I’ll confess I’ve had the concept of “the team” on my mind lately. As a life-long sports fan, I never miss a Super Bowl, and with the Winter Olympics nearly upon us I’m gearing up to cheer on Team USA – even for events I know nothing about – Ski mountaineering? Count me in! Whether it’s a local team or athletes on the world stage, I’ve always been moved by the way a group of people can come together to achieve something no individual could do alone. There is something truly powerful about that collective energy; it reminds us that we’re rarely at our best when we’re operating on our own.
With the advent of Privacy Awareness Month at Intuit, I’m struck by the parallel to how our privacy mission has evolved. The deeper we dive into innovating with data to create impactful products, the more we realize that privacy isn’t a siloed department – it is the ultimate team sport.
Early in my career, privacy was treated much more as a defensive measure – a vault designed to keep valuable information stationary and secure – managed by only a handful of specialists. But as emerging technology reshapes how we build products and work, that isolated approach is no longer enough. Specifically, as AI has quickly become a core part of how we work, the stakes for how we manage and apply data and information have never been higher.
Meeting this moment takes mastering the “next-click” for data stewardship, where we come together and put the data we protect to work in meaningful ways across the organization to power prosperity for the people who own it – our customers.
Making privacy a team sport of shared expertise (& accountability)
In the age of AI, Intuit is fostering a culture where every employee – from engineers to product designers to our expert network treats privacy like a team sport. This includes a cross-training approach to building knowledge and expertise between privacy and the other critical teams across the organization.
In each instance, my team and I learn so much more when we draw upon the collective strength of the roster around us. Want to better understand pain points in your product development process? Sit down with the front line. Need to enable wider adoption of new tech? Get in touch with the people actually using it. We listen to their stories and learn from their challenges and successes, and while we’re there, we share what we know so that everyone can, to extend the metaphor, get in the game.
Here’s how that “shared competency” looks in practice:
- We embed privacy ambassadors directly within our engineering and product teams to create a mutual learning opportunity: as our technology teams master privacy principles, our ambassadors work to better understand the nuances of AI and data engineering so we can meet in the middle and move faster.
- Speaking of engineers, we are incredibly fortunate to have a team of privacy engineers staffed across our global technology ecosystem within our CTO organization. While our privacy ambassadors focus on project-level alignment, these engineers architect the core systems that help us maintain compliance amidst an ever-growing web of global data regulations. This is essential to safely and responsibly launching the products and services our customers need most.
- Lastly, the idea of privacy as a shared competency extends beyond our office walls to our customers as well. Members of our privacy team have been conducting roadshows and workshops with small business owners and state regulators to discuss how to navigate the AI landscape through a responsible lens. While we share our framework for data stewardship, we are also learning about the experiences entrepreneurs are having as they adopt AI tools. By meeting our customers where they are, we can ensure that our internal privacy expertise is directly shaped by the lived experiences of those we serve.
The return on trust
This collaborative approach gets everyone involved, but how do you know that you’re working toward a big win? Customers rightfully want to know what they get in exchange for their data beyond the critical need to keep it safe and secure. At Intuit, our answer is to deliver data-driven innovation and experiences you can’t get anywhere else.
We are building a future where we don’t have to choose between speed and privacy protections because safety is the engine for our momentum. By investing in data stewardship as a shared competency, we can safely use data to solve complex financial problems. This approach is what allows us to find an overlooked tax deduction, predict a cash-flow gap for a small business, reach a new customer base, or automate hours of manual bookkeeping.
Ultimately, taking the “next click” as privacy professionals means it’s no longer enough to just guard the vault – we need to come together as one unified team to show customers how we’re using their data across the organization, to unlock new possibilities, personalized experiences, and lasting value.