Intuit’s New AI Initiative
Intuit has announced the rollout of Intuit Assist, an AI-powered platform designed to automate many accounting and financial tasks across its flagship products, including QuickBooks Online, TurboTax, and Credit Karma. The service is intended to enhance efficiency for small business owners and consumers by integrating AI with human expertise.
In QuickBooks, AI agents will be able to handle routine bookkeeping responsibilities such as:
- Managing customer leads
- Tracking payments
- Sending invoices
- Reconciling books
- Identifying anomalies in spending and transactions
- Providing batch posting with ready-to-post features
The system is built to deliver real-time insights—for example, highlighting cash flow hot spots, predicting follow-up questions, and answering requests in natural language such as “show me my profit and loss for last month” or “how many invoices are overdue?”
Intuit emphasizes that its approach is not entirely automated. Users will still have access to accountants and tax experts through Intuit’s Live Platform, where AI is meant to complement human judgment. By combining large datasets in small business, tax, and consumer finance with generative AI, Intuit aims to create a tool that helps small businesses and individuals make more confident financial decisions.
Applications Across Products
- QuickBooks Online: Small businesses will have automated reconciliation, invoice tracking, and cash flow analysis. The AI will provide context-driven insights to guide decisions and reduce time spent on manual bookkeeping.
- TurboTax: Using Intuit’s Tax Knowledge Engine, the AI will help filers navigate complex tax laws, create personalized tax checklists, and streamline access to refunds. The tool can assist experts in TurboTax Live by surfacing quick, data-driven answers to client questions.
- Credit Karma: Consumers will receive year-round recommendations for improving financial decisions, from building credit to optimizing money management.
Patrick Moorhead, founder and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, noted that Intuit’s advantage lies in its extensive financial data across business and consumer domains, paired with a decade of investment in AI development.
Independent Evaluation: AccountingBench Results
While the potential of AI in accounting is significant, independent evaluations suggest challenges remain. AccountingBench, a benchmark built from a year of real financial data from a SaaS business, compared the performance of frontier AI models against professional CPAs.
- In the first months of closing the books, leading models performed at near-human levels, typically keeping balances within 1% of CPA-calculated figures.
- Over time, however, errors compounded. After several months, model-produced ledgers diverged by more than 15%—approximately half a million dollars in misstatements for the test business.
- The models’ outputs showed increasing incoherence, demonstrating the difficulty of “butterfly” tasks—where every action has lasting consequences, and mistakes accumulate.
These findings highlight the difference between excelling on synthetic benchmarks and maintaining accuracy over long-term, real-world accounting cycles.
User Concerns and Adoption Issues
Feedback from early adopters reflects skepticism about fully automated AI bookkeeping:
- “QBO forced it on me as a demo and it made so many mistakes… I spent more time correcting its errors than doing the books myself.”
- “They are making QuickBooks Online all AI automation or nothing after September 2025?”
- “If small business owners rely on auto-matching and auto-categorization, it will create cleanup work for real bookkeepers, just like offshore bookkeeping services often do.”
These comments point to the risks for businesses that adopt AI tools without careful oversight. Incorrect reconciliations or categorizations can lead to significant accounting issues, ranging from lost money to compliance failures.
Outlook for Small Businesses
AI has clear potential to save time on repetitive bookkeeping tasks and provide faster financial insights. However, current evidence suggests that long-term accuracy still requires expert human oversight.
For small business owners, this means AI can be a useful tool to improve workflows, but not a full replacement for professional accounting services. For accountants, the shift represents an opportunity to leverage AI for efficiency while reinforcing the importance of expert review in maintaining accurate books.
As Intuit expands Intuit Assist across its platforms, it is obvious Intuit is attempting to move all customers to a subscription model and have them continue to pay additional fees for AI and so-called experts. Intuit seemingly intends to reduce the actual human workforce that they use for assisting customers. Over-time this can lead to uncertain tax results for customers while attempting to increase profits for Intuit.
Be prepared for uncertain situations while always using human experts such as Morris and Associates to prepare your taxes and keep your books
