Intuit cuts 17% of its staff to focus on AI, but refuses to blame AI

The financial services software company Intuit Inc., known for platforms that include Credit Karma, QuickBooks and TurboTax, said today it’s letting go 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 people.

The cuts, announced as the company delivered its latest financial results, will allow it to divert more resources towards the artificial intelligence innovations increasingly powering its software. But it insisted that it’s not replacing anyone through automation.

In a memo to employees, Chief Executive Sasan Goodarzi added the layoffs will also help to reduce complexity at the company by simplifying its corporate structure. Intuit had around 18,200 employees globally at the end of July 2025, according to its last annual report. “None of it had to do with AI,” Goodarzi told analysts on a conference call today. “Everything was about how do we become more effective.”

The CEO explained that senior executives had come to realize that the company had too many management layers and claimed that this had been slowing innovation. By flattening the organization, he said he hopes to “reduce the complexity of information flow so we can push decision making to our frontline folks that are the builders.”

The focus of the layoffs is therefore on “coordination-heavy” roles such as project managers and business operations staff, which are now less necessary due to the speed at which teams can innovate. In addition, the company has also decided to merge the Credit Karma and TurboTax platforms into a single business unit, and the cuts eliminate some of the overlaps within that new group, Goodarzi explained.

Analysts asked if Intuit planned to automate some of the tasks currently performed by affected workers, but Goodarzi insisted that’s not the case. There have been increasing concerns lately that advances in AI could lead to wholesale job cuts in the technology industry as more work is automated. This year, 114,173 tech workers have lost their jobs so far, according to data from Layoffs.fi. Tech giants including Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have all announced thousands of job cuts, while simultaneously increasing their investments in AI infrastructure and tools.

Goodarzi said the cuts would cost the company around $340 million in restructuring charges, with most of that stemming from severance payments. However, he said that the company would ultimately grow its bottom line following this decision. “A big chunk of this, you can count on it to go to margin expansion and EPS growth, and a smaller part is going to be scaling the growth engines because we feel good that the growth engines are funded quite well, just because of the productivity we see internally,” he said.

Intuit is most definitely under pressure to find some way of sparking growth. In addition to concerns over layoffs, there are also fears that the rise of AI could end up sidelining traditional software businesses, because of the way they enable anyone to create business applications using natural language prompts. Intuit’s stock has fallen 41% in the year to date. Goodarzi pushed back at the notion that AI represents a threat to his company’s business. “People spend seven times more on tax and accounting experts as they do on software, because people don’t buy code, they buy confidence,” he pointed out.

He also claimed that large language models are reliable enough to replace his company’s software for high-stakes financial tasks. “Accuracy, compliance, being audited for these high-stakes decisions is why people choose us,” he argued. “LLMs are not the place where people rely on to do their taxes and to run their business.”

In its most recent quarter, Intuit delivered adjusted earnings of $12.80 per share, beating Wall Street’s expectations of $12.57 by a comfortable margin. Revenue for the period grew 10% from a year earlier to $8.56 billion, just ahead of the Street’s target of $8.54 billion.

Photo: Intuit