Cannot have generative AI without clean, real-time data: Intuit’s Ashok Srivastava

Last month, financial and accounting software provider Intuit launched a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based financial assistant called Intuit Assist. It is embedded across the company’s platforms and products to help customers make ‘smart’ financial decisions by making simple natural language queries, as Intuit stated in its blog. Some of Intuit’s flagship products include QuickBooks for accounting and bookkeeping, Mailchimp for email and marketing automation, and TurboTax for income tax preparation software.

The launch of Intuit Assist follows closely on the heels of the release of Intuit's ambitious AI strategy for 2023. In this vision document, the US-based fintech giant outlined its aspirations to transform into an AI-driven expert platform. Its overarching objectives include expediting the realization of benefits for its users, resolving cash flow challenges, and delivering personalized guidance, with a particular focus on the small business mid-market segment.

“Intuit has undergone massive reinventions in the last 40 years, but the last AI and data transformation has been the most significant. Six years ago when I started as chief data office (CDO), the charter I had was to start more rapid investment in AI to build the data capabilities necessary to scale this across all products and services into offers, both internally as well as externally,” said Ashok Srivastava, CDO, Intuit, in a conversation with TechCircle. 

Srivastava emphasised greatly the need for using clean and real-time data for building these AI systems. “You cannot have generative AI without clean, real-time data flowing through your systems with the right permission, guardrails, and governance.” He added that these AI systems at Intuit have been built on 60 petabytes of proprietary data, including 500k financial attributes per small business, and 60k attributes per customer. The AI models deployed have been able to generate over 800 million customer interactions per year and 65 billion machine learning predictions every day.

Intuit is also focusing on training its workforce in AI and generative AI, especially across product development, product management, experience design, and other similar functions. “There has been a lot of demand for such learning and we are providing them in the long run. These AI tools and technologies that we are building will also be leveraged internally by employees, irrespective of their background, in the spirit of AI democratisation.” Intuit has also developed a generative AI-based operating system called GenOS, which has helped 1000s of Intuit developers develop several projects. 

The Mountain View-based company has offices in the US, Israel, and India, among others. In fact, with 1,700 employees, India is among the largest offices for the company, with the main branch in Bengaluru. The India office functions like a Center of Excellence for product development, tech and engineering across Intuit’s products and services. Since 2021, Saurabh Saxena has been heading the India site for Intuit. Notably, Intuit announced in 2022 that it would stop QuickBooks Online products in India from January 2023.