TurboTax gets an AI upgrade as Intuit inks major deal with OpenAI

AI can do your taxes now—sort of. 

The tax software giant Intuit just struck a new deal with OpenAI that will weave AI deeply into its portfolio of financial apps, including the ones many Americans use to file their taxes.

In the multiyear deal, Intuit will pay ChatGPT maker OpenAI more than $100 million annually to implement its artificial intelligence models across products like TurboTax, personal finance manager Credit Karma, email marketing platform Mailchimp, and the accounting tool QuickBooks. Through the partnership, Intuit’s products will also become accessible directly through ChatGPT—the latest lucrative business integration for OpenAI. 

“We are taking a massive step forward to fuel financial success for consumers and businesses, unlocking growth for both companies,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said. “Our partnership combines the power of Intuit’s proprietary financial data, credit models, and AI platform capabilities with OpenAI’s scale and frontier models to give users the financial advantage they need to prosper.”

Intuit owns a big swath of the financial software market, and all of those apps will be popping up in ChatGPT soon to steer users toward personalized recommendations for credit cards and loans and to answer their tax and personal finance questions. 

Intuit has been gravitating toward AI for a while now. Late last year, the company introduced AI-powered features into QuickBooks, inviting its users to automate rote, time-consuming tasks like sending invoices. Intuit insisted that it was being intentional about its implementation of AI, particularly given the rush for every business to boast about its AI capabilities. 

“The idea is not to just have random sprinkles of AI across the product,” Dave Talach, Intuit senior vice president of the QuickBooks platform, told Fast Company at the time. “We’ve been thoughtful about approaching AI, not just for the sake of AI, but we want it to show up in a cohesive way in the product that is coherent to the customer.”

In June, QuickBooks released a set of AI agents for QuickBooks designed to get familiar with a company’s business and operations, taking over tasks to speed up bookkeeping and accounting. At the time, CEO Goodarzi emphasized that the company moved deliberately in building out its AI because it knows that missteps and inaccuracies are high stakes for the financial tools its customers rely on. “If it screws up, it’s a big problem,” he told Fast Company.

ChatGPT is a platform now

OpenAI’s new partnership with Intuit is the latest third-party integration for ChatGPT, but it’s far from the first. In late September, OpenAI took what it called “first steps toward agentic commerce” with integrations for Shopify and Etsy, and went on to ink a deal with PayPal last month.

OpenAI also just introduced a developer kit that would open its hit chatbot platform to third-party apps—a major shift for the chatbot that stands to remake the way that its 700 million-plus weekly users find and do things online. ChatGPT’s first wave of apps included Zillow, Spotify, Canva, and Expedia, with apps from DoorDash, Peloton, Uber, and Target in the works. 

OpenAI’s recent moves point to the company’s vision of ChatGPT as an all-encompassing hub of utility that gives internet users little reason to go elsewhere. Those decisions coincide with OpenAI’s seismic shift away from its complex nonprofit roots into a more traditional for-profit company, although it technically will still remain under the wing of a nonprofit.

“We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity, which currently requires hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a letter about the decision to change the company’s structure. “We believe this is the best way for us to fulfill our mission and to get people to create massive benefits for each other with these new tools.”

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