While Wall Street and Silicon Valley are obsessed with artificial intelligence, many companies are too busy driving revenue to care about it.
At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Monday, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi acknowledged that users of the company's products, including QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp and Credit Karma, are focusing on their daily priorities.
“I keep telling ourselves internally: Customers don't care about AI,” he said. luckAndrew Nazca. “Everyone talks about AI, but the reality is that consumers are looking to increase their cash flow. Consumers are looking to enhance their prosperity to make ends meet. Businesses are looking to acquire more customers, manage their customers, and sell more services.”
Of course, AI still powers Intuit's platform, helping businesses and entrepreneurs digest data that is passed between the dozens of separate applications they often juggle. That's why Intuit declared several years ago that it would focus on delivering “an experience tailored to the user,” Goodalzi said.
On the business side, that means helping businesses manage sales forecasts, cash flow, accounting, and taxes. On the consumer side, we need to help users build trust and wealth. Expertise from real people – human intelligence – is also an important factor.
“Customers don't care about AI,” Goodarzi added. “What they care about is, 'Help me grow my business, help me thrive.'” And we've found that the only way to do that is by combining the technology that automates everything with the human intelligence on our platform that can actually provide a human touch and advice. And we believe that will continue for decades to come. But the role of HI, or humans, will change. ”
For example, Intuit AI agents can hand off tasks to humans by following up with business clients whose invoices are past due or identifying which clients typically pay on time.
Ashok Srivastava, chief AI officer at Intuit, said AI agents save customers an average of 12 hours a month in daily tasks. Plus, users get paid 5 days earlier and are 10% more likely to get paid in full.
“As someone who has run small businesses in the past, I can tell you that numbers like this are very meaningful,” he says. “Twelve more hours means we can spend another 12 hours building the product and understanding our customers.”
Read more about Fortune Brainstorm AI:
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