“I realized that building out a platform for our customers to do the work was not actually the future,” he recalls. “The future was, it’s done for you.”
「我意識到為我們的客戶建立一個平台來完成工作實際上並不是未來，」他回憶道。 “未來已經為你做好了。”

The light bulb moment spurred Goodarzi, who became CEO in 2019, to lead the company into a massive strategy reset putting AI at the center of the business. The revamp has included two major acquisitions costing $20 billion in total, firing hundreds of employees, and investing heavily into AI, years before the technology made a blockbuster debut into the public consciousness.   
這個靈光一現的時刻激勵了 2019 年成為執行長的古達齊 (Goodarzi) 帶領公司進行了大規模的策略調整，將人工智慧置於業務的中心。這項改革包括兩項總耗資200 億美元的重大收購，解雇了數百名員工，並對人工智慧進行了大量投資，而早在該技術首次進入公眾意識的幾年前，該技術就轟動一時。

The company has been incorporating elements of AI into its business for years, but its first major stand-alone AI product for consumers, called Intuit Assist, debuts today. It’s embedded into products including TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, and the company says it can do everything from foreseeing a looming cash crunch at a small business to creating and executing an email marketing campaign. Goodarzi believes that an early gamble on AI, along with a massive trove of data, is a winning strategy to extend the company’s domination of tax and accounting software for individuals and small businesses. And he has quite literally bet his entire company on the idea that millions of people will trust an AI service to recommend specific, personalized business decisions. 
該公司多年來一直將人工智慧元素融入其業務中，但其首款面向消費者的主要獨立人工智慧產品 Intuit Assist 今天首次亮相。它被嵌入到 TurboTax、Credit Karma、QuickBooks 和 Mailchimp 等產品中，該公司表示，它可以做一切事情，從預見小型企業迫在眉睫的現金緊縮到創建和執行電子郵件行銷活動。 Goodarzi 認為，早期對人工智慧的賭博以及大量數據是擴大公司在個人和小型企業稅務和會計軟體領域的主導地位的製勝策略。他確實將整個公司的賭注押在了這樣一個想法上：數百萬人會信任人工智慧服務來推薦具體的、個人化的商業決策。

“At the end of the day, there are certain decisions you have to make,” Goodarzi says. “And the decision I made was, as a team, we’re going to bet the company on data and AI.”
「歸根結底，你必須做出某些決定，」古達齊說。 “我做出的決定是，作為一個團隊，我們將把公司的賭注押在數據和人工智慧上。”

A big bet on big data
大數據的大賭注

Intuit has a long history of changing with the times.
Intuit 有著與時俱進的悠久歷史。

The company launched in 1983 with personal finance software called Quicken. Specialized PC software was hot back then, but Intuit’s peers from that year (Flexidraw, VisiCalc) are long gone. It has outlived them all by continually disrupting itself to meet the advent of Microsoft Windows, the internet, mobile devices, and other revolutionary innovations that competitors couldn’t handle. 
該公司於 1983 年推出名為 Quicken 的個人財務軟體。專用 PC 軟體當時很熱門，但 Intuit 當年的同業（Flexidraw、VisiCalc）早已不復存在。它透過不斷自我顛覆來滿足 Microsoft Windows、互聯網、行動裝置和其他競爭對手無法應對的革命性創新的出現，從而比它們更長久。

Today the company is best known for creating TurboTax, the bestselling tax prep software, and QuickBooks, the No. 1 accounting software for small and medium-size businesses. Since the company went public in 1993, the S&P index has risen 902%, and the Nasdaq has risen 1,940%. Intuit stock is up 23,190%. Most of the Wall Street analysts covering the stock rate it a Buy. None rate it Underweight or Sell.
如今，該公司因創建最暢銷的報稅軟體 TurboTax 和第一大中小型企業會計軟體 QuickBooks 而聞名。自該公司1993年上市以來，標準普爾指數已上漲902%，那斯達克指數已上漲1,940%。 Intuit 股價上漲 23,190%。大多數華爾街分析師對該股給予買入評級。沒有人將其評級為“減持”或“賣出”。

