Intuit’s CEO Says These AI Tools Will Streamline Your Accounting Department

As temperatures in New York City hit record highs this past Tuesday, an event space in Manhattan offered some much-needed respite from the heat—as well as a glimpse at how AI may soon change the face of small business bookkeeping. Intuit, the tech giant behind the QuickBooks accounting platform, previewed technology that it’s now making public: a suite of AI agents meant to handle some of the behind-the-scenes accounting and bookkeeping work. Each of four AI tools on display promised to automate a different aspect of business management on QuickBooks—payments, accounting, finance and customer acquisition—with video walk-throughs showing the software doing everything from reconciling books to suggesting what late fee a business owner should implement to ranking inbound sales leads as either “cold,” “warm,” or “hot.” Payroll, marketing and project management bots are also on their way, according to the company. It’s always a good idea to take these pre-screened tech demos with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to AI, a technology that can act in surprising and unpredictable ways. Still, Intuit seems all-in on the machine learning revolution, and as it rolls out these agents (a process that, for American customers, starts July 1), it’s worth understanding the company’s vision for the future of accounting. Inc. spoke with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi about why his company is embracing AI and how he plans to maintain customer privacy and security in the process. What are you guys launching, and how does it fit into your vision of the role AI will play in bookkeeping? The biggest thing we’ve learned from our customers is that they’re using way too many apps, spending way too much money and don’t really know what’s going on in their business. And when you think about a business, whether it’s a solopreneur or a several hundred million dollar business, time is everything: so what we are launching is a virtual team of AI agents and AI-enabled human experts that can, in essence, do all the work for our customers while still leaving them in control. We have 12,000 experts that sit on our data and AI platform and are not only making our AI agents better every day, but are actually working with the AI agents to deliver a customer experience. Is this the first time you’ve integrated agentic AI into one of your products? This is years in the making in terms of all of the data investments that we’ve made—because AI is useless without data—and all of the data services we’ve built. So the essence of what we’ve launched has been in the works for years. About a year and a half ago, we launched multiple agentic experiences. But this is the first time we’ve launched a broad-based set of agents that can manage everything from leads to cash. So if I’m using QuickBooks, what does my interfacing with the AI look like? In very practical terms, we’ll go into their Gmail with their permission—if that’s the source of what they use to communicate—or SMS, and be able to help them manage which leads are hot versus cold. Then they can click on the hot leads and we’ll help them interact with that customer, suggest what they should communicate. We’ll create an estimate for them, and an invoice. So we feed them the most important actions and choices they should make so that it’s forefront—like, following up on invoices, or ‘It’s time to take out a line of credit.’ But they’re always in control. They always see why we’re recommending something, and if they choose to change it, they can. We’re in a CPA shortage right now. Do you see this as a workaround to having less than enough human accounting labor? In general, with anything that’s very driven by intensive labor, a lot of it will get automated by AI—but I also believe that it will fuel the reallocation of people’s time to things that are more productive. 75 percent of accountants are retiring, and the inflow of accountants has really dried up, so we see this as an opportunity not only to fuel the success of our accounting partners but to automate a lot of the manual work. People are obviously dealing with a lot of sensitive financial information and data in this system. What is your approach to data privacy and security? Trust is everything, and so we declared more than 20 years ago a set of data principles that we’ve adhered to ever since. One is that it’s the customer’s data, not ours. Two, we would never sell the data and we would only use the data for the benefit of our customers, which is why the way we have built our platform—both our data models and our AI models—only our Intuit financial large language models get trained by our customers’ data. The data never leaves our four walls. The data is never used to train LLMs, as an example, that are outside our four walls. We also have governance; we have a lot of human spot-checks in terms of how the models are operating to make sure there’s no bias in the models. We have AI models that inspect AI models as well as human experts that inspect the models. Accuracy is so key in something like accounting, and a lot of people are still concerned about hallucinations with AI. What can you say about how you ensure accuracy with high-stakes bookkeeping and financial decisions? Everything comes down to accuracy. That’s why what we’ve launched today is such a big deal, because it’s about financial forecasts, accounting, taxes. We’ve invested heavily in our own models. Anytime we detect an anomaly where we believe it’s not accurate, we automatically bring in a human expert to confirm. A lot of companies are still figuring out how to integrate AI into their workflows. What are some best practices you would encourage small business owners to adopt when implementing AI? In order for you to grow, you need to digitize your entire business so that everything from lead to cash is digitized. Then, when we show them what our platform can do and the capabilities which are all data and AI-driven, that’s where there’s a light switch, which is: ‘Rather than using all these different apps that don’t talk to each other, I can run my business in one place.’ So for a business that we serve, it’s all about having one platform that automates all their workflows, versus the customer automating their own workflows. Are there any mistakes you see small businesses make when they’re incorporating AI? Customers are over-digitized today. Four years ago, when I talked to customers, whether they were businesses or accountants, it was: ‘How do they move from Excel, Google Sheets, shoeboxes with receipts to using a platform to run their business.’ Today, they’re using up to 10 apps to run their business—and the larger they are, the more apps they use. They use one app to manage their pipeline; they use one app for estimating; one app for invoicing; one app for accounting. All their data is trapped in a bunch of different apps. BY BRIAN CONTRERAS @_B_CONTRERAS_

