Payroll and HR technology provider Gusto is adding artificial intelligence to several of its products after hiring the former global head of data science and analytics at Google, Jeremy Welland, and making him the company's new head of data.
"What we're trying to do is look at ways to apply AI that will be meaningful to small businesses, focusing on those resources that business owners lack the most, which are time and money," said Welland, who joined Gusto five months ago. "Our premise is that if we can build solutions with AI that save our customers one or both, then we'll continue to lead the pack with Gusto being the people platform of choice."
Some of the new capabilities include intelligent payroll imports to help prepare payroll without manually uploading it. Gusto has also created a tool to enable businesses to build customized reports by simply asking for what they want, in plain language and plain text.
Another new tool is a job posting generator that helps businesses generate accurate job descriptions and then customize them to reduce the downtime spent writing job postings.
Gusto is also leveraging AI to prevent tax notices, building functions within its software that will run in the background so customers don't have to think about them.
If a business is running payroll late, the system will help them capture notices triggered by a late payroll and resolve them on behalf of the customer. If a business is hiring a remote employee in another state, the system will recognize the business' connection to a new state, and prompt the user to complete any necessary registration forms, ensuring the business is connected to the proper tax authority and avoids tax notices.
"For a small business or an accountant at Gusto, they won't have to wait to see the benefits of AI," said Welland. "We have a number of things that we're currently working on, as well as things that we're about to release for accountants and other small-business owners as they get tax notices for faster resolution around those tax notices. Small-business owners don't start a business to become tax experts, so often when they get a communication from a tax authority that hits their mailbox, a lot of bad feelings can come up — dread, frustration, confusion, just to name a few. Anyone trying to resolve these notices on their own can sometimes spend an obscene amount of time trying to do so, not to mention that any interaction can really mean missing deadlines and result in penalties, etc. When it comes to preventing these notices, we have a lot that we've done in this area."
He gave an example: "Let's say a business runs payroll late, so you have unhappy employees who weren't paid on time, and on top of that, it triggers these tax notices. We actually have built some functions using AI that will capture these notices triggered by late payroll and resolve them on behalf of the customer."
The tool can help with remote employees working across state lines. "Another thing is looking at remote employees in a new state," said Welland. "Let's say small businesses don't have the complete necessary paperwork that they need to register with that state. It's not difficult to imagine, especially in the post-pandemic era. Our system will recognize the business' connection to a new state. It can prompt the user to complete any necessary registration forms for that state and prevent businesses from running payroll without connecting to the proper tax authorities, thereby avoiding tax notices."
The tools aim to help accountants save time and effort. "The pain that small-business owners feel is multiplied 100 times for accountants because they're dealing with these thorny tax resolution issues across many of their clients," said Jaclyn Anku, director of education and community at Gusto. "We also know that the time they spend chasing down compliance issues takes away from the valuable advice they could be delivering their clients. So it's our mission to invest in this technology and to ensure that we're incorporating AI as a means to better empower our accountants to go deliver those valuable services that help them grow their firms and help their clients succeed."
The new tools will complement others from Gusto.
"Gusto has been investing in the accounting profession through creating People Analytics, building Gusto Academy and certifying thousands of accountants, and building the many tools across our people platform," said Anku. "When we think about AI, it's enabling us to innovate faster, create richer features that enable accountants to deliver better advisory services because we know that time they spend, for example, on chasing down tax resolution notices and helping their clients with that means time but they're not spending delivering advisory."
Gusto is partnering with Google as well as Microsoft and OpenAI on the new AI tools and is introducing them at the Collision conference in Toronto on Tuesday.
The risks of AI
Some Google AI leaders have warned about the dangers of letting generative AI get out of control, including former AI leader Geoffrey Hinton, who recently left the company and
Welland said he takes a multifaceted stance when evaluating new AI tools.
"It comes down to two things: an offensive stance and a defensive stance," he said. "On the former side, we're looking at ways in which Gusto can provide more value by continuously looking at enhancements and features we can put into our people platform. We're doing that today and are excited about the tools that we're releasing, to save time and money for accountants and small and medium business owners."
"On the defensive side, there's been a lot of talk all the way to like the Terminator series and Skynet," he continued. "Is this thing going to take over? Folks are saying you can imagine people talking about whether this is going to replace jobs, or the ethics and AI issues. Are these things built with inclusivity for all users? Especially on that last piece, one of the things that we do as part of our validation when we're looking at a product is to make sure that we're testing it for things that would deal with ethics and bias within AI. We make sure that anything that we release would actually go through a formal screening, in which we have a diverse set of thought leaders coming around the table from our engineering teams, data science teams, design, product teams, project managers and product managers as well, evaluating it to make sure that it meets all of our customer needs."
Welland recently wrote about the new tools in a blog post for Gusto. "The reality is we're a long way from both utopian splendor and complete annihilation," he wrote. "Right now, artificial intelligence is, in some sense, the smartest-looking dumb tool any of us have ever seen. Generative tools like ChatGPT and others create with such ease and confidence, it's no wonder we're often fooled when it produces something that's laughably wrong or caught off guard when it's malinformed. But just because many of these AI tools are in their awkward teen phase doesn't mean we shouldn't use them or that we can't be excited about the possibilities for the future. In fact, despite some embarrassments, many of these tools work very well, which is validated by the millions of people who are already using and experimenting with them in their everyday lives and work."
