How Intuit plans to use agentic AI to automate complex business tasks

Intuit announced significant enhancements to its Generative AI Operating System (GenOS) platform today, including introducing agentic AI workflows to bolster its AI and data capabilities.

Intuit is well-known for its suite of business tools including QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma and Mailchip. The company has been on a multi-year journey to integrate AI capabilities that improve user experience and productivity. At VB Transform 2024, the company outlined some of the ways it is using generative AI to improve personalization. To date, those efforts have included the company’s Intuit Assist, an AI assistant that is powered by the GenOS platform. Intuit is now taking the platform a step further announcing its plans and goals for agentic AI.

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The GenOS framework is being expanded with enhanced security, usability and functions to enable the agentic AI workflows.

“It’s bringing together the power of GenOS, the orchestrator, large language models, GenSRF (Security, Risk and Fraud), the UX experience, and it’s tying all that with what people really want, which is the ability to to have work done for them,” Ashok Srivastava, Intuit’s chief data officer, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

Intuit’s new agentic AI features, currently in testing, are set to launch for end users in mid-2025.

Using agentic AI to automate complex tasks for businesses

Intuit is focusing on practical applications that address real-world challenges faced by businesses.

Srivastava highlighted cash flow management as a key initial use case for Intuit’s new agentic AI workflows. The ability of any business to be able to pay its bills on time is a critical task. The challenge is often whether the business has sufficient cash flow during a specific period.

The new agentic workflows can process various types of customer information, including emails, documents and images, to automate accounts receivable and payable tasks.

“It allows us to automate the accounts receivable and accounts payable tasks and merge together several things,” he explained.

That said, Srivastava emphasized that there is still a role for human oversight in the process.

“We want to have human expertise involved with it,” Ashok stated.

Bringing new insights and transparency with agentic AI

Beyond cash flow management, Intuit is developing capabilities to provide dynamic insights into business finances.

“We’re creating dynamically produced insights and answers to customer questions using an advanced conversational system that sits upon GenOS,” Srivastava said. “It’s allowing me to get insights into what my financial situation is, what my tax situation is, compliance information and really helping me understand the financial domain.”

As AI becomes more integral to business operations, concerns about security, transparency, and environmental impact have grown. Intuit has taken proactive steps to address these issues. The GenSRF (Security, Risk and Fraud) module in the GenOS framework plays a crucial role in ensuring responsible AI development. GenSRF works alongside the Gen Runtime component of GenOS to ensure AI safety.

“It (GenSRF) has built-in guardrails to help responsible development of generative AI applications, it’s extensible and configurable, and it allows us to embed safety, privacy, transparency, security controls directly in the experience,” Srivastava said

Looking to the future, Intuit plans to continue enhancing GenOS and launching new capabilities based on customer feedback. A key focus will be integrating traditional AI with generative AI technologies.

“When you look into the rest of the world, they’re solely focused, it appears to me, at least on what is happening in the generative AI and agentic AI spaces, which is understandable,” Srivastava said. “We are doing the comprehensive understanding and development of traditional AI capabilities that are really going to transform how our customers have work done for them.”