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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mactavish88 5mo agoThe absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
- kstrauser 5mo agoBoy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoI know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time. I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare! The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.
- Loudergood 5mo agoNo, that's Intuit lobbying.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoTaxes are not objective. No software can reach into your life and classify your activies into legal categories.
- kstrauser 5mo agoI use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum. Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.
- LamaOfRuin 5mo agoThe IRS's fillable forms do a perfectly fine job of copying values around and doing the basic arithmetic that they can automate.
- crowcroft 5mo agoI think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.
- kstrauser 5mo agoIt sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and... These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written. If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know? "This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.
- nerdsniper 5mo ago> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place > These things are knowable There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined. Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions. Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently. That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.
- kstrauser 5mo agoI agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoThat’s a true side fact, but that has nothing to do with how the software behaves once you input your answers.
- mk12 5mo agoAnd there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
- jmalicki 5mo agoThat's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do. There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
- gamblor956 5mo agoIs your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations. Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that there are a lot of options to change the inputs (for example, choosing FIFO vs LIFO for stock sales, using an S-corp vs a sole proprietorship for a personal business). For example, the home office deduction is only available to individuals who have a home office that is used exclusively for their individual business, not as an employee for someone else's business (the only exception being for flow-through entities where the taxpayer is a shareholder/partner). The "exclusive use" is meant in the all-or-nothing sense. Use your office computer after hours for games? The home office deduction no longer applies. Uses the office space to store personal documents, or really any other activity except for the business activity? The HOD no longer applies. Don't have any income from that business activity you claim are doing in the home office? The HOD no longer applies. It's simply that enforcement is not deterministic, so people think they get away with a lot of positions that do not survive actual audits. Talk to an IRS agent that handles audits and you'll learn that a failed home office deduction claim is the #2 adjustment to the tax returns of white collar professionals.[1] At a relatively recent tax mixer, IRS agents from the Los Angeles branch office could only recall about a dozen cases in which the home office deduction actually survived an audit, out of thousands, and those taxpayers were extremely rigorous about following the rules to the letter (to the extent that all of them locked their home offices when they were not being used for work). [1] The #1 reason for adjustments to the tax returns of white collar professionals is attempting to claim business expense deductions without matching business income to deduct against. Technically, the home office deduction is one of these deductions, which is why it is #2 and not #1.
- s1artibartfast 5mo agoThere are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.
- xwowsersx 5mo agoIntuit has a pretty broad financial software portfolio, not just a tax company. Also, yes the actual arithmetic at the end should be handled by deterministic code. I doubt anyone, including Intuit, thinks otherwise. But there's a ton of uses for LLMs before you get to 2+2 = 4, explaining concepts, document extraction, understanding the full financial picture, etc. Kind of feels like you're criticizing a cartoonish idea of AI's place in their products.
- skirmish 5mo agoYou would think arithmetic should be deterministic, but just days ago I received paper mail from IRS saying my tax software computed federal tax underpayment penalty incorrectly, and they are refunding me > $300.
- jcranmer 5mo agoUltimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes." I can see how AI could be helpful here... at least were not AI plagued with hallucinations. That said, Intuit's actual business model is convincing millions of people that their taxes are so complicated they need to spend $60 on a program that is just copy-pasting numbers from one document to another.
- jimbob45 5mo agoNah, Free Fillable Forms paired with ChatGPT (free, not even plus) is adequate for the vast majority of the tax population now and none of it is hard. I expect that 2027 is the last year for the tax preparation software companies to still exist.
- Loughla 5mo agoThere have been free alternatives for years. People still pay accountants to do their very basic taxes and pay $200 for twenty minutes worth of work. Why? For the same reason paid software exists in this space - knowing you have someone else to blame.
- bombcar 5mo agoYou would correct your W2 when the amount you receive wasn't what was reported - this is exceptionally rare.
- nunez 5mo agotbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes. As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
- thrwaway55 5mo agoWhy? What's wrong with some non determism if Intuit foots any mistakes? I am all for AI auto filling taxes where the filer offering takes the burden.