Despite Intuit’s history of constant transformation, when Goodarzi decided to put AI at the center of its business model in 2019, not all of his top lieutenants agreed. “It was a big debate,” he recalls. “Five years ago, putting AI at the core was hard to see. You had to have a belief.” 
儘管 Intuit 有著不斷轉型的歷史，但當 Goodarzi 在 2019 年決定將人工智慧置於其商業模式的中心時，並非所有高級副手都同意。 “這是一場大辯論，”他回憶道。 「五年前，將人工智慧置於核心是很難想像的。你必須有一個信念。

The deciding factor in that decision was the company’s incredible trove of data—something that AI needs to train, and what enables the company to give detailed financial recommendations tailored to each customer. “AI is really useless if you don’t have vast data and clean data,” Goodarzi told Fortune three years ago. Speaking more recently, he said that when it came to a new strategy, “the decision I made was, we’re going to bet the company on data and AI.”
該決定的決定性因素是該公司令人難以置信的數據寶庫——人工智慧需要訓練這些數據，並且使該公司能夠為每個客戶提供詳細的財務建議。 「如果沒有大量數據和乾淨的數據，人工智慧真的毫無用處，」古達齊三年前告訴《財富》雜誌。最近，他表示，當談到新策略時，“我做出的決定是，我們將把公司的賭注押在數據和人工智慧上。”

Intuit already had data from its 57 million customers, which gave it a significant advantage when it came to financially focused AI. Then in 2020, Goodarzi bought Credit Karma, a personal money management platform, for $8.1 billion. That brought in 110 million consumers and their financial data. And in 2021 he bought Mailchimp, a marketing platform, for $12 billion. That brought in 10 million more customers and their data.  
Intuit 已經擁有 5700 萬客戶的數據，這在以金融為重點的人工智慧方面賦予了它顯著的優勢。然後在 2020 年，Goodarzi 以 81 億美元收購了個人理財平台 Credit Karma。這帶來了 1.1 億消費者及其財務數據。 2021 年，他以 120 億美元收購了行銷平台 Mailchimp。這帶來了 1000 萬以上的客戶及其數據。

“Everybody wants to talk about how great their data is,” says Jackson Ader, a MoffettNathanson analyst who covers the company. “But Intuit’s dataset, on the consumer side or small-business side—it’s second to none.” 
「每個人都想談論他們的數據有多出色，」負責該公司業務的 MoffettNathanson 分析師 Jackson Ader 表示。 “但 Intuit 的數據集，無論是在消費者方面還是小型企業方面，都是首屈一指的。”

Amid these acquisitions and a strategy shift, Goodarzi made an unprecedented move in 2020—firing 715 employees, the first mass layoff in the company’s history. Moving AI to the core was going too slowly, Goodarzi felt, and Intuit’s ambitious reskilling program couldn’t work fast enough. He replaced the departing workers with over 700 new ones, largely people with AI skills. “We were starting to see momentum in our bets around data and AI,” he says, “but we knew we didn’t have the talent at the level that was needed to accelerate what was possible. We took those dollars and reinvested them in the craft skills we needed.”
在這些收購和策略轉變中，Goodarzi 在 2020 年採取了前所未有的舉措——解僱 715 名員工，這是公司歷史上的首次大規模裁員。 Goodarzi 認為，將人工智慧轉移到核心的速度太慢，而且 Intuit 雄心勃勃的再培訓計劃也無法足夠快地發揮作用。他用 700 多名新員工接替了離職員工，其中大部分人擁有人工智慧技能。 「我們開始看到圍繞數據和人工智慧的押注勢頭，」他說，「但我們知道我們沒有達到加速發展所需水平的人才。我們把這些錢重新投資到我們需要的工藝技能上。

Goodarzi’s grand goals

Intuit says the generative AI–powered assistant it introduced today will offer personalized analyses and recommendations for anyone who runs a small business, files their taxes, manages finances, or markets products and services.

