The news: Intuit signed a multiyear strategic partnership with OpenAI with over US $100 million per year to embed OpenAI’s models into Intuit’s software. The models will enable AI agents for Turbotax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp.

Here’s how it works: Users of Intuit products will be able to link their accounts to ChatGPT. Through that link, they can use ChatGPT to conduct tasks like estimating tax refunds (Turbotax), searching for personalized financial products (CreditKarma), and summarizing business activity (QuickBooks).

Zoom out: Intuit has invested heavily in its in-house genAI framework, GenOS, released in 2023. And in September it announced new “agentic AI experiences”: New proprietary large language models (LLMs) trained on financial data and power agentic capabilities in QuickBooks and Intuit Enterprise Suite as well as handoffs between AI agents and human experts.

The OpenAI partnership and these new features are an evolution of the original GenOS platform, which included a development environment for gen AI experiences; a layer that chooses from LLMs and retrieves data based on user context; a library of user interface components; and custom LLMs for tax, accounting, marketing, cash flow, and personal finance.

Our take: Intuit’s OpenAI deal foreshadows a seismic transformation in how users experience applications— where generative interactions become the norm, AI agents handle tasks on users’ behalf, and copilots integrate seamlessly into daily workflows. In financial services, it introduces the capacity to quickly interact with complex data and take action.

Human efficiency gains will be realized through less time poring over documents like spreadsheets and tax filings, the ability to query that data rather than look for it, and complete context-aware tasks that once meant clicking around.