Why 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."
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.
I 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.
Ultimately, 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.
Nah, 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.
Intuit 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.
I'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'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
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.
Why 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-17p...
The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
Boy, 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.
I 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.
No, that's Intuit lobbying.
I 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.
Ultimately, 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.
Nah, 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.
Intuit 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.
I'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'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.
I 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)
I 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.