Intuit at Jefferies Conference: AI Integration and Growth Strategy

On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ:INTU) presented at the Jefferies Public Technology Conference, sharing a strategic overview of its recent performance and future plans. The company highlighted strong momentum in its tax and SMB sectors, driven by AI integration, while acknowledging challenges like slower growth in Mailchimp. The event underscored Intuit’s focus on innovation and long-term growth.

Key Takeaways

• Intuit reported a strong quarter with significant growth in its assisted tax business.
• AI integration is central to Intuit’s strategy, enhancing both customer and expert experiences.
• Credit Karma showed impressive growth, attributed to innovation and market share gains.
• Mailchimp’s slower growth remains a challenge, with expectations for improvement by 2026.
• Intuit remains committed to capital allocation strategies, including buybacks and dividend increases.

Financial Results

• Assisted tax customer growth reached 23%, with revenue growth at 47%, surpassing the long-term target of 15-20%.
• Credit Karma grew by 28%, fueled by strategic execution and favorable macroeconomic factors.
• Intuit holds $6 billion in cash, balancing an equal amount of debt.
• A 16% increase in dividends was announced, alongside a 100 basis point margin expansion.

Operational Updates

• Intuit improved its assisted tax services through targeted local marketing and AI enhancements, like an AI agent for calculating tax basis.
• The SMB platform aims to consolidate multiple SaaS apps, improving user experience and increasing average revenue per customer.
• Despite slower growth, Mailchimp is expected to achieve double-digit growth by fiscal year 2026.
• Credit Karma’s growth is driven by innovations like Lightbox and AI-driven insights.
• International expansion focuses on new customer acquisition and strengthening ecosystems outside the US and Canada.

Future Outlook

• Intuit targets 15-20% durable growth in the assisted tax sector.
• The SMB strategy focuses on displacing other apps and driving new customer growth.
• Mailchimp is set to become a significant contributor by fiscal year 2027.
• Credit Karma is expected to sustain long-term growth in the 10-15% range.
• AI monetization strategies include pricing for value and offering add-on modules.

Q&A Highlights

• Stability in SMBs is noted, despite downbeat sentiment; cash balances and hours worked remain stable.
• Government policy concerns are deemed overblown, with a focus on fraud elimination and waste reduction.
• International strategy, though important, is overshadowed by the US market, with a focus on healthy growth under new leadership.
• AI monetization is in early stages, with a focus on value-based pricing and add-on modules.

In conclusion, for a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies Public Technology Conference:

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Good morning, everyone. It’s Brent Thill with Jefferies. We’re here with Sandeep from Intuit. Kim Watkins in the front row. Kim, raise your hand.

Thank you so much for coming to Newport and being part of the conference.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Thank you for having us.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah, it’s great to have you. And maybe we start from last week. That was a wild quarter for many. The expectations as everyone kind of worries going into the fourth quarter of the tax season. But as Brad Smith told me once, everyone freaks out and we’re Tom Brady and we throw the ball to the right person at the end and wins.

So you guys pulled it off. It was a great quarter. So maybe we’ll just start there, your thoughts of what you saw, what surprised you, what maybe didn’t surprise you. Give us just a quick debrief of how that went.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Sure. Great quarter indeed. And I would say excellent momentum across the business would be the bigger takeaway from the trends you’re seeing in the company. And for the quarter, I think it’s the biggest tax quarter given the seasonality in that business. And it wasn’t a surprise because we’ve been at it And it’s one of those things such as Sasan likes to use the analogy of a bamboo tree.

It takes years to spread out its roots and then grows real quickly once it takes hold. And similarly, when you’re trying to disrupt a new market, particularly in this case, a $35,000,000,000 assisted tax market. You have learnings and pivots along on that journey and we’ve been very transparent with you all over the last couple of years, in particular the learnings we had such as local marketing, which we leaned into this year, such as marketing timing where about 30% of the people who do tax assisted way make the decision before December and we won’t turn on marketing until January, right? So those tweaks we made in our evolution from going from a DIY platform to a assisted tax platform really took root and really proud of how the team executed and the results they delivered. But beyond that, I would open up the aperture.

