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_