In the frenzied land rush for generative AI that followed ChatGPT’s debut, Intuit delivered Intuit Assist, the company’s new generative AI assistant. Its most prominent feature was a classic first attempt: a chat-style interface bolted onto the side of its applications, designed to prove Intuit was on the cutting edge. It was supposed to be a game-changer. Instead, it flopped. The feature’s failure, particularly within Quickbooks, plunged the company into what Dave Talach, SVP of the QuickBooks team, calls the “trough of disillusionment.” The assistant’s chat feature took up valuable screen space and created confusion. What followed was not a minor course correction, but a grueling nine-month pivot to “burn the boats” and reinvent how the 40-year-old giant builds products. The pivot in the company’s AI strategy began by observing customers as they did their work. Intuit’s transformation required a new operating model built on three core changes: empowering its people, re-engineering its processes, and building a technology engine for speed. To execute the pivot, Intuit first had to get the right people in the right structure and empower them to work in entirely new ways. The result of this pivot is a suite of AI agents deeply woven into QuickBooks and increasingly across Intuit’s other products. The QuickBooks Payments Agent does things like proactively suggest adding late fees if a customer’s payment history shows they’ve been late in the past. The impact is tangible: Small businesses using the agent get paid, on average, five days faster, are 10 percent more likely to get paid on overdue invoices, and save up to 12 hours a month. The Customer Agent transforms QuickBooks into a lightweight CRM, scanning connected Gmail accounts for leads, while the Accounting Agent automates transaction categorization and flags anomalies. Today, these “virtual employees,” as Talach calls them, surface their work through tiles in the QuickBooks “business feed,” turning the dashboard into an active, collaborative space. These translate into more holistic offerings for customers, and could help Intuit take market share from competitors who offer similar services, such as HubSpot. Intuit is now applying this playbook to bigger challenges, recently announcing agents for mid-market companies with up to $100 million in revenue – a significant expansion from Intuit’s traditional base of customers with $5 million or less in revenue. The logic is simple: Bigger customers have more complex workflows, and thus a greater need for AI agents.