Intuit’s CTO on AI in 2020 & Beyond

At Intuit, proud maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to prosper. We’re dedicated to providing the tools, skills, and insights that empower people around the world to take control of their finances and live the lives they want. You may not realize it yet, but artificial intelligence is all

At Intuit, proud maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to prosper. We’re dedicated to providing the tools, skills, and insights that empower people around the world to take control of their finances and live the lives they want.

You may not realize it yet, but artificial intelligence is all around us. In fact, AI is so ubiquitous that it’s become as much a philosophy as a technology—a new way of thinking about the relationship between people and machines. Whether you’re using AI to gain insight into business trends, improve energy efficiency, diagnose medical diseases, or make better financial decisions, you’re blending the technology into your everyday life of traditional manually-done tasks in order to make your life simpler and easier.

And this is only the beginning. As the science, technology, and implementation of AI continue their rapid advance, we’ll see new and better ways to leverage its value in day-to-day life.

Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel predicts AI will accelerate in three significant ways through 2020 and beyond:

AI and humans will collaborate

AI will not “replace humans”; it will collaborate with humans and enhance how we do things. People will be able to provide higher-level work and service, powered by AI. At Intuit, our platform allows experts to connect with customers to provide tax advice and help small businesses with their books in a more accurate and efficient way using AI. It helps work get done faster and helps customers make smarter financial decisions. As experts use the product, the product gets smarter, in turn making the experts more productive. This is the decade where, through this collaboration, AI will enhance human abilities and allow us to take our skills and work to a new level.

AI will eat the world in ways we can’t imagine today

AI is often talked about as though it is a sci-fi concept, but it is and will continue to be all around us. We can already see how software and devices have become smarter in the past few years and AI has already been incorporated into many apps. AI-enriched technology will continue to change our lives, every day, in what and how we operate. At Intuit, we’re always thinking about how AI will transform finances. Just as we can’t imagine the world before the Internet or mobile devices, our day-to-day experiences will soon become different and unimaginable without AI all around us, making our lives today seem obsolete and full of unneeded tasks.

We’ll see a surge of AI-first apps

As AI becomes part of every app, the way we design and write apps will fundamentally change. Instead of writing apps the same way we have been and just adding AI, apps will be designed from the ground up around AI and written differently. Just think of conversational user interfaces (CUI) and how they create a new navigation paradigm in your app. Soon, a user will be able to ask any question from any place in the app, moving it outside of a regular flow. New tools, languages, practices and methods will also continue to emerge over the next decade.

AI is already woven into more aspects of daily life than most people are even aware of—though every time they ask their car for directions or auto-categorize a business expense, they’re realizing its benefits. Those benefits will expand exponentially in the months and years ahead. And we can’t wait to see them.

How do you think AI will change how you live? Comment below!

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