Name: Intuit CEO: 'AI is fueling innovation for our customers'
Uploaded: 2022-06-17
Duration: 5 min 30 s
Description: Sasan Goodarzi says AI will 'revolutionize experiences' for Intuit customers.

Sasan Goodarzi says AI will "revolutionize experiences" for Intuit customers.

Intuit CEO: "AI is fueling innovation for our customers"

Leadership

when you became ceo of Intuit three years ago you said that artificial intelligence would become a very important platform at the company and it turned out that way. Tell us how you're using ai. First of all, we focus on really three benefits for our customers. We use Ai to put more money in our customers pockets. We use Ai to eliminate work and drudgery so they don't have to do any work on our platform. And last but not least is we want to make sure they make their decisions with you know, total confidence. And so I'll give you just, you know, a couple of examples of how does that show up for our small businesses, One, you know, we're able to do things like leverage all of your data as a small business with your permission, the customers, you serve, the vendors that you serve and we can instantly give you access to capital and alone. So you can thrive as a business. We can give you a loan on an invoice that you just sent out to get paid for the landscaping that you did without the customer even paying you because we know their credit worthiness and we can give you instant access to that cash. All those things are available to us because of the application of AI and all the machine learning capabilities that we use. And um I'm just so excited about the possibilities of Ai because it's actually feeling all the innovation that we're delivering for our customers well, your core business. Uh just to remind our viewers is uh the software, tax and accounting software of turbo tax and Quickbooks, what is it that you can do for those core businesses that you couldn't do before a I will use tax as an example, you know in in TurboTax, if you're doing it yourself or we do it with you with an expert. Ultimately we have to ask you a lot of questions to learn about you based on the use of machine learning and knowledge engineering. We've eliminated the majority of the questions that we ask because we know if you bought a home, we know if you have a child, we know if you've gotten a divorce. We know if you've bought a, you know with a loan that you've taken out and all those things fuel our machine learning robotics and capabilities to not only get you the maximum refund, but avoid asking you a lot of questions to give you confidence that things are done. Right? So that's just an example of how it's making our core platforms far better for consumers. Well, let me bring up an example of during the pandemic. I understand that uh into its ai capabilities were a significant plus for a lot of your customers because you were able to connect your customers, small businesses with experts to help them prove this pandemic um during the time that everybody was in lockdown, how hard or easy was it to make that connection for your customers just like you and I are connecting right now virtually, we were able to connect a customer to an expert anywhere in the United States that was a match for them. So one what AI enabled was matchmaking. The other is we actually leverage ai to make our experts far smarter, We help them understand what they need to know about that customer because we've already crunched the numbers, we've already leveraged the data to offer questions and insights that the expert can deliver to the consumer. So AI has been actually core to great matchmaking and delivering the benefits that consumers and small businesses are looking for when they connect with our experts virtually. Well for all the positives about ai it can have a dark side and you talk a lot about all the data that you can collect on a person, but sometimes um that data can be flawed and it leads to some inaccurate ai conclusions, It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen from time to time. How are you navigating through all of this into what people are calling responsible Ai we are as aware of all the bad things that could have happened with the technology as the good and so what we've done is a couple of things. One we have a governance body internally that's actually led by our data engineering and data scientist officer and the governance bodies actually do you have to do checks and balances to actually look at some of the decisions that the machine learning and knowledge engineering capabilities are making uh to test for biases. And we also have a partnership with an external uh sort of governance body to make sure that we are teaching and learning from one another because we want to make sure that we are actually sort of a role model and the gold standard for how AI is used because we truly believe it's revolutionary in our space and many other spaces but we also have to do it responsibility and be very clear about the downsides of it and how we're managing against it. But that's the approach that we take. So it sounds like you've had an extremely positive experience using AI in your business for companies watching this Ai movement from the sidelines, what advice do you have about the best way that they can launch their companies on this Ai path based on our experience, pick a specific customer problem, everything goes back to the customer, pick a problem that is important to you that you want to solve and try to understand one. Are you getting the data that you need, that's clean data that you can leverage and then to how you can first and foremost start with external partners to leverage their machine learning capabilities. So you can learn quickly because by learning quickly then you can decide what's unique to you that you want to invest in to deliver for customers because Ai is the wave of today. it is the wave of the future to fundamentally revolutionize experiences for our customers.