How Intuit combined advanced AI and human expertise to reshape the future of finance for 100M+ customers

The convergence of emerging and advanced technologies, particularly machine learning (ML) and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI), is delivering tremendous value for consumers and small businesses. Technologies that were once on the bleeding edge have quickly been democratized in a few short years, bringing the transformative power of innovation to the doorstep of our customers globally. 

Intuit’s mission is to power prosperity around the world. We help put more money in the pockets of consumers and small businesses, saving them time by eliminating work, and ensuring they have confidence in every financial decision they make.

Our expertise in AI has helped us transform what we offer our customers: from products that enable them to complete tasks, to a platform that does tasks for them. Since declaring our strategy to become an AI-driven expert platform back in 2019, Intuit has seen accelerated adoption of the services our experts provide with the assistance of AI, as we’ve innovated at scale to benefit our more than 100 million customers. Our platform combines the power of rich data with AI and human experts to seamlessly blend digital and human financial expertise and deliver personalized experiences that give our customers complete confidence. 

Intuit’s unique approach to AI continues to drive best-in-class financial outcomes for customers

• Our AI-driven expert platform is powered by three key technologies: knowledge engineering (KE) to codify and work with vast rule sets like tax code; natural language processing (NLP) to interact with customers without friction, and understand and solve for customer needs;and machine learning to learn from the platform’s rich data and create personalized experiences. And we’re continuing to invest in our generative AI (GenAI) capabilities that can contribute to game-changing experiences for our customers.

These technologies underpin an approach to AI that’s unique to Intuit in two important ways: 

• First, we not only invest in the data, AI, and models, but we seamlessly blend digital and human financial experts on our platform, using AI to supercharge our network of experts. In turn, our experts provide invaluable feedback to help us train the best AI models possible.
• Second, we use cutting-edge technology in the fintech industry for personalized recommendations and predictions today, as our platform capabilities and model design enable us to custom-train millions of models for individual customers.

The customer benefit of this approach is clear in the numbers: Our platform delivers 730 million AI-driven customer interactions per year, generates 58 billion machine learning predictions per day, and provides 400,000 customer/financial attributes per small business. And while we use relevant open source code that helps our platform stay up-to-the-minute, our ~700 AI, ML, and data science US patents filed make us prolific inventors as well, creating entirely new, unique ways to power prosperity for our customers globally.

We have paved a path to virtual financial advice at scale. Nuanced, context-based personalization and recommendations can be delivered in natural language to help consumers and small businesses with virtual financial advice, so they can make the best choice based on their individual needs. A trusted platform can answer questions, advocate for one financial strategy over another, and flexibly adjust recommendations over time, based on choices the customer makes. The convergence of NLP, natural language understanding, computational linguistics, ML, KE—and the new breed of GenAI—can bring virtual financial advice at scale to life, augmented by virtual “live” financial experts.

Generative AI alone can’t file your taxes, but it can contribute to next-generation experiences on the Intuit platform   

As AI meets its next horizon in the form of GenAI, Intuit customers are already reaping the benefits. GenAI has captured the world’s attention with its human-like capabilities. We are well down the path of deploying this technology and are excited to deliver GenAI experiences directly to customers, as well as help our experts be more efficient and do more to help customers. For example, our Mailchimp team has been applying GenAI to help small businesses produce email marketing content more efficiently as a complement to our in-house developed and open source models.

Innovations like GenAI have game-changing potential to empower people and create next-generation customer experiences.  That’s why we’re moving quickly to deploy it more on our financial technology platform, to continue creating personalized experiences that inspire the trust and confidence our customers count on from Intuit.

And while GenAI alone can’t file your taxes for you, it can significantly enhance experiences. Our platform’s use of GenAI has already driven more than half of all chat conversations and eliminated 380,000 hours per year from customer call times, giving valuable time back to our customers and helping us serve them more efficiently by automatically summarizing calls for agents. 

This is just scratching the surface of GenAI’s true potential. Intuit technologists are experimenting with a variety of new applications and experiences, including domain-specific large language models that specialize in solving tax, accounting, marketing, and other fintech-specific problems; a GenAI lab that enables our technologists to experiment with GenAI capabilities from multiple third parties and Intuit’s own foundational language models that are trained on a large amount of unlabeled data and can be adapted to many applications; and generated chat responses and real-time coaching for product experts to serve customers more effectively and efficiently.

Powering prosperity for customers with accuracy and speed

As GenAI and other advanced AI technologies push the boundaries of what’s possible, the real magic will happen in fintech—which relies heavily on accurate, secure experiences—when these innovations are combined with deep domain and human expertise. It’s this synergy that already enables Intuit to deliver delightful experiences to our customers with accuracy and speed.

To achieve our mission to power prosperity around the world, we focus on delivering three benefits: more money, less work, and complete confidence. Technologies like GenAI can teach users more than they’ve previously known about complex topics like tax and tax code. But when it comes to finances, trust and confidence are an essential part of the value proposition. 

More development is needed before GenAI can safely be used in financial calculations, where accuracy is critical. We see a bright future in which Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform combines human expertise and GenAI to create groundbreaking new experiences that solve our customers’ most pressing financial problems.