- hsuduebc2 5mo agoTo be honest I'm kinda sceptical that they will be paying fines for you.
- skirmish 5mo agoSoftware licenses usually explicitly disclaim all financial damages. I assume Intuit does too (I don't use Turbotax myself).
- ryandrake 5mo agoIf an LLM hallucinates your income or deductions, the IRS is not going to go after the LLM, it's going to go after the taxpayer. I can't believe what I'm seeing in some of these replies. Making a mistake on your taxes is at best, a stressful letter from the IRS, and at worse, prison time. Place your trust appropriately.
- cyberax 5mo agoIntuit actually will indemnify any penalties in case of filing errors on their part.
- VariousPrograms 5mo agoI asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.” When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though. I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo agoYou're being deprived of government services and a sustainable economy because the wealthy are allowed to game the system they've rigged for themselves. I wouldn't call that luck.
- dh2022 5mo agoSerious question: to figure out the answer why did you not go to the IRS website for that field? This is how I ultimately answer any tax questions I have.
- avree 5mo agoGemini is a pretty bad choice for an LLM. Most people using it are doing so because Google bundled it for free with a couple things, not for its quality.
- jandrewrogers 5mo agoThis. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise. I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit. The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
- bonsai_spool 5mo agoI think this isn't terrible, actually. If there aren't humans involved in tax filing, the process of moving from private-entities-are-needed-to-do-your-taxes to the-government-can-figure-out-your-taxes becomes politically easier as we won't be taking jobs away from families. We got somewhat close to this ideal before Trump Round 2, so ideally eight years of a more normal admin will be enough.
- xwowsersx 5mo agoWhy are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products? > "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17percent-workforce-cut-had-nothing-to-do-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17p...
- golly_ned 5mo agoSeriously, the article says exactly the opposite.
- bloppe 5mo agoThe article was written by AI
- zknill 5mo agoHow do you know? There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.
- Melatonic 5mo agoIt's becoming the modern adult equivalent of the old kids saying: " I know you are but what AmI ? "
- true_religion 5mo agoI don’t think it’s AI. AI would at least keep the article body consistent with the title even if it had to bend over backward and hallucinate new facts.
- eru 5mo agoThat would maybe be true, if AI wrote both the title and the body of the article. In human practice, some hack usually writes the body, but the editor decides the title. And that can happen after the article is written or before. I don't think they would change that workflow, even if the writer, or both writer and editor, were replaced with a AI. So yours was a good observation, but it's rather weak evidence.
- readthenotes1 5mo agoI wonder how many windows 10 users discovered freetaxusa.com works as well as turbotax this year (since Intuit doesn't support Windows 10 any more)
- furyofantares 5mo agoTheir website doesn't support windows 10?
- Marsymars 5mo agoTheir desktop software. If you’re going to switch off the desktop software to something, it may as well be something that isn’t turbotax. My dad had to upgrade his PC recently to do his taxes as it was stuck on Windows 10 due to CPU support. I suggested a Mac Mini, but neglected to confirm that turbotax Canada supports macOS with their desktop software. My dad had no interest the website version, so he bought another Windows laptop and now has both the Mac Mini and his “tax laptop” that he plans to only use once a year. Some people are just ingrained in their habits and not interested in change. (Though my retired father was perfectly willing to try a Mac for the first time - apparently new tax software was a bridge too far.)
- missedthecue 5mo agoUnfortunately doesn't work with foreign addresses. For me, TurboTax is a godsend. Or I'd be paying a preparer $1000+
- mplanchard 5mo agoWas scanning the comments to see if anyone had recommended freetaxusa. I think this was my third or fourth year on it. I’ve been nothing but pleased, personally.
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo agoI've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness. This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall. If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoI'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.
- kev009 5mo agoI've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software. If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/ https://www.freetaxusa.com/.
- gdulli 5mo agoI made the switch to FreeTaxUSA from H&R Block online this year. It was very easy and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. You can upload your previous year's PDF from your other software to import the data.