Yes, great consumer group performance. Credit Karma, the momentum continues. It continues to take share in credit cards, in personal loans, and that momentum will continue to build on as our partners and the consumers are finding tremendous value in the innovation Credit Karma team is bringing on and also the Global Business Solutions Group continues to be executing well and I’m sure we’ll get into that in next stage of questions.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah. I think on the assisted side, that clearly kind of is this on call that was a breakout or breakthrough. I forgot the exact word you used. But what triggered this year that wasn’t triggering the past years at that magnitude? It felt pretty good.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: It did feel good. And 23% customer growth, 47% revenue growth in assisted compared to our compass of long term growth in assisted of 15 to 20%. So it did feel like a breakthrough. And what worked were the multiple strategies we had placed in the market. Marketing worked, Right?

Because the biggest thing is we knew all along we have the experience because once you get you connected to an expert, your conversion goes up multiple times. Once you get your taxes done the assisted way, we had PRS in the eighties, which is like a phenomenal breakthrough level of product recommendations course. And what we needed to do was get people to look at us as a place you can come and get your taxes done the assisted way. And that’s where the marketing showing up local, the better together with Credit Karma, All those things contributed in their own way towards the results that we printed this year, and we’re just getting started. Our compass remains the 15% to 20% durable growth in assisted.

And the learnings we had and what worked this year, we’re going continue to build on that in the years ahead.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: I guess from a tech perspective, did anything change with AI with assisted this year that really kind of put you in a different position? Are most of these just kind of fine tunes? I mean, Kim was kind enough to host many of us in January. We met with the head of your tax business then. And it sounded like the conversation was there were so many technical hurdles to get Assisted going.

Many of those hurdles you’ve cleared through or maybe are just getting easier for users to use the system. I think everyone’s kind of searching for maybe even a couple of layers down, like what happened with just the tech enablement side. And maybe it was AI that helped, too.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Yeah. So your question more on the AI, but let me zoom out and address it on the AI customer experience, but also on what worked and what likely Mark was referring to when you met earlier in terms of hurdles, if that’s the word he used in terms of the experience. On the experience side, you know, historically, you would come to our website and we would put the you come to get your text done the assisted way, and we’ll put the line up in front of you. That’s a very software way of shopping. And that wasn’t hurdle because most people wanna talk to a talk to a live agent and understand better what the offering is, how the pricing works, and that was a big change we did.

We started to operate more as a services business as opposed to a software lineup type of a business. So that was one change in the experience. In the front of AI, for us, we declared our strategy to be an AI driven expert platform in 2019, way before AI even became as fashionable as is today. So we’ve been embedding AI in that experience and we had some really breakthrough experiences this past year. Those of you who get paid through restricted stock would know that just doing that component, getting your tax basis right, was on your W-two versus what the $10.99 you got could literally take over ninety minutes.

When I did my own taxes myself on TurboTax, it would literally take me a couple hours to go back and find those bases. We actually built an AI agent that would do it for your behalf. So that was a massive time save for folks. So that’s one example of multiple areas throughout the experience where we are embedding AI and it’s just a core part of the fabric and it keeps getting better for the consumer. Also on an expert side, we’re embedding AI and we call them AI empowered experts.

So think of as a combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence working together to really deliver the differentiated experience, and we saw meaningful improvements in their productivity and the ability to answer questions such as, hey, my kid’s going off to college next year. Can I deduct the mortgage on the house I bought there? That could take an agent in the past ten minutes to go research and give an answer. Now they could use our LLMs and the millions of data points we have across our company to answer that literally in seconds. So that’s a massive improvement in customer service time and the end customer experience.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: That’s great to hear. One of the other elephants in the room for me in every meeting I walk into with clients on you has just been the whole federal government, what’s going on, Doge and all this change. And I think you’ve been consistent. Any change in the tax code’s always good for you, because we need you as an advisor. You help us do the right thing.

