While Wall Street and Silicon Valley are obsessed with artificial intelligence, many businesses don’t have the luxury to fixate on AI because they’re too busy trying to grind out more revenue.
At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Monday, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi acknowledged the day-to-day priorities of users of his company’s products, such as QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma.
“I remind ourselves at the company all the time: Customers don’t care about AI,” he told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca. “Everybody talks about AI, but the reality is a consumer is looking to increase their cash flow. A consumer is looking to power their prosperity to make ends meet. A business is trying to get more customers. They’re trying to manage their customers, sell them more services.”
Of course, AI still powers Intuit’s platforms, which help companies and entrepreneurs digest data that’s often stovepiped across dozens of separate applications they juggle. So Intuit declared years ago that it would focus on delivering “done-for-you experiences,” Goodarzi said.
On the enterprise side, it means helping businesses manage sales leads, cash flow, accounting, and taxes. On the consumer side, it entails helping users build credit and wealth. Expertise from a real person, or human intelligence, is an essential component as well.
“Customers don’t care about AI,” Goodarzi added. “What they care about is, ‘Help me grow my business, help me prosper.’ And we have found the only way to do that is to combine technology automating everything for them with human intelligence on our platform that can actually give you the human touch and the advice. And we believe that will be the case for decades to come. But the role of the HI, the human, will change.”
For example, an Intuit AI agent can hand off tasks to humans by helping them follow up with business clients who have overdue invoices or identify which ones typically pay on time.
Ashok Srivastava, Intuit’s chief AI officer, noted that the AI agents on average save customers 12 hours per month on routine tasks. In addition, users get paid five days sooner and are 10% more likely to be paid in full.
“As a person who’s run small businesses in the past, I can tell you numbers like that are very meaningful,” he said. “Twelve more hours means 12 more hours that I can spend building my products, understanding my customers.”
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