Intuit is joining the AI party, with plans to beef up its core software offerings with AI enhancements, including QuickBooks. And Intuit says those enhancements are going to save users a ton of time.

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The company—which counts QuickBooks, Mailchimp, TurboTax, and Credit Karma among the brands under its umbrella— announced its new Intuit Assist generative AI-powered assistant at its Intuit Connect event in Las Vegas last week. The technology has been in beta, and is designed to help QuickBooks users speed up their workflows by auto-generating invoices, among other things. It launches for the public this month.

While many other companies in the tech space have likewise rolled out AI enhancements and features over the past couple of years, Intuit’s team says that it may get a leg up on some of them because they have a good sense of when and where users will benefit the most from those enhancements.

“We have the context, now you just need to do the work,” explains Dave Talach, Senior Vice President of Quickbooks Platform and at Intuit.

Talach says that Intuit has taken a measured approach to implementing the AI features into QuickBooks specifically, and wanted to make sure that users would actually see a benefit from those features—not merely get caught up in any AI-related hype. Talach says that QuickBooks’s team knows where users get caught up or slowed down during their workflow, and that’s where his team aimed their efforts at incorporating AI to help improve efficiency.

“The idea is not to just have random sprinkles of AI across the product. 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,” he says. “It’s embedded in the workflows customers want it to be in—it’s about embedding AI where the work needs to be done.”

As for the results, Talach says that the enhancements can speed up several parts of a users workflow, including a 45% reduction in time spent creating invoices.

The main goal, he says, is to make the product “feel light,” so that users can “move faster.” If manual accounting was akin to walking down the street, then QuickBooks was like riding a bike, he says. “QuickBooks with AI is like riding an electric bike.”

This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com
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