Intuit announces major gen AI upgrades

Intuit announced major updates to its generative AI development capabilities through recent updates to its proprietary GenOS system.

Officially released last June, Intuit's GenOS, part of Intuit's platform architecture, is described as a proprietary Generative AI operating system for Intuit developers, which boasts custom-trained financial large language models that specialize in solving tax, accounting, marketing, cash flow and personal finance challenges as well as a catalog of best-in-class LLMs, including commercial, proprietary and open-source base models for fine-tuning.

Since then, Intuit has experimented with hundreds of different use cases, allowing its engineers and developers to "responsibly design, build, and deploy breakthrough generative AI (GenAI) experiences with unparalleled speed." These experiments have already yielded customer-facing solutions, like Intuit Assist, which was released just three months afterwards in September 2023.

Intuit believes these latest updates will accelerate its generative AI development capacities even further. Developers have access to a new tool that lets them identify the best LLMs for specific use cases; store, version, retrieve, manage and templatize prompts; gain visibility into exactly how the LLM is decomposing the prompt into discrete tasks to produce a response; and evaluate application performance in terms of quality, latency and cost.

Intuit also pointed to other enhancements to the already existing components of GenStudio, GenRuntime and GenUX.

GenStudio, the developer sandbox, already includes access to Anthropic Claude via AWS Bedrock, Gemini from Google Cloud, LLaMa from Meta AI and Mistral from Mistral AI to supplement its own custom-trained domain-specific LLMs and OpenAI GPT models via Microsoft Azure. Intuit said GenStudio can now add new and updated LLMs in just days.

GenRuntime features an intelligent layer that accesses data and capabilities to perform planning, execution, memory and knowledge retrieval functions as well as tools to ground commercial and open source LLMs in Intuit domain-specific knowledge. GenRuntime now has the ability to enable "agentic workflows." Agentic workflows, basically, allow an LLM to act on behalf of users to perform tasks or provide assistance by leveraging their capabilities to act as an intelligent intermediary between users and the information or services they require. This allows models to move beyond basic prompting to autonomous planning, reasoning and execution to tackle complex business workflows.

GenSRF—the security, risk and fraud prevention component—now has additional guardrails in addition to its existing extensible and configurable framework that includes embedded safety, privacy and security controls. Intuit also pointed to updates to GenUX, which provides user experience components, widgets and patterns for front-end developers; it said the UX library is continuously updated so developers have the latest UX elements for optimal customer experiences.

Alex Balazs, executive vice president and chief technology officer with Intuit, said that GenOS has already enabled many new opportunities, and he is looking forward to further developments.

"Intuit's proprietary GenOS is the key to unlocking new opportunities to fuel consumer and small and mid-market business success with GenAI," said Balazs. "Over the past year, we've increased our pace of innovation by enabling product teams to turn new ideas into live customer experiments in just days, and built out our GenOS to speed time-to-market for ideas that rise to the top. We're proud of the progress we've made and fired up about the 'done for you' future we're creating for our customers to power their prosperity."

Intuit has long been interested in using AI to enhance the functionality of its products but has leaned extra hard into the technology once generative AI became widely available.

In June the company announced plans to lay off about 1,800 workers (see previous story), approximately 10% of its personnel, as part of its larger plans for artificial intelligence.

Intuit said this is not a cost-cutting move, as the company actually expects its overall headcount to grow in fiscal year 2025 and beyond, starting with hiring about 1,800 new people primarily in engineering, product and customer-facing roles such as sales, customer success and marketing. These new staff members will support Intuit's plans to accelerate investments in generative AI. For example, the company plans to use its proprietary "GenOS" to shift its products from traditional workflows to AI-native experiences. It is planning to hire additional engineers to support this push.