For example, besides warning a small business of an impending cash crunch, Intuit says it can now create an email marketing campaign—strategy, images, words, which customers to target—analyze the results, and recommend next steps. The company says it can also give personalized recommendations to a consumer who lives paycheck to paycheck and confronts an unexpected expense, or help an entrepreneur get started, importing data from the entrepreneur’s website and taking on day-to-day chores such as sending invoice reminders to customers.
例如，Intuit 表示，除了警告小型企業即將面臨現金短缺之外，它現在還可以建立電子郵件行銷活動（策略、圖像、文字、目標客戶），分析結果並建議後續步驟。該公司表示，它還可以向靠工資生活並面臨意外開支的消費者提供個人化建議，或者幫助企業家入門，從企業家的網站匯入資料並處理日常瑣事，例如發送發票提醒給客戶。

Intuit has a long AI head start against its competitors including H&R Block, Cash App, TaxSlayer, Xero, FreshBooks, and others. The company is hoping its early investment will produce a network effect, in which good AI-generated recommendations attract more customers, bringing in more data, improving the company’s products, therefore attracting more customers. 
與 H&R Block、Cash App、TaxSlayer、Xero、FreshBooks 等競爭對手相比，Intuit 在人工智慧方面擁有長期領先優勢。該公司希望其早期投資能產生網路效應，即人工智慧產生的良好推薦會吸引更多客戶，帶來更多數據，改進公司的產品，從而吸引更多客戶。

But the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last November raised the fear, at least among investors, that the company had been ambushed. Who would need Intuit’s AI products if anyone could ask free or low-cost generative AI to do almost anything? The fear deepened when OpenAI introduced GPT-4 three months later and demoed its ability to calculate taxes—calling the system TaxGPT and asking it to answer the tax problem of a fictional couple, to show how it arrived at its answer, and, as a flourish, to write a rhyming poem summarizing it all (“To calculate their tax, it’s true/A standard deduction we must construe…”).
但去年 11 月 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 的發布引起了人們的擔憂，至少在投資者中，該公司遭到了伏擊。如果有人可以要求免費或低成本的生成式人工智慧來做幾乎任何事情，誰會需要 Intuit 的人工智慧產品呢？三個月後，當OpenAI 推出GPT-4 並展示其計算稅收的能力時，這種恐懼加深了——將該系統稱為TaxGPT，並要求它回答一對虛構夫婦的稅務問題，以展示它是如何得出答案的，並且，作為一個蓬勃發展，寫一首押韻的詩來總結這一切（“為了計算他們的稅收，這是真的/我們必須解釋的標準扣除......”） 。

The fears are unwarranted—for now. GPT-4 can read the tax code, but it can’t give personalized recommendations, because it doesn’t have Intuit’s massive proprietary dataset. GPT-4 is “more friend than potential threat” to Intuit, says Ader, because Intuit “has the data—that is what they have in spades.”

Investors seem to like Intuit’s AI-powered strategy to date. The stock has far outperformed the S&P and Nasdaq since Goodarzi took the helm. But he feels certain his controversial call of five years ago has a long way yet to play out. His goals are broadscale: to double the savings rate of customers on Intuit’s platform by 2025 (the U.S. personal savings rate was 3.5% in July) and to increase the success rate of small and medium businesses on the platform by 20 percentage points by 2030 (about 50% of new businesses fail in the first five years). As for the company itself, Intuit expects its revenue to increase 11% to 12% in the fiscal year ending July 31, 2024, and expects earnings per share to increase 11% to 15%.

Goodarzi considers AI a general-purpose technology as transformative as electricity and the internet. “We are at the beginning of the journey with AI,” he says. “In the next five to 10 years it will create new economies and destroy some economies, will create new experiences, fuel new company growth, and make certain companies go out of business.”