I Asked ChatGPT a Simple Question. It Literally May Have Saved My Life

As a general rule, one thing you should definitely not do is start typing random symptoms you might be experiencing into Google Search, or, say, an AI chat box. If you’re concerned that something might be wrong, you should probably just go see your doctor. I use ChatGPT a dozen or so times a day for research and getting answers to general information questions. I ask it about everything from how to fix a chainsaw to explaining company earnings reports. That’s probably why I did the thing you aren’t supposed to do, even though I know better. It started a few months ago with something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d get short of breath when doing ordinary things like walking up a flight of stairs or mowing the lawn, or carrying a bag chair to the sideline of a soccer game. In May, I was exhausted after walking with my roller carry-on to the gate of a redeye flight. All of those are things I’ve done hundreds of times, but recently it seemed to take a lot more effort. For months, I chalked it up to getting older, needing more exercise, or maybe just a busy season catching up with me. However, the symptoms didn’t go away—they got worse. I began coughing more often. Breathing deeply made me wince. And worst of all, I was tired all the time. Still, I would have put the symptoms into the category of annoying, not alarming. I have long suffered from seasonal allergies, so the trouble taking deep breaths and coughing was easy to play off as just a bad year for tree pollen. I didn’t think it was an emergency. I wasn’t sick in the usual sense—no fever, no sore throat, no runny nose. Just a slow, steady decline. I’d heard stories about long COVID, maybe that was it? Or maybe it was just stress. I kept putting it off. Until one night when I randomly did the thing I do dozens of times a day: I asked ChatGPT. “I’ve been having some strange symptoms over the past few months. What is most likely wrong?” Then I listed what had been bothering me: an increased shortness of breath when doing routine physical activity like walking up stairs or mowing the lawn a feeling of congestion in my lungs, resulting in coughing that sometimes brings up material… sometimes that includes a slight reddish tint extreme fatigue and increased blood pressure. The AI didn’t hedge. The very first possibility it gave me wasn’t a cold. It wasn’t stress. It wasn’t even anxiety. The top result: “The combination of progressive shortness of breath, cough with possible blood (hemoptysis), and fatigue, especially when paired with elevated blood pressure, could point toward a cardiopulmonary issue, with congestive heart failure (CHF) or pulmonary hypertension among the leading concerns.” Then came the most alarming part. “These symptoms warrant medical evaluation without delay,” it wrote. “Please see a cardiologist or primary care doctor right away — or go to urgent care or an ER if the symptoms are getting worse.” I froze. Heart failure? That felt dramatic. Like something that happens to much older people, or people with a known heart condition. I’m relatively young. I’m not an athlete, but I don’t smoke or consume more than a few glasses of alcohol a year. Still, the answer rattled me enough that I called my doctor the next morning. After a quick physical exam, they ordered a battery of tests. First, a CT of my lungs to rule out blood clots, then bloodwork, and finally an echocardiogram. It’s never a good sign when you’re having an ultrasound of your heart and the sonographer stops, gets up from their chair, and says, “I’ll be right back to finish the rest of these images,” before leaving the room. The only reason that happens is because they saw something very bad, and they’re going to get a doctor. Sure enough, a moment later, he came back in the