AI can help UK small businesses grow and do more

Intuit’s mission is to power prosperity around the world and help customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. Helping small businesses succeed is personal for us. In the UK, 99% of businesses are small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and they account for 61% of all employment. Small businesses power local communities and are the economic engine of countries all over the world, but more than half don’t survive beyond their fifth year. 

As a company, Intuit is committed to helping our small business customers beat the odds. One way we’re doing this is by putting artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the hands of small businesses. We’re taking the technology that big businesses use to match small business needs. For over 5 years, Intuit has been driving AI innovation to help our customers solve their most important problems. We’ve been building Intuit products on our platform using AI technologies—such as machine learning, knowledge engineering, natural language processing and understanding, and generative AI—that inspire trust and confidence with our customers in their financial decisions. Today, we have more than 730 million AI-driven customer interactions annually, generating 58 billion machine-learning predictions daily.

In QuickBooks, we’re using AI to help simplify business operations by automating, predicting, and personalising our customers’ experience. AI helps small business owners make more money with less work while giving them confidence in their actions and decisions.

In Mailchimp, we’re leveraging AI-powered tools to help businesses create engaging content quickly and easily leverage tools that suggest more click-worthy subject lines and headers to help small businesses create personalised experiences at scale and boost revenue. 

We’re excited about the positive impact that our AI tools can have. Here are some of the ways Intuit is using AI to help small businesses grow and do more. 

Intuit uses AI to help small businesses grow.

AI can provide data-driven insights, enabling users to quickly understand if they can weather a drop in business, take out a small business loan, or expand. To help owners avoid coming up short, QuickBooks Online Cash Flow Planner uses state-of-the-art AI forecasting techniques to make personalised cash flow predictions and identify key patterns. These predictions give small businesses the enhanced visibility they need to help guide financial decision-making. 

When we spoke with Emma Thomson of Gemz by Emz, a small business focused on memorial jewelry, she described the impact that AI has had on her business. For her business, Mailchimp’s segmentation tools have helped her identify customers who are more likely to purchase again and spend more over time. ‘Intuit AI’s tools have led to me getting a lot more sales, a lot more engagement, and a lot more customers,’ said Thomson, ‘AI can be really good for small businesses.’ 

Intuit’s AI tools help small businesses do more.

Every small business owner wears multiple hats—from CEO, CFO, and CMO to stocking shelves and delivering orders. Intuit’s AI empowers small businesses to do more by serving personalised insights, providing expert advice, and helping owners make informed financial decisions. 

We use AI to automate repetitive tasks to remove drudgery so small business owners can be more productive and focus on the work they love doing. Who wants to manually enter every receipt and bill when you can upload it to QuickBooks, and it automatically categorises the transaction for you? Accurate, timely categorisation of data is essential for small business owners, giving them a high-level view of where their money is going. 

Our machine learning models are built using historical data and ‘learn’ over time, based on customer input, to further refine the categories most relevant to their business. Intuit’s AI tools help small businesses tackle everything from the critical to the mundane.

We believe AI should be designed and used responsibly to help people.

Intuit is guided by our core values in everything we do. We build AI that works hand-in-hand with people to help them do their jobs better. AI can be a powerful tool for small businesses, but it also must be used and deployed responsibly. Intuit takes a multi-disciplinary approach to operationalising responsible AI and data governance. This includes internal review, executive-level oversight, employee training, and channels for stakeholder feedback. 

We strive to use AI to improve the financial lives of everyone—from the small business on the high street to the online entrepreneurs leveraging digital tools to reach more people across the country.