So maybe just set the table straight in terms of I’ve been dealing with a lot of static globally. I realize a lot of investors outside The US don’t pay US tax, so it’s harder for them to grasp. But it just seems like there’s general, hey, what’s happening? Your thoughts on that.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Sure. I would say the worries are absolutely overblown and let me unpack that a bit more around Doge and where the government and the administration and the secretary of the treasury, everyone who’s a key decision maker where their heads at. They’re looking at two things. One is eliminating fraud and two, reducing eliminating to the extent possible waste. And we think that could be a massively synergistic relationship between public and private sector.

On eliminating waste, we all know and the government has the data and the new administration taking an objective look at that data believes that and they will conclude I believe that direct fall is an absolute waste of taxpayer money and that will be eliminated. Secondly, they’re looking at reducing expenditure, reducing waste in the government such as providing us possibly APIs or the private sector APIs, not just us. We can brought a better tax filing experience for our clients. So all that is actually synergistic for our business. On top of that, if they were to reduce complexity in the tax code, that is a tailwind for our business because more people would be willing to do the taxes DIY or a blend of our services as opposed to going to CPA.

So net net, I think it’s a positive development as opposed to a worry for us.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: So the natural question now for taxes, how do you keep it going? And everyone said, look, it was a rough couple of years, right? It wasn’t perfect, and you were finding your way. And it looks like we’ve kind of found our way now. So one of the questions I’m getting, and I know it’s way too early to say, but what keeps this momentum going?

What are the signals that you’re seeing and feeling that we shouldn’t have this type of concern maybe we had this year? I haven’t felt this in a long time covering you guys. It was like

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: You know, yeah. And I would tell you a little bit about the persona that Susana have. In fact, while we were waiting for coming into this room, Kim and I were just chatting about one of my kids got a 96 on the math exam and they were like, gosh, what a loser last four points. And we are the same way when it comes to operating a business. Yes, we had a great result, but we are focused on how do we continue to do better, right?

How do we continue to build upon this momentum? Yes, many things worked, but I can tell you there are plethora of things that we could have been a lot better at. We are focused on those learnings. I think on the call, Sasan mentioned to one of the questions he got like, we did our celebration on April 16, it’s heads down and execute and what are the plays we want to run next year, that’s where our focus is. Our compass remains 15% to 20 growth in assisted and learnings across marketing learnings across how we could be even better in that experience we’re delivering to the customer when they’re looking to connect to a live agent.

How we show up even better in local where we had some delays in terms of showing up local with, you know, in the Google search and Yelp search. That took us a few months to really nail that and that could have been nailed at scale earlier. So these are all areas that we are learning and that we focused on making sure that even if we got an A this year, how we continue to build upon that A and get that into an A plus and not rest on a laurels.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: So everyone’s going to now ask you, Okay, tax is great, but what about this little thing called S and B with macro tariffs? How do you think about what’s happening? My wife runs a small business. I always use this story. We use eight SaaS apps for eight females in a Bernadoodle.

It’s an interior design shop. And I’m like, look, we can consolidate to you on the platform. Why do we need payroll from another vendor? Why do we need all the front office technology from another vendor? Why are we doing you go through, and I see it because we pay the bills for the small business.

There’s a huge consolidation play, even if things got tough. So it seems like there’s a lot of different engines that you can ride new business formation, consolidation. I think the one thing from being an owner of a small business, my wife doesn’t actually even realize how many of these products you have. So this kind of awareness build, how do you get that awareness built up? And maybe talk through this durability, too, of SMB over the next year.

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Sure. So a couple of stages. One, thank you for being a customer. I think your wife uses both QuickBooks and Mailchimp, if I remember correctly. Yeah, so and we’ll get the other apps on our platform as well for her to even have a bigger book of business with us.

So I heard a couple of things in that question. One is the macro and two is just the continued adoption of our platform. So let me address both of those. On the macro, it’s helpful to have the context that we serve nearly 10,000,000 customers across a range of industries and across a range of sizes. 70% of the customers on our platform tend to be services oriented businesses, meaning they are less directly impacted by tariffs or other things such as what product based businesses might be used to, that might be impacted by.

