For the first 17 years of his career at financial software giant Intuit, Alex Balazs worked as an engineer and rose up the ranks to become a vice president, without a single direct report.
Today, in his current role as chief technology officer, 8,000 employees are under Balazs’ purview, representing nearly half of Intuit’s total workforce.
“I fought to be an individual contributor as long as I could,” says Balazs. “I didn’t really want to move into leadership positions.”
Balazs’ trajectory is similar to that of many corporate technology leaders, who began their careers because of a love for coding and tinkering and have since had to learn to apply that skill effectively on a much broader scale. In his role as CTO—a job he was appointed to in September, Balazs oversees Intuit’s technology strategy and leads the product engineering, data science, IT, and information security teams globally.
This is his first tax season as CTO. It’s a critical time for the maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma but even more so this year. For the first 40 years of the company’s existence, Intuit designed software to make it easier for individuals to do their own taxes. Today, with data and artificial intelligence, Intuit wants customers to trust Intuit to handle more of the process for them.
“We’re in the middle of that,” says Balazs. “And so obviously, there’s a lot to do from a tech perspective, a capability perspective, and data and AI perspective.” Those newer tools include Intuit Assist, a generative AI-powered financial assistant.
Balazs says he was an introverted child but also saw the potential to be a great leader, inspired by his chemist father who rose up through the ranks at wastewater treatment plants. At the age of 12, his parents signed him up for a programming class at the local YMCA. It was 1983, the same year Scott Cook founded Intuit. Balazs was an athlete who competed in sports like football and basketball but equally enjoyed learning how to source code from physical magazines in his parents’ basement in Ohio.
Balazs joined Intuit in the fall of 1999 as a senior software engineer and was one of the first engineers to help put the desktop-bound QuickBooks onto the internet. At the time, Balazs explains, Intuit “wasn’t really a technology company. People knew the products, they didn’t really know the tech behind it.”
Throughout his earliest years at Intuit, Balazs considered himself a “boundaryless” leader, preferring to exert influence through his competence as an engineer. He was jolted after Intuit acquired Boston Light Software and founder Paul English left with many of Intuit’s leadership team to start travel search company Kayak. The experience left Balazs feeling abandoned and even angry.
That was when Balazs began to step outside his comfort zone and when the leadership qualities within him began to emerge more evidently. He was later selected to join Intuit’s leadership training program and learned the ropes from his predecessor Marianna Tessel and another former Intuit CTO, Tayloe Stansbury.
When he became CTO of Intuit, which generated $14.4 billion in total revenue for the latest fiscal year, Balazs got some friendly advice from CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who he recalls told him: “Alex, the best thing about you in this role is you’ve been here for 24 years. The worst thing about you in this role is you’ve been here for 24 years. You need to act like it’s Day One.”
As a leader, Balazs keeps his experiences as a frontline engineer top of mind, and, in fact, he still has running code in production. “I will make a bigger impact by the environment that I create, by the culture that I create,” he says.
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NEWS PACKETS
For whom the savings flow. You might have expected that generative AI would lower the costs of deploying software across the enterprise. But according to the latest forecast from International Data Corp., spending on worldwide systems integration services will increase by 6.4% to $153.8 billion this year, and further rise to $183.42 billion by 2027. As the Wall Street Journal reports, some CIOs are worried that the benefits of generative AI will accrue to third-party system integrators, who will lower their own costs without passing on the savings to customers.
GenAI is the new iOS vs. Android clash. One of the first decisions that most C-suite leaders need to make is which generative AI product they want to use, says Harvard Business Review, and that market is becoming very, very crowded. While OpenAI has a clear market-leading position, the authors of this piece say competition between different generative AI companies may resemble the early days of the battle between iOS and Android. As the market consolidates, two to three large factions will emerge, and companies ranging from big tech to startups will position themselves to be the heart of those systems. Read the full story.
White House aims to attract AI talent. The Biden Administration is seeking $32 million to lure AI talent into federal agencies in a bid to better compete against the private sector's lucrative AI jobs. Under the president’s proposed budget request for fiscal 2025, the White House is also seeking $75 million for a fund that allocates extra money for technology projects, though as Bloomberg reports, that's less than half the $200 million the Biden administration sought in 2023.
ADOPTION CURVE
It's tough to look at Nvidia's stock, which has risen nearly 300% in the last 12 months, and accuse Wall Street of not being bullish enough on AI. But according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, investors are underestimating the broader impact of AI on IT spending.
“This is just the top of the first inning of a $1 trillion+ AI market opportunity coming to the shores of the tech sector over the next few years,” Ives writes in a recent note to investors. Sure, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Palantir are well positioned for the bonanza, Ives says—but those are just a few of the boats that will lifted as enterprise spending on AI technology claims a bigger portion of IT budgets, Wedbush says.
“We believe overall AI could comprise 8%-10% of IT budgets in 2024 versus less than 1% in 2023,” Wedbush proclaims.
JOBS RADAR
- FedEx announced that Robert B. Carter, EVP, FedEx Information Services and CIO, will retire and step down from his current roles effective June 30 but remain as a senior advisor through the end of the year. Effective July 1, Sriram Krishnasamy, currently the EVP and chief transformation officer for FedEx and the president and CEO of FedEx Dataworks, will serve as chief digital and information officer.
- GXO Logistics announced the newly created leadership role and appointment of Nizar Trigui as CTO to further accelerate GXO’s industry leadership in technology and capitalize on the increasing global demand for advanced warehouse solutions.
- Societe Generale named Christophe Tummers as group chief data officer, effective April 1. Tummers has close to 30 years of experience in the financial industry and joins Societe Generale from UBS, where he was a managing director and most recently held the positions of group CDO and then CDO for ESG.
- Calastone has appointed Nick Parsons as CTO, where he will be responsible for Calastone’s technology operations, as well as product strategy and development.
- Proof announced that Eric Fleischman has joined the company as CTO. Fleischman previously was the CTO of Invitae, and prior to that, he was the chief architect at DocuSign, where he led the company's technical strategy and engineering.
- The Federal Maritime Commission appointed Mohammad “Ali” Usman as CIO, duties he assumed effective immediately. Prior to joining the Federal Maritime Commission, Usman served as CTO at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service.
