Intuit opens up UK beta access to Intuit Assist for QuickBooks

Intuit has announced that QuickBooks customers and their accountants can sign up for early access to Intuit Assist for QuickBooks. The new generative AI-powered financial assistant will give customers and accountants context insights that will help them make the right financial decisions with less work.

The application is already available for US customers. Intuit is now rolling out the beta program for the UK market. US organisations have seen several benefits, including increased efficiency and improvements to cash flow from taking the proffered advice.

Intuit Assist for QuickBooks was announced for beta availability in September 2023 in the US. It is part of the firm’s investment in AI and data to become a global financial technology platform. Intuit Assist is being integrated across all Intuit cloud-based solutions, including Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp.

Intuit continues to build AI into its solutions. In the last year it has accelerated product development and built out its proprietary Generative AI Operating System (GenOS). Since its launch in June 2023, Intuit has added to GenOS an AI Workbench and GenStudio, GenRuntime, and GenUX tools. The platform enables Intuit’s team of software developers, product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and data analysts to accelerate the development of new tools such as Intuit Assist.

What is Intuit Assist

Intuit Assist is available across the Intuit Software portfolio. It helps people and organisations to better manage their finances, whether personal or within their business. Intuit Assist can surface issues such as cash flow hot spots and expense issues. It can understand natural language questions that enable users to quickly drive to the root cause or any issue. Thus providing insights on actions they can take to mitigate them.

Intuit Assist accelerates the value that accountancy or bookkeeping experts can deliver to clients. The difference is that these professionals know which questions to ask about a client’s data set to extract the optimal insights and advice to support the client’s needs.

Intuit shared in a blog that Intuit Assist will provide three types of support to users:

• Personalised Insights: The AI will create a personalised view of the financial state of the business to help with decision-making
• Do it for me: It will automate tasks on request by users. These will include the ability to draft invoices or deliver personalised recommendations on how to overcome the cash flow hot spots
• Guide Me: It can create a fully customised action plan across both QuickBooks and Mailchimp that guides a small business owner’s attention to where it’s most impactful

Customers can sign up for the beta version here.

QuickBooks continues to deliver AI-powered solutions to UK customers

This is just the latest AI-powered feature that Intuit has delivered to UK customers. Other features that UK customers already have access to include:

• Payee Automation: Automating the population of the payee (supplier) for money-out transactions as well as auto creating the supplier in the customers’ supplier list.
• Transaction Categorisation: Offering Chart of Account suggestions and transaction categorisation in banking, powered by a new improved ML model, giving accurate category recommendations for each transaction.
• Train QB: A workflow designed to help customers save time by accurately automating the categorisation of transactions when they first connect their bank account.

With GenOS and now with Intuit Assist, the software giant is providing AI capabilities to small businesses. These were once the domain of larger enterprises. Intuit is ensuring that with a rich data platform, an established AI foundation that has guardrails provided by its responsible AI Principles and is secure, small businesses can benefit from the latest technology revolution.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Intuit continues to invest in AI. Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit, stated when first announcing Intuit Assist, “We are creating the future, where we do the hard work for our customers to achieve the bold goal of doubling household savings rates and fueling the success of small businesses for anyone on our platform.”

For UK customers, that is now coming closer to reality with the ability to join the beta version of AI Assist. What isn’t clear from the announcement, or the accompanying blog, is whether Intuit will charge anything for this new feature. Or whether it will just become part of the platform in the future.

Nevertheless, this is an important step for Intuit as it looks to compete against the other financial management solutions in the market.