Intuit partners with OpenAI in $100M deal to integrate its finance applications with ChatGPT – News

Financial services software company Intuit Inc. said today it’s partnering with OpenAI to bring its applications to ChatGPT and accelerate productivity within its own organization.

The multiyear deal, which is expected to generate more than $100 million in revenue for OpenAI, was described as an “end-to-end agreement” that will expose Intuit products such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp to thousands of potential users through ChatGPT.

In addition, Intuit’s employees will continue to get access to ChatGPT Enterprise, while its developers will have broad access to OpenAI’s suite of application programming interfaces. The financial software firm wants to use the company’s cutting-edge frontier models to power various applications and research across its business. Its employees will also continue to embed AI into their daily workflows and enhance productivity, the company said.

Intuit sells a number of products aimed at both businesses and consumers, including its tax preparation software TurboTax, the QuickBooks accounting platform for small and medium-sized businesses and the personal finance and credit monitoring platform Credit Karma. It’s also the owner of Mailchimp, an email marketing platform for businesses. Each of these products will benefit from the partnership, Intuit said. It plans to use OpenAI’s models to power artificial intelligence agents that will be able to automate tasks inside of its platforms and services.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI Chief Executive of Applications Fidji Simo said ChatGPT’s accessibility and Intuit’s expertise will help to “unlock financial literacy at a scale that hasn’t been tried before.” She explained that the partnership will help transform ChatGPT from a very useful, albeit fairly insular, tool, into something that’s “connected to incredibly helpful services.”

Ultimately, OpenAI wants to make ChatGPT become a kind of “super personal assistant” that’s useful for people in every aspect of life, as opposed to trying to build the next “superapp.” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi told the Journal that OpenAI will help the company to reach thousands of untapped customers who are currently engaged with ChatGPT on a daily basis.

The companies didn’t make it clear exactly how ChatGPT will help Intuit to reach more users, but they did explain how it can make life easier for existing customers. For instance, TurboTax users will be able to link their accounts to ChatGPT and ask the chatbot to perform tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options or managing business finances.

ChatGPT will be able to guide people through the various tasks they need to do in TurboTax, without accessing their financial information. The entire experience will run within ChatGPT.

Perhaps more significantly, the deal represents an opportunity for OpenAI to generate some much-needed revenue from its AI services. The company’s monetization troubles are no secret. Only a small percentage of ChatGPT’s users have become paying subscribers, and it continues to burn through billions of dollars of investors’ capital every year on data center infrastructure and research costs.

OpenAI has struck similar deals with companies like PayPal Holdings Inc., Shopify Inc. and Walmart Inc, which have begun integrating payments, shopping and transaction capabilities into ChatGPT.

The problem of making money from AI has created a lot of anxiety about the prospect of the market entering a bubble, with sky-high stock valuations and debt levels that cannot easily be justified at current revenue levels.

Goodarzi told the Journal he doesn’t think the overall impact of AI is being exaggerated, but warned that expectations around the pace of adoption might be. He expressed confidence that the technology will ultimately spark more innovation than was experienced with the emergence of electricity and the internet, but said it may take some time for that to happen.

Image: OpenAI