At Intuit, the financial software giant, A.I. is becoming “foundational”

And if it turns out that the business does need a loan, A.I. helps assess the business’ creditworthiness and make sure they get a decision quickly. Intuit says that 60% of customers who obtain loans through this product—which is called QuickBook Capital—would not qualify for a loan from a bank. “We can provide the loan because we have so much good data and A.I.,” Srivastava says. He says products like this were a lifesaver for many small businesses during the pandemic and are likely to continue to be so as many companies wrestle with surging inflation.

Srivastava says these are just a few examples of the way in which Intuit is putting A.I.-powered features into its products, which include popular tax preparation software TurboTax, and QuickBooks, which small businesses often use for accounting, as well as credit monitoring software Credit Karma, personal finance software Mint, and email marketing platform Mailchimp. “This is the direction we are headed,” Srivastava says. “We want to provide advice at scale.” He says that means making sure that advice is powered by A.I. “wherever it makes sense,” and having A.I. working to assist human experts, not replace them.

Like many companies, Intuit is finding that advances in natural language processing are having some of the biggest business impacts. For instance, although Intuit makes software, much of its business is actually based around customers consulting with human experts, such as tax advisors or accounting specialists. In the past, these experts would have to type notes on the conversation while listening to the customer. That meant that sometimes the experts weren’t able to spend enough time actually thinking about the customer’s problem and how to overcome it. Now, language A.I. systems automatically take notes for the expert call handlers and automatically summarize the conversation and categorize the caller’s issue. That helps the expert find the best information to relay to the customer. But it also helps Intuit track trends and spot potential issues with the company’s software that its developers may need to fix.

And Srivastava says the company is “investing more and more” in large language systems, especially those that can turn speech to text and then analyze that text. “Advice comes from conversation,” he says, so it is important that A.I. systems can help make those conversations happen—and analyze their content.

He also says that Intuit is among those companies experimenting with using reinforcement learning to improve their A.I. systems such as that cash-flow analysis feature in QuickBooks. Reinforcement learning is the kind of A.I. that learns from experience, essentially by trial-and-error, how to maximize some reward that the person creating the A.I. specifies. In particular, Intuit is exploring the use of a kind of reinforcement learning called a multi-armed bandit, which tries to balance how much an A.I. system explores new options versus how much time it spends recommending following actions that it has already found to work. It is A.I. like this that helps Intuit hone the advice it gives a small business about how best to improve cash flow.

Intuit is an example of a company that is putting A.I. at the very heart of its business. “A.I. is foundational for how we operate,” Srivastava says. It is likely that many other companies will soon find the same.

Here’s a few other things happening in A.I. this week.

Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com

A.I. IN THE NEWS

This week’s news section was curated by Alexei Oreskovic.