- eeixlk 5mo agoIt's been good for so long I hope it doesn't get popular and go to shit. Free federal return and $15 state return if needed. If Intuit died tomorrow the world would be a better place.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoNot for me! I would have to hire an accountant or CPA. Then I would have to spend a lot of time and energy meeting with them and taking their phone calls. TurboTax occupies a middle ground and it saves me enormous amounts of time.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoSource: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17-global-jobs-streamline-operations-memo-shows-2026-05-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/intuit-cut-17... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214516)
- user3939382 5mo agoIntuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great. My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible. Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.
- dmqctx 5mo agoRecently needed to start tracking expenses for a new business I started. Sole prop, no payroll to fuss with. I literally reached for the oldest version of QB I had available. 2014! Greatest experience of my life. Brought back memories of when Intuit didn't suck. I despise what they've done to QB Desktop over the years...they have been torpedoing it for a while so people are left to move to Online. I like QB Online. But their Fast, old versions of QB Desktop are pure bliss.
- dtnewman 5mo ago1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading. 2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making judgement calls. However, for something like quickbooks, I can imagine many uses for AI. For example, categorizing expenses, organizing receipts, noticing odd patterns, etc.
- mistrial9 5mo agothis company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO. ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.
- danaris 5mo agoI can think of very few less appropriate places for LLMs than accounting. They can't do basic arithmetic reliably, and will confidently tell you completely made-up figures when you ask for reports. Meanwhile, existing accounting software is mature and does a great job at keeping numbers straight, and producing good reports, especially in the hands of a professional.
- IndianHandwash 5mo ago[dead]
- ForOldHack 5mo agoWell, if all there QA people have left... Their "pivot" is straight off a cliff. Best of luck.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago> In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier. So profits are up 50% YOY and the CEO got a $30M package, but they're cutting 3000 employees.
- matwood 5mo agoCompanies aren’t charities. If those 3k employees were important to the revenue or profit, we’ll find out in the next couple quarters.
- WarmWash 5mo agoGemini and GPT did my (non-trivial) taxes this year. They're going to be laying off way more than 3k people.
- 0xffff2 5mo agoHow does this work, concretely? Do you just upload your W2/1099s/etc and prompt it to "do my taxes"? I imagine it's not that easy, but filing my (trivial) taxes with any of the well known tax prep services is easy enough that the LLM version can't get very much more complex than "do my taxes" and still be an improvement.
- WarmWash 5mo agoUpload all the needed forms, upload the forms to be filled, but output instead to a spreadsheet instead of trying to get the model to fill out the .pdfs. I then manually filled out the forms from the spreadsheets.
- abcde-bbq 5mo agoYou can also ask antigravity to fill out the forms if it is in the browser (from the spreadsheet data).
- daemin 5mo agoThe more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
- dualogy 5mo agoI think you're on to something here. For a multi-product dev company, they could (if domain still available) brand as 'without.ai' or 'no.ai' or 'sans.ai' and do 'taxware.sans.ai', 'todo-mvc.sans.ai', 'basecampclone.sans.ai' etc..
- jimcollinswort1 5mo agoThis was the last year for me and my wife to use Turbo Tax, it's been ok for 15 years but I know AI will do it all for us next year, for free. Gemini was very helpful with questions and some skills building this year, I should have tried more. N ext year I'll basically feed in my W2, 1099s, fidelity forms, insurance, maybe 20-30 documents, and ask for my completed 1040 and related forms. The LLMs already have the data extraction capability, vast tax knowlege, large enough context for personal taxes. We don't need another year to make tax software obsolete. Actually I'll try a test first, easymgiven I have my 2025 input docs and TurboTax outputs, see howma few models do.
- warmwaffles 5mo agoWell if you also have your 2024 input docs as well, you may want to check that too in separate sessions. Post your findings. I'm interested.
- noobermin 5mo agoBe sure to give it your bank account details and pin number too, so it can fill out that section of the 1040.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo agoI’d be quite careful, giving it your financial information. I have a friend that uses ChatGPT for medical advice, so it has a lot of very personal information. He asked it if he could trust it with his financial information, and it told him no. I’ve used a (human) CPA for over a decade. Been well worth it. He easily earns his fees back.
