This week, Intuit rolled out a sweeping upgrade to its Enterprise Suite, touting a new generation of agentic AI tools designed to automate workflows for mid-sized businesses. The announcement marked a milestone in the company’s years-long effort to reposition itself as a platform powered by artificial intelligence rather than just a provider of tax and accounting software. Its latest AI agents promise to cut down manual financial work and deliver insights that help businesses grow faster and operate more profitably. For a segment historically stuck between small business tools and heavyweight ERP systems, Intuit’s pitch is compelling.
In light of Intuit’s reinvention, some questions still remain. The company has long been known for lobbying efforts that sought to maintain the complexity of tax filing in the United States, a position that helped preserve the market for its flagship product, TurboTax. In an interview with The Verge last year, CEO Sasan Goodarzi was asked: “How much of your budget is allocated to lobbyists?” The question points to a certain irony in Intuit’s approach: a now innovation-forward company that has historically benefited from friction, promising to reduce it.
A Platform Rebuilt
Intuit’s AI transformation is powered by GenOS, its in-house operating system designed to automate tasks across QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and the Enterprise Suite. New agents handle functions like invoicing, bookkeeping, project tracking, and financial forecasting: features aimed at streamlining mid-market operations. According to the company, 78% of users say the tools make running a business easier.
The suite targets companies stuck between small business software and traditional ERP systems. For these firms, often managing dozens of disconnected tools, Intuit offers a single AI-enabled platform that they say can save up to 20 hours per month.
Recent upgrades push further into enterprise territory, adding real-time multi-entity reporting and cross-org financial analytics.
Growth Through AI, and Friction
The broader transformation has paid off on Wall Street. Intuit shares have rallied over 20%, and analysts expect earnings per share to grow more than 18% in fiscal 2025. Revenue from QuickBooks Online rose 21% in the last reported quarter, with much of that attributed to new AI-powered features.
But even as Intuit rebrands itself as an AI platform company, its core business remains deeply tied to the tax system’s opacity. The company has repeatedly lobbied against legislation that would create a free, government-run e-filing system, arguing it would reduce choice and innovation. Critics, including public interest groups and some lawmakers, say the company has spent decades ensuring that filing taxes remains just complicated enough for TurboTax to be necessary.
That legacy of obstruction stands in contrast to the company’s current promise: intelligent software that eliminates manual effort and delivers simplicity at scale. In effect, Intuit is building AI to reduce the very complexity that helped make its business model so profitable.
Still, A Framework for Legacy Players
Despite the dissonance, Intuit’s AI pivot offers a practical model for other legacy software firms. Rather than trying to displace existing processes with standalone AI tools, Intuit is embedding automation directly into critical business workflows: reporting, invoicing, cash flow planning, while allowing human experts to step in where needed. This hybrid model lowers switching costs and boosts adoption among companies already wary of new software rollouts.
The approach also signals a shift in how enterprise software companies might think about AI: not as an add-on, but as a systems-level transformation that demands new organizational structures, new data infrastructure, and new go-to-market strategies. Goodarzi, who feared extinction when he took over as CEO in 2019, has bet the company on this future. His emergency staff meeting after the launch of GPT-4 accelerated Intuit’s AI roadmap by nearly a year.
That urgency may explain why the company continues to press forward, despite public scrutiny over lobbying. With more than 100 million users and 60 billion machine learning predictions generated daily, Intuit’s AI capabilities are real, and hard to ignore. But the contradictions remain.
