While businesses around the world race to unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI), Intuit, a USD 192 billion California-headquartered business software company, is very outwardly leading this charge—powered by innovation, data platforms, and a clear-eyed vision for the future. As much has been evident going by the realignment announced earlier this year at Intuit, including the July job cuts and CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s strong statements accompanying the layoffs, the message was clear: Intuit is shaping itself into a sinewy organisation—lean, yet robust and resilient.
Interestingly, India is one the key sites for Intuit globally and has been pegged to continue on its growth trajectory. On his recent visit to India, Ashok Srivastava, the company’s SVP and Chief Data Officer, sat down with BW Businessworld's Rohit Chintapali to share an insider’s view of how AI and data are transforming Intuit from the inside out and how Bengaluru-based India Development Center (IDC) is at the heart of this transformation. Excerpts:
How has the conversation around data at Intuit evolved with the rise of generative AI and AI, especially since late 2022, when AI became a major focus for companies?
We started making significant investments in AI and data about six years ago when we declared that we would be an AI-driven expert platform. Intuit is extremely principled in the way it constructs its strategy. And so, in defining the strategy of AI driven expert platform, we realised that one of the most important things to do would be to create a powerful data platform that could certainly power our AI experiences, but the expert platform as well, which means the platform that connects human customers with human experts and AI and data play a major role in that. Hence, we started making those investments very significantly and we have continued. The data platform is the foundation for all innovation at Intuit. And in my time here, we have made enormous investments going from siloed data in corners of the company to now a single data platform that cuts across the entire company that allows for clean data to flow in real time, where it makes sense to any corner of the company that needs it, with the right permission, with the right governance, and with the right accountability model built into it.
A lot of companies are claiming to be AI-first today, could you tell us how the narrative has shifted both at Intuit and more broadly?
You are right, a lot of companies today are making claims about AI. As a person who has been doing AI since graduate school, I can tell you that it is only as good as the data. And that’s why with companies that make claims about AI, you should look at their data capabilities and see how robust they are. Our data capabilities are extremely robust. We have 95 petabytes of data in our data lake, and we have the ability to generate clean real-time data at scale, to the point that we have tens of thousands of such pipelines are in operation. And these pipelines have essentially extremely high operational excellence, very low latency, and they serve our business with compliance and governance built in.
Given the recent layoffs at Intuit, alongside the CEO’s focus on AI and data investments, could you tell us how the strategy has evolved since July? Were these AI and data investments already in discussions, or did they pick up after the layoff announcement?
The huge investments started happening in AI and data about six years ago. I joined the company about seven years ago. So around that time, we started to build the AI capabilities, the AI platform, data platforms and so forth. And we continue to invest in these areas extraordinarily. What I find is that as we are making those investments, the talent that we can access here in India, the talent that we can access in the United States and Canada and Israel and in other places, is such that they, when they come in, they see the power of our platform, and then they can add to it. And that additive element is what drives us to higher levels of innovation. That is the nature of our investment. So, we built the foundational capabilities, we hire the top talent, they use those capabilities, they enhance that, which attracts the next level of talent, and that is what drives the growth we have at this company in terms of our investment.
In the layoff announcement in July, it was mentioned that there would be consolidation of some roles to five sites globally, including Bengaluru. Tell us what Bengaluru’s and India’s contributions are to Intuit’s AI and data-related efforts. We have learned that there are 1,800 people at Intuit India.
It’s upwards of 1,900 people right now. So, the India Development Center (IDC) in Bengaluru is one of the most critical elements of our AI and data and the company’s strategy. The reason for that is that India has a remarkable talent. We realised a long time ago that the engineering talent here was something that we could attract and we could build revolutionary capabilities with them. The IDC was started almost two decades ago. In this time, we have seen a consistent growth in engineering. And this is not outsourcing of engineering from the United States or elsewhere. This is having core capabilities built here in India in order to serve the markets that Intuit operates in.
We have built the best AI team in India. And the way I back that up is that we’ve been named as the number one place for data scientists work in India. And what we are doing is we are having that talent come in from the Indian market. People come from the US back to India, to work here because we are taking the, the key problems that our customers face, converting them into AI capabilities and building them right here. India is part-and-parcel of our long-term strategy for growth of our company. We’re growing here and my intention is to continue to grow.
“India is part-and-parcel of our long-term strategy for growth of our company. And we’re growing here and my intention is to continue to grow”
Are you building products out of India?
Yes, we are building products, customer experiences and capabilities here in India. We recently announced the creation of Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES). And this is a very powerful capability, a product that is being built here in India which allows our mid-market customers to better scale and better adopt our capabilities – financial management capabilities and other capabilities – so that they can move forward and work with their customers quickly and efficiently without years of migration.
Prior to the launch of IES, customers would come to a certain point, and then they would need to invest in some other software capability, and they would take years to adopt it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars would go into adopting it. In IES’ case, it takes, in some cases, the click of a button, in some cases only a few weeks, in some cases, the most extreme case, maybe a couple of months for them to make that migration. And it is something we’re incredibly proud of because it is going to help mid-market customers do better and understand project profitability and how their finances are doing so that they can serve their customers in the best possible way.
How about your other capabilities from here (and AI)?
New capabilities are definitely being built here. We were experimenting with LLMs long before November 2022 and we have been using AI since a while now. Now, one of the most important things about LLMs, which is the core component of generative AI, is that these models can work at scale, but they also need to have very strong underpinnings of data. And a key innovation that we’re making here in India is how we take LLMs and tie it to data so that they produce the very best experiences for our customers with the lowest latencies and with the highest accuracy is possible. And we are creating brand new ways to do large language modeling from the standpoint of prompt creation, prompt generation, and also reconciling those with the underlying data capabilities.
"… key innovation that we’re making here in India is how we take LLMs and tie it to data so that they produce the very best experiences for our customers with the lowest latencies and with the highest accuracy is possible"
What kind of results have your AI-powered products brought about in India?
In the prior tax here, we had 24 million TurboTax customers use Assist, which is our AI-powered experience for tax customers. With QuickBooks, we have seen an 11x increase in engagement with Intuit Assist and we have a 45 per cent increase in the speed at which QuickBooks customers are getting paid when they use Intuit Assist. About 51 per cent time has been saved when QuickBooks customers are using autogenerated bills. Greater than 90 per cent time saved for MailChimp customers leveraging revenue intelligence. And that is just a few of the numbers, and we have many more. All these are numbers from last 4-6 months.