Now on the platform, what we are seeing is what I would describe stability. And yes, there are some businesses such as advertising, warehousing, manufacturing where revenues down low single digits, particularly in the month of April, but broadly across the platform, we’re stability. The couple of leading indicators I look at for the health of the SMB category, One is how much cash do they have because cash in bank is their reserve, a cushion, is a good indication of their ability to survive. Those cash balances are up about 5% year over year. The second aspect I look at is the hours worked by the employees and those hours worked are flat year over year.

So all to say, we can realize the sentiment is a bit down in the SMB category, but the data is showing stability. So that’s one on the macro. Now let’s get to our business and what’s really exciting for us is SMBs, small businesses, mid sized businesses are over digitized. Your example absolutely resonates. When we talk to customers, when we talk to accountants, we are finding out that people are using anywhere from three to like ten, fifteen apps.

And they’re having to sit there and stitch together their view across all these different apps to understand how their business is doing. And many people got into the, went down the entrepreneurial path to run a business as opposed to spend time figuring out what’s happening with the business. And that’s where we come in by having them adopt our platform and have multiple services on our platform. You have this one place where you can look at your business end to end. Have your payroll with us, have your payments with us, have your access of capital with us.

And that’s what we are focused on is displacing other apps in addition to driving new customer growth. And the way we unlocking that is through innovation such as we introduce AI agents. Our customer agent, as an example, can scan through, and this is a technology we got from a Mailchimp, can scan through your emails, highlight for you which are likely high probability customers to go and provide estimates to. Draft up your response to those customers, help you get schedule. Now that is an area where we could replace other apps and add value to the customer.

So there are a plethora of these kind of examples where we have the opportunity to displace and we are displacing other apps, and in doing so, continue to drive the ARPC on our SMB side.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: For AI, industry’s all just trying to figure out monetization. Is it embedded at the core? Is it add on fee? Is it a copilot? Is it priced by the work done?

How do you think about monetization of AI?

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: AI is still in its early innings and I think the monetization aperture is pretty wide, not just for us, it’s across the industry. And what we are leaning into is a couple of things. One is pricing for value and two is pricing for as an add on module, which we will introduce in the coming months. And I would encourage everyone in this room to if they get the opportunity to go check out our the announcement we had on our firm of the future last week and the innovation we’re rolling out across our agents, our customer agent, accounting agent, finance agent, project management agent. And we are embedding these across our lineup and pricing those lineups for the value that these agents would deliver.

We’ve had these agents in the hands of hundreds of thousands of SMBs and we’ve been testing it and we are seeing uplifts such as folks getting paid faster, their invoices going less unpaid, them saving hours of time. All that is leading into opportunity to price for value. Additionally, we will have ability to get add on modules that will also be an opportunity to further monetize. And there’s a long runway here in ways we can monetize and how much value we’re continuing to create and over the next multiple years how we continue to drive monetization through agents.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: I think we’re all hopeful for your front office strategy to kind of resonate, but it’s been a little slower than maybe we would all like, including yourself. What needs to change there to get the front office maybe where you’re seeing the back office?

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: I don’t think of it in terms of front office versus back office. I think you’re referring to Mailchimp, so I’ll address that head on. What we are looking at is and the way the customers we serve, small businesses, mid sized businesses look at is the range of needs that they have. Help me get a customer, help me manage my customer, help me get paid, help me pay my employees, help me stay compliant, etcetera, help me get my taxes done. And that’s a holistic one stop shop.

Our earlier conversation about displacing multiple other things, that’s a one stop shop we are focused on executing and becoming and are making tremendous progress towards becoming. And with that notion, I am not thrilled about where Mailchimp is. No one does an acquisition for it to be a frankly a drag on your growth rate. But what I am focused on is making sure that the team has a space measured in quarters, not in for amount of space, to execute the strategy, to nail the product experience, to nail the discoverability of features and functionalities on our platform, whether you’re small business, whether you’re a mid sized business. And they’re making pretty solid progress towards that goal.

I would say we one of the surprises was I thought that the fix here would be a one to two quarter fix and what we have shared on the earnings and what I’ll reiterate here is likely a multiple quarter fix. So I’m looking at this exiting fiscal twenty six to be at a double digit growth rate and so this is more of a contributor as we get into fiscal twenty seven. But I want to make sure as a team iterates on it and works on it that we give them the space to learn, pivot and have a durable long term growth strategy.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Speaking of double digit growth, Credit Karma, twenty eight percent, pretty amazing recovery. What’s driving that? What’s the durability for Credit Karma?