room with a cardiac fellow. “Do you know why your primary doctor ordered this test?” he asked. “Well, he was worried about blood clots in my lungs, but we ruled that out with the CT,” I replied. “He ordered this test to check for congestive heart failure.” “Yeah, you have heart failure,” the doctor said. Specifically, the echo showed that my ejection fraction, a measure of how much blood your heart empties every time it pumps, was around 25. That’s a little less than half of what is normal. My BNP—a blood marker that rises when the heart is under stress—was dramatically elevated. My heart was struggling to keep up, and my body was sending all the signals. I just didn’t know how to read them. What’s scary is that I almost didn’t do anything. I almost didn’t ask the question. I almost didn’t listen. I assumed I was just out of shape and had a bad case of allergies. Without that initial answer pushing me to take it seriously, there’s a good chance I’d still be trying to power through it—getting worse without knowing why—all the while putting myself at risk of not knowing why. The truth is, heart failure can be subtle in its early stages. The signs aren’t always dramatic. You might not clutch your chest or collapse. You might just feel a little more tired. A little more winded. A little off. But when your heart is struggling to circulate blood effectively, your entire body feels it—and if you ignore it long enough, the consequences can be irreversible. Google, by the way, suggested I might have bronchitis or tuberculosis. Neither of those is something you should ignore, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have TB, and bronchitis doesn’t usually last months, and often comes with a fever. ChatGPT, on the other hand, noticed a pattern. It gave me language to describe what was happening. It raised a red flag. It helped me take myself seriously. And, it nudged me to take the whole thing seriously and get checked out. That’s not just impressive. In my case, it may have been lifesaving. It’s easy to treat AI chatbots like a novelty or a parlor trick. But the thing they are really good at is taking complex information and synthesizing in ways that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. Sometimes, asking the right question at the right time—no matter who, or what, you ask—can change everything. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has frequently said that it thinks the company’s greatest contribution could be in health care. I think that may be true. I am amazed by the ability of technology to reveal information about ourselves that we could never know or understand on our own. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a time where we have such ready access to heart monitoring and other data sensors built into our smartwatches. I share this story to encourage you. If your body is telling you something, listen. If something feels off, don’t wait until it becomes a crisis. Technology is not a substitute for medical care, but it can be a powerful tool for insight, direction, and action—especially when you’re stuck in that limbo between “I’m probably fine” and “I might need help.” Thankfully, modern medicine is incredible, and this is something doctors are well-equipped to treat. I’ve been given more meds than I ever thought I’d be taking at 45 years old, and we’re working on ruling out a few other possible causes of my heart failure (once the insurance company comes around about what’s actually “medically necessary”—but that’s a different story). This is something I’ll be managing for the rest of my life, but thanks to a simple question I asked ChatGPT, I’m hoping it will be a long one. I reached out to OpenAI for comment on this story, but the company did not immediately respond to my request. EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

