providing them with confidence and clarity. Intuit combined the power of its tax engine with an LLM from Anthropic to simplify complex calculations and make them digestible for everyday users.
Intuit’s approach to personalization using gen AI is tailored to each customer’s unique requirements. By leveraging their data, Intuit modifies its products to suit specific business types and services. For example, a construction company and a bakery have vastly different needs, so Intuit ensures that each user only sees the most relevant features and services.
To excel at personalization, Intuit follows a set of key actions:
1. Integrating AI to simplify complex tasks: AI breaks down complex tasks into manageable steps, as seen in TurboTax’s explanations of tax calculations.
2. Automating routine operations: Gen AI automates routine tasks, allowing users to focus on core activities like customer conversations.
3. Ensuring high-quality data: Intuit prioritizes clean and accurate data to ensure the effectiveness of AI-driven processes.
4. Managing latency in AI systems: Intuit is exploring methods to reduce latency in generative AI systems, which can operate slower than user expectations.
5. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy: By remaining agnostic to cloud providers, Intuit can access the best AI models for personalization use cases.
6. Building scalable and secure AI systems: Intuit focuses on data scalability and security to enable safe innovation and guarantee customer data protection.
7. Creating a composable architecture: Intuit uses a composable architecture to integrate various AI models and technologies, allowing for flexibility in creating new applications.
8. Personalizing user experiences: Intuit customizes AI tools for different small business types, ensuring that each user receives a tailored experience.
9. Balancing deterministic and probabilistic systems: Intuit determines which AI systems should be deterministic and which can be probabilistic to ensure accuracy.
10. Expanding AI application use cases: Intuit pushes the boundaries of AI applications beyond initial use cases to improve efficiency in various business processes.
In conclusion, Intuit’s advanced use of gen AI for personalization sets them apart in their commitment to refining customer preferences and experiences. With the launch of Intuit Assist and GenOS, Intuit demonstrates their advanced capabilities in using gen AI to enhance customer experiences. By leveraging gen AI across their product lineup, Intuit empowers customers to make informed financial decisions and achieve their goals with confidence.