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: Credit Karma, I would say, is two thirds our execution, one third the macro. And let me unpack that a bit more. What’s driving Credit Karma is innovations such as Lightbox. Sometimes can get it confused with a lighthouse program, Lightbox as well as the AI that we incorporated in terms of the customer being able to better understand why certain offers and certain financial decisions are the right ones for them. That’s really resonating.

And we believe we’re taking share of both the credit card and the personal loan spend. We are scaling our insurance business and that has a lot more runway ahead. So that’s what is driving Credit Karma and that’s what’s giving us the confidence in the durable as we’ve shared the durable long term growth structure of the business to be in the 10 to 15% range.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Capital allocation, 6,000,000,000 of debt, 6,000,000,000 in cash, pretty active in buybacks. Anything changing here in terms of your priorities?

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: We stay disciplined. We have our operating principles such as making sure we’re allocating our capital towards the highest ROI resources and that we can’t invest at the right level, paying it back to our shareholders through dividends and buybacks and we remain committed to that strategy. And I think a testament in addition to the buybacks, in addition to the 16% dividend increase is a hundred basis points a margin increase in a year where we build out the mid market sales force, in a year where we rolled out agents, right, in a year where we made pretty solid progress disrupting the assisted tax category. That’s a question I would get from many capital allocators, like how could you do all this and deliver margin expansion? And we just did it this year, and I’m committed to continue to do it going forward.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: You made a lot of noise in international way back when, kind of quieted down. I don’t even think it was part of even the discussion at the last Analyst Day. But it’s kind of testament to how big your market is here in The US. International’s really never cracked double digit growth or did double digit percent of total revenue. But when you think about where this sits in your strategy, is it, hey, look, Brent, don’t ask me about international ever again?

The US is so good. We don’t even need to discuss it. We’ll go to international already. But we get the question a lot, so how you think about it?

Sandeep, Executive, Intuit: International is definitely important, full stop. And let me unpack your answer. I’ll zoom out from international to actually talk about the durable growth of the business of our Global Business Solutions Group and as part of that aggressive international question. When I look at that business group, we have tremendous opportunity to continue to scale the business across volume, which is new customer acquisition both in The US, but particularly internationally where there’s a lot of unaddressed market that we have opportunity with, especially as Mailchimp continues to scale and serves as the tip of the spear expanding internationally. So when I look at volume, there’s a massive opportunity internationally.

When I look at mix, so the three things we look at in terms of durable revenue growth is volume, mix and price. You know, we don’t have a strong ecosystem outside of The US and Canada and that’s an opportunity to continue to drive that as well internationally through partners and through building it in house. So international totally is a big part of our strategy, but it’s a one where sometimes gets, for lack of a better term, would say overshadowed because we have so much tremendous amount of addressable market in The US to go after that I wanna make sure that we are addressing international in a healthy way. We, to your point, has had a few fits and starts there. So that is a area where I wanna make sure that, under the new leadership we brought in under the combined QuickBooks and Mailchimp internationally, we, execute on it properly.

Brent, the one thing I do want to touch on is price as a last component of our growth strategy. I would encourage everyone here to go look at the amazing innovation we rolled out this week. And as part of that, how we are pricing our lineup for the value is is delivering across the AI agents, which we’ve had in the hands of our customers and which are really resonating in those tests and giving us the confidence to launch them at scale. And expect pricing continued strong pricing power for our business and that’s the pricing power we’ll continue to take over the next multiple years. But as you look across the next year, we want most of our growth to come from volume and mix and that will continue to be the case.

And in fact, next year on a points of revenue growth, price will be a smaller contributor to GBSG’s revenue growth than it was this year.

Brent Thill, Analyst, Jefferies: Terrific. We’re out of time. This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive. Good morning, everyone.

It’s Brent Thill with Jefferies. We’re here with Sandeep from Intuit. Kim Watkins in the front row. Kim, raise your hand. Thank you so much for coming to Newport and being part of the

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