Intuit Inc., the maker of financial software for consumers and small businesses including TurboTax and QuickBooks, announced today that it’s bringing a new generative artificial intelligence powered assistant into its products to create personalized AI experiences for its customers so they can get their work done faster and more easily.

The new service will be embedded across Intuit’s platform and products with a familiar and common interface, called Intuit Assist, that will give users a personalized “chat” experience with their financial and customer data. Using the capability, users will be able to interact with the products by prompting it with text and have it respond to them with insights and advice.

Generative AI is the same type of artificial intelligence that underlies popular chatbots such as OpenAI LP’s chatbot ChatGPT, which can understand human speech and respond conversationally. Intuit is including the new Assist AI in its tax preparation software TurboTax, personal finance software Credit Karma, small business accounting software QuickBooks and email marketing platform Mailchimp.

Nhung Ho, vice president of artificial intelligence at Intuit, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that it was the company’s early investments in AI and data that set up these innovations today. Five years ago, the company declared that it was going to become an AI expert driven platform and today it’s making good on that plan.

“And what does it mean to be an AI driven expert platform?” said Ho. “It means that we marry the power of expertise from our accountants and bookkeepers with the power of AI to really deliver three key benefits for our customers. Help put more money in their pockets, eliminate the work that they don’t want do and save them time so they can really focus on what they care about.”

To do this, Intuit has tapped into 40 years of transactional and longitudinal behavioral data from more than 100 million customers that has been curated and categorized for the AI platform to use for its different products. This was then placed in the hands of different teams, whose task was to help train AI models to provide personalized experiences and responses the same way an expert might.

“That’s why we built GenOS, our generative AI operating system, which allows us to be able to quickly, securely and safely build and scale out new experiences for all of our products,” explained Ho.

GenOS was announced in June as the foundation for the company’s plans for today’s release. It’s a platform architecture of AI tools and models that provides a consistent experience for users as well as a sandbox environment for developers to experiment safely and refine new AI experiences before deploying and scaling them up for users. The system and tools build on Intuit’s already existing knowledge of AI with proprietary machine learning models that provide more than 800 million AI interactions per year.

With the platform, Intuit’s customers and employees have an expert system that can essentially coach them with actionable insights and even invoke actions, at their behest, similar to contacting a human expert.

“AI is fundamentally changing how we work and live. As people start to make financial decisions with the help of this technology, responsible stewardship and accuracy are paramount,” said Patrick Moorhead, chief executive and chief analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “We believe Intuit stands out for its ability to harness robust data across the small business, tax and consumer finance segments to deliver accurate and personalized AI-driven experiences at scale.”

Customers benefit from Intuit’s models and its AI experiences across products as it’s capable of providing immediate assistance better than search or help drop-downs because it can understand conversational speech. It’s also a lot easier to use than trying to navigate through forms or menus, which might take up to a dozen clicks to get to where a user needs to get a job done. With generative AI, all it takes is a simple question or request and the AI can complete the task.

In TurboTax Live, a user could be struggling with a complex tax issue, open up Assist and ask, “What do I do in this tax situation?” From there, Assist would have the context of the customer’s tax information, as well as all the data from numerous other taxes that had been similar, to explain the problem. Assist is already available to customers now, and will have enhancements rolling out in the coming months for the 2023 tax season.

A different AI model would be used for QuickBooks, one that is aware of cash flow and financial situations and can provide accounting insights and data. It can answer questions such as, “How do I make better decisions to help my company grow right now?” Or, “What is my cash flow?” And the AI will be able to display reports, charts and summarize insights to assist. Assist is available in beta to select customers and will roll out to all U.S. customers in the coming months.

“We bring the data to you,” Ho said. “We bring the insights and it’s not just about bringing insights. It’s actually bringing insights that really matter. Giving you numbers is not super-useful, but an action plan is much more useful.”

Select users of Credit Karma Live and Mailchimp have access to Intuit Assist and a larger release is set in the coming months.

It’s not just customers who can take advantage of the generative AI, it’s also employees. With many of Intuit’s products, when a customer wants to “chat with an expert,” they get the option to talk to an accountant or a bookkeeper to assist. That same employee also has access to Assist and the AI can help them offload tedious knowledge work as well and provide useful insights from the data.

“Our view is really AI is here to provide maximal benefits for our customers, and we marry the power of human expertise with AI expertise,” said Ho. “So really we provide that holistic solution, and at the heart of our platform really is the data.”

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