- croes 5mo agoI guess 3k users less for TurboTax
- irjustin 5mo agoI used to be a pretty happy TurboTax user due to all the automatic handlers/connectors. This year I leaned fully into LLMs and had Claude build everything from scratch then used the Gemini & Chatgpt to check. While it took time to get all the marking just right, it was, relatively speaking, pretty easy since I downloaded the previous years to start as the basis which allowed for multi-year customization and back testing. Guess I'm not using Turbotax anymore.
- huaiorg 5mo ago[dead]
- bni 5mo agoAs a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.
- drysine 5mo agoSame as Russian. The state provides all needed software for filling documents related to taxes. It's been so for at least 15 years, most likely longer.
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoIn the past? Because they make a mostly non-digital system digital and convenient. Currently? Corruption. At least for the TurboTax part of Intuit.
- shellfishgene 5mo agoThere are multiple similar companies in many European countries, even though the government provides (often somewhat basic) tools to file taxes. A large percentage of citizens in the Germany and Austria use paid software because it's more comfortable, same in the UK and Poland. But yes, it would be better if that was not the case, like in Scandinavia.
- dinkumthinkum 5mo agoHas anyone in these comments ever heard of QuickBooks?
- abeyer 5mo agoIt's worth pointing out that TurboTax is just one of their products... even if it went away overnight, they'd still have a lucrative business publishing QuickBooks. It is basically the standard in small business accounting software in the US, and a majority of small businesses probably use it, pay an outside accountant that does, or both.
- drstewart 5mo agoMaybe you, as an infinitely wise European, can explain this page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/self-assessment-commercial-software-suppliers/self-assessment-online-commercial-software-suppliers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/self-assessment-c...
- techtuate 5mo agoInteresting article and an accelerating trend that will continue for some time in the tech industry. The challenge and the opportunity will be for legacy companies to ensure their legacy stack is well mapped to the newfound AI capabilities. My biggest fear is human laziness - AI coding is good for the most part and will get many times better over the next few months - BUT IT'LL NOT BE PERFECT. Overloaded employees are likely to get lazy and ship features cheaper and faster without checking - this will lead to small businesses being hit for no fault of their own. Anyway - short term share price gains beckon.
- zenai666 5mo ago[flagged]
- shandilyaharsh 5mo agoi mean layoffs used to happen every year no? the companies are just piggybacking atp
- Ancalagon 5mo agono, they did not. certainly not at this level or publicity. do not normalize this.
- Ozzie-D 5mo ago[flagged]
- nickfromseattle 5mo agoIn the long term Intuit is probably a $0 because you don't need TurboTax to file a UBI report.
- WorldMaker 5mo agoDepends on how good Intuit's lobbyists are at complicating any attempt at getting a UBI legislated. One of the concepts often used to describe/"sell" a UBI is that a UBI may be thought of as changing the tax code to provide larger rebates and/or the government doing cash advance "loans" on a person's tax rebates so that people can make use of the time value of money. Those perspectives make a UBI easier to sell to legislators ("it's just a stranger tax code with some new accounting tricks"), but unfortunately also give plenty of room to tax code lobbyists to complicate and corrupt a UBI.
- goopthink 5mo agoA quick reminder to all commentators that in addition to Turbotax and Quickbooks, Intuit also owns MailChimp for (nowadays pretty broad) marketing, CreditKarma for your credit scores/analysis (and pitching you credit cards), and professional enterprise tax prep software. There’s a lot of red-queening happening in AI for marketing and financial assessment software. Individual tax prep, maybe not as much?
- gizajob 5mo agoTurboLayoffs
- arjie 5mo agoMakes sense. After I finished my taxes this time I ran them through Claude Code and it found things I’d forgotten to include that would actually help things.
- clearstack 5mo agowhatever the framing, Intuit runs ~80% gross margins. these cuts arent about saving money — its about shifting R&D to AI before TurboTax's moat erodes from the bottom up