Your Employees Hate These Tasks at Work. They Say AI Can Help

New research commissioned by AI writing tool Grammarly and conducted by Talker Research found nearly half of the workers who responded hate the repetitive office tasks that make up the daily grind. The 44 percent total is no surprise, and you’ve probably had similar thoughts when you have to fill in a travel budget request form for Steve in Accounts—yet again. But it’s the AI era, and workers are increasingly aware that there are tools that can help wipe out this recurring drudgery—and 62 percent of the survey respondents said there are plenty of tasks they’d like to speed up with AI. The Grammarly study, which involved 2,000 knowledge workers, defined as people who work with computers in some way in the office, showed that certain tasks that have to do interrupt their momentum, getting in the way of productive work. The New York Post reported that respondents they have to undertake 53 of these tasks a week, on average, and they cost the typical worker some 3.5 hours of meaningful work. And while over four in 10 people hate carrying out repetitive tasks, there’s a generational spread in the data: 57 percent of Gen Z workers don’t enjoy mundane tasks, only 42 percent of Gen X feel the same. Anecdotally, this makes sense—Gen Z is used to living online, dealing with the fast-paced, constantly changing digital realm of social media, memes, and a world that never seems to stand still. That’s part of why many reports say that they feel very differently about the typical office job and workplace norms. The survey also asked what kind of tasks workers would like to use AI for, and how they’d like the experience to be. Fully 35 percent of people wanted AI to help with the tiresome task of drafting an email, and 34 percent said they’d want an AI to help with repetitive tasks like sorting spreadsheet data. Another 33 percent wanted the AI to draft meeting notes so they wouldn’t have to, and 31 percent wanted AI to carry out workflows automatically. The speed at which AI tools are evolving is a big factor in respondents’ interest in convenience. The data also showed 49 percent of workers would favor a tool that’s easy to use, and 35 percent said they wanted one that’s easy to prompt. Prompting an AI is a skill that can be developed, and it can greatly impact a generative tool like a chatbot, leading to a tighter, more useful output if you properly refine your questions . Since only 38 percent of the respondents’ companies have a preexisting policy on AI use, this makes sense—many companies are lagging on training staff and openly allowing them to use AI to save time. Over 50 percent of respondents said they wished their company was more open to AI use, and Gen Z led this sentiment, with 67 percent feeling this way, compared to just 45 percent of Gen X. Why should you care about these statistics? They do, after all, simply back up plenty of reports about the rising popularity of AI, and the fact that younger workers are more keen to adopt the technology to relieve them of humdrum office tasks than older workers are—even though, on the whole, roughly half of all workers are keen to use AI to do mundane jobs. The data even back up recent advice from the likes of entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who pointed out that AI is already great at taking on repetitive tasks. You should care precisely because the survey shows you how your staff could be using AI to free up their day to tackle more productive work. And because if your company is pro-AI, and you really want to reap the full benefits, it would be best for your business if every age cohort in your workforce was as keen to use AI as every other. Grammarly’s data show that maybe you should put an official AI use policy in place. Then you should train users of every age on how to make the most of what AI can offer, instead of relying on your digitally savvy younger workers to carry out your AI wishes. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

Tensions Are Flaring Between Microsoft and OpenAI

Cracks are reportedly forming in the previously-solid relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft as the two companies renegotiate the terms of their partnership. According to new reporting from The Information and The Wall Street Journal, the two companies have been negotiating for more than eight months regarding issues of ownership, profit-sharing, and exclusivity. Here’s the context: OpenAI is attempting to convert from a non-profit into a for-profit public benefit corporation (also known as a B Corp). According to The Information, OpenAI wants Microsoft, by far its largest investor, to only have a 33 percent ownership stake in the company. The same report alleges that OpenAI also wants to alter terms that give Microsoft exclusive rights to resell OpenAI’s API in the cloud, and prevent Microsoft from getting access to AI code editor Windsurf, which OpenAI is currently in the process of acquiring. In 2019, years before the debut of ChatGPT, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI as part of a deal that gave the Bill Gates-founded company exclusive rights to resell OpenAI’s API in its Azure cloud computing platform. In total, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI. According to a January 2025 blog post, OpenAI and Microsoft’s contract will expire in 2030. Other cloud computing providers, like Google and Amazon, would likely jump at the chance to resell OpenAI’s popular models. The year 2030 is also when Microsoft will lose exclusive access to OpenAI’s IP, and according to The Information, Microsoft is looking to extend that period of exclusivity. Microsoft uses OpenAI’s tech to power many of its new and AI-upgraded products, and OpenAI’s models serve as linchpin for Copilot, Microsoft’s lineup of AI-powered personal and work assistants. In addition, OpenAI is reportedly looking to change the terms of its revenue-sharing deal with Microsoft. Under the current deal, OpenAI will share 20 percent of its revenue with Microsoft until 2030. Now, OpenAI is hoping to reduce that percentage. As for Windsurf, a platform that uses AI to assist software engineers, the Information reports that leaders at OpenAI are concerned that their relationship with Microsoft could complicate a planned $3 billion acquisition of the company. That’s because Microsoft also owns GitHub Copilot, a major competitor to Windsurf. According to the Journal, tensions between Microsoft and OpenAI have deepend to the point that OpenAI executives have discussed going to antitrust regulators with accusations that Microsoft has been engaging in anticompetitive behavior. However, OpenAI and Microsoft told The Information in a joint statement that “we have a long-term, productive partnership that has delivered amazing AI tools for everyone. Talks are ongoing and we are optimistic we will continue to build together for years to come.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY