Intuit Targets New Customers, AI Growth as QuickBooks and TurboTax Bets Scale

Key Points

• Intuit is prioritizing customer acquisition alongside scaling its major growth initiatives, including upmarket QuickBooks, fintech services and assisted tax. These initiatives have each grown more than 30% and now account for nearly 30% of company revenue.
• The company expects near-term pressure from investments in lower-priced tax and QuickBooks offerings, but believes these initiatives will create higher customer lifetime value over time. Intuit is targeting durable double-digit revenue growth and high-teens EPS growth.
• AI is being integrated into Intuit’s financial workflows using proprietary customer data, with potential monetization through pricing, payments and additional services. Intuit also sees significant opportunity in assisted tax, which Aujla estimates represents 88% of the market.

Intuit NASDAQ: INTU is prioritizing growth in new-to-the-franchise customers while continuing to scale its larger “big bets,” Chief Financial Officer Sandeep Singh Aujla said at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference.

Aujla said the company’s major strategic initiatives—including moving upmarket in QuickBooks, expanding fintech offerings and growing beyond do-it-yourself tax into assisted tax—have each grown more than 30% and now represent nearly 30% of company revenue. However, he said Intuit concluded it needed to improve its performance in acquiring new customers.

“As a company that is north of $21 billion in revenue, we need to be exceptional at both,” Aujla said, referring to scaling major growth initiatives and attracting new customers. He described the addressable opportunity as $300 billion and said Intuit remains in the “early innings.”

Long-term growth investments and the “J curve”

Aujla said Intuit’s fiscal 2027 strategy includes investing in customer acquisition even when those investments pressure near-term revenue per customer. He characterized the approach as a “J curve,” in which initial revenue effects are followed by higher customer lifetime value over time.

In tax, Intuit is seeking to be more competitive and transparent on pricing for consumers with adjusted gross income of about $50,000, a group Aujla said is price-sensitive and where the company lost market share. The company aims to monetize those customers beyond tax filing through offerings such as faster refund access, Credit Karma Money, credit cards, personal loans and insurance.

“In 2027, the revenue takes a hit, but in the long term, the lifetime value is there,” Aujla said.

On the small-business side, Intuit is broadening its entry points with QuickBooks Lite and QuickBooks Free. The products are intended to bring entrepreneurs onto the QuickBooks platform earlier, before their businesses reach the complexity level that traditionally leads them to adopt accounting software. Aujla said customers can later move into higher-tier products on the same platform as their needs expand.

He said Intuit’s goal is to build a company that can deliver durable double-digit revenue growth and earnings-per-share growth in the high teens, with the company’s guidance and three-year compound annual growth rate targets reflecting that objective.

AI strategy centers on data, workflow integration

Aujla said artificial intelligence is most valuable when paired with the company’s financial, industry and domain-specific data. Intuit has hundreds of thousands of attributes for each small-business customer and more than 85,000 attributes per consumer, he said.

The company is incorporating what it calls Intuit Intelligence into core customer workflows rather than treating AI as a separate feature. Examples include automatically reconciling business books, tracking nonprofit donation spending against donor restrictions and generating related documentation.

Intuit tracks AI adoption through several measures, including logins, usage frequency and the number of customers allowing Intuit Intelligence to take actions on their behalf. Aujla said the company is pleased with its progress on those metrics.

AI can be monetized through pricing, greater adoption of payments and other services, and potentially future offerings that take on tasks such as treasury management, according to Aujla. For now, he said Intuit’s focus is on driving adoption and repeat use while preserving options for future monetization.

Aujla also said search-engine optimization is not a major contributor to Intuit’s business, accounting for about 20% of QuickBooks traffic and less in tax. He said traffic coming from AI-driven search and generative-engine optimization is converting at multiples of the rate associated with traditional SEO traffic, and the shift has not been a headwind so far.

QuickBooks expansion and small-business conditions

Intuit sees the small-business macroeconomic environment as stable, Aujla said. Cash reserves and hours worked are increasing among small businesses and are rising even more among mid-market companies. Manufacturing and IT services have shown favorable revenue growth, while some consumer discretionary segments have been softer than a year earlier.

In the mid-market, Aujla said Intuit has been encouraged by adoption of QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite, which combine accounting with payments, payroll and capital offerings. Mid-market customers have payment adoption rates nine percentage points higher and payroll adoption rates 15 percentage points higher, he said.

Three-quarters of mid-market growth has come from upgrading existing customers, according to Aujla. He said about 700,000 entities in the QuickBooks base could potentially upgrade to Advanced or Intuit Enterprise Suite.

Intuit also plans to pursue more new-to-the-franchise mid-market customers and deepen its relationship with accountants. Aujla said 70% of mid-market customers have an accountant, making accountants an important influence on software decisions.

Tax platform and assisted filing opportunity

On the consumer side, Intuit is combining TurboTax and Credit Karma capabilities to turn tax engagement into a broader year-round financial relationship. Aujla said 35% of customers selected faster access to refunds, while other customers used Credit Karma for products such as personal loans and balance-transfer financing.

The company is also reimagining TurboTax with AI, including expanded data ingestion through persistent financial connections and a more natural-language-based interface. Aujla said the approach could enable customers with available tax and financial data to complete a filing in as little as 15 minutes, while still providing explanations that build confidence in the result.

Aujla said Intuit did not see an impact from AI-native tax competition during the latest tax season. He added that the greater growth opportunity is assisted tax, where he said 88% of the market resides. Intuit intends to use AI to improve the economics of its human-assisted offering and remain price-disruptive, he said.

About Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU)

Intuit Inc is a financial technology and business software company that develops products designed to help consumers, small businesses and accounting professionals manage finances, tax obligations and customer relationships. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and serves customers primarily in the United States and Canada, with additional international availability for certain products.

Its principal offerings include TurboTax, a tax preparation and filing platform; QuickBooks, which provides accounting, invoicing, payroll and payments tools for small businesses and self-employed individuals; Credit Karma, a personal finance platform offering credit monitoring and related financial products; and Mailchimp, an email marketing and customer engagement service for businesses.

Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx.

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