Intuit Inc. (INTU) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Hey, good morning. Thanks to all of you for joining us at the Intuit session at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference. Delighted to have on stage Sandeep CFO with me. Thank you for taking the time today.

Thank you, Gabrielle. Good to be here. You guys do an amazing conference every year, and it's our delight to be here.

It's very kind of you to join us multiple years in a row. Let me ask you to take us behind the scenes a little bit at Intuit from the last three to six months. When we listened to the earnings call, there was very much this tone that came through on, we are too good at this to be losing at the entry point on price. And so maybe just walk us through how your strategic thinking has changed in the last six months, and then we can get into some of the specific business questions.

Sure, absolutely. I think the last six months and the thinking is really a reflection on the last 43 years of the company of identifying the trends early, understanding how those trends will impact our customers, what's the best customer benefit we could deliver, and making sure that we execute on that, come out bigger, better, more relevant in the life of our customers. The company about four years ago started focusing on the big bets. And four years ago, the question was, hey, could Intuit actually go upmarket? Could Intuit really be a meaningful player in the fintech? Could Intuit really go beyond DIY tax to assisted tax? And we shifted our focus in investments to those areas, and they did exceptionally well, and each one of those growing north of 30% are big bets, reflecting nearly 30% of the company's revenue. But when we looked at the last year, we realized we wanted the best we could be in growing new to the franchise customers. And as a company that's north of $21 billion in revenue, we need to be exceptional at both. So that performance in 26, which was quite strong, solidified the foundation, but also clarified the agenda for the year ahead, which is continue to scale the big bets. It's a $300 billion opportunity we used to in the early innings, but also meaningfully scale the platform, which comes down to scaling new to the franchise customers.

There have been some conversations that we've had in the last year in the software space broadly on the nature of deterministic versus non-deterministic with AI algorithms. And especially now as you're embedding more AI into your own products, I would love to hear your view on how do you think about this deterministic, non-deterministic, taking the best of AI with the best of workflows.

AI is an exceptional capability, intelligence in terms of rendering answers, in terms of providing intelligence. But what really makes AI powerful is the context around it. For us, we have hundreds of attributes per, hundreds of thousands of attributes per small business, 85,000 plus attributes per consumer and that financial context a deep domain expertise a deep industry expertise knowing exactly how a non-profit works how a plumbing company works allows us to really maximize the benefit of AI through internet intelligence and deliver done-free experiences for our customers that are truly relevant so as AI proliferation continues to grow as AI becomes even cheaper to adopt by leaning on our moat. It's allowing us to even greater serve the customers in a very relevant way.

There is a fair number of moving pieces at Intuit over the next year, which I would imagine made the forecasting process a little more complicated than usual. One of the questions we get from investors is, look, we really want to buy this stock. How do we get comfortable that estimates are troughing and that numbers have been decreased? How would you answer that question?

First and foremost, I will start with the history. We are always prudent in terms of the numbers we put out there. We want you all to have the utmost confidence in those numbers, and our record has been at the company level to always deliver on our commitments. And so that approach, that principle remains consistent. What we are doing in fiscal 27, our agenda, as I shared, is very clear. Continues to grow big bets, grow new to the franchise customers. And as we lean into scaling new to the franchise customers, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to make sure that we are building a durable long-term franchise. These are going to be customers that are the lifeblood of future revenue. And our focus is to have a company that is durably delivering double-digit top-line growth and, through our disciplined approach to running the company, delivering EPS in the high teens. That is the business we are building in 27, and our guidance and the three-year CAGRs we have put out there are a reflection of the commitment towards that.

The three-year CAGRs are important, too, because they allow us to talk a little bit about this concept I think you introduced in the last several weeks of a J-curve. What do you mean by a J-curve? What does that mean about not just FY27 but what the three-year CAGR looks like?

So let's take a couple of examples to unpack that J-curve. And we were very deliberate, by the way, about being a three-year K-curve versus just an arbitrary long-term. But let's go through the J-curve, starting with our tax business. We have a business that is addressing a customer needs and getting the filing system. We did 39 million filings last year. But we also realized that in a price-sensitive consumer base, those who run AGI, adjusted gross income of 50K, hey, we weren't the best we could be, and we lost share. So we're being deliberate about being comparative and transparent on pricing at that level because now we've spent the energy over the last few years to build a wholesome consumer ecosystem where we do not need to lean into just monetizing the tax filing. We could have these customers monetized through early access to money, through putting the refund into credit karma money and using that account year-round as their day-to-day banking app to get credit cards, personal insurance through consumer apps. So that is a very deliberate investment we're making in fiscal 27 to take a hit on ARPC, get these customers in, and monetize that through higher lifetime value as we take share of the tax filing. So that means in 27, the revenue takes a hit, but in the long term, the lifetime value is there. Then if we, similarly on our business side, we are continuing to scale our big bets. The breadth of those big bets give us the opportunity to have strong revenue growth for years to come. Just since fiscal 23, we put this into context. The big bets, CAGR, is over 2x, the overall company's revenue CAGR. So that strong trajectory is going to continue, but we also need to get better and new to the franchise customers. So we are broadening the front doors. getting these customers in through QuickBooks Lite, QuickBooks Free. So in early months, they're not as high in revenue, but as we continue to lean into a muscle of driving adoption of our platform, cross-sell, these customers become very meaningful ARPC contributors over time. So that, in essence, is the J-curve. Continuing to have access to all the levers across volume, mix, and price, but really leaning into the volume and mix to make sure we're setting up the business for durable, long-term double-digit growth.

There's a secular change here that I want to spend a couple of minutes on, which is SEO. What can you share with us on, for either of those examples that you were giving, either on the tax side or the GBS side, how important is SEO to your top of funnel? And are you seeing an evolution? The concern is that there is an air pocket as we move from SEO to AI engine optimization. Maybe help walk us through how we should think about that.

SEO is not a big contributor to our business. On the QuickBooks side, it's about 20% and even less so on the tech side. The other thing to keep in mind is we have exceptionally strong brand and brand recognition. And some of the data out there is the top 25 brands tend to show up 10x more in AI search in terms of recommendation. So what we're seeing is that where a CEO is having an impact as people go to AI rendering, that traffic we're capturing through AI, a GEO, and the good thing is that traffic converts auto-magnitude higher, multiples higher, so net-net that this shift could actually end up being a benefit to us just given the underlying core strength of our brands and how they're showing up.

Are you already seeing it as a net neutral or a benefit, or is there a period of time where, even though it's less than 20%, where it ends up being a medium-term headwind?

As I've engaged with our go-to-market teams, we are not seeing it as a headwind. In fact, the conversation goes more towards the excitement that we are seeing it in GAO and the excitement of how highly that traffic is converting, because people are coming in with a lot higher intent of conversion when AI is sending them. versus when SEO was sending them.

Let's talk a little bit more about QuickBooks. Intuit is unique in having the insight that you do into all of your SMB customers. In the past, you've shared some really interesting comments on the health of the SMB ecosystem. Bring us up to speed. How would you describe the health of the SMB ecosystem given all of the AI secular disruption that's happening this year?

The SMB macro, I see what you mean? The macro remains quite stable. the two metrics that are my favorite to look at are the cash reserves that these customers have and the hours worked. Both the cash reserves and the hours worked are up for the small businesses and even more so for the mid-market businesses, so they continue to be stable. We continue to see goodness in terms of revenue growth for sectors such as manufacturing, IT services, and the areas that are a little softer than what they were maybe a year ago or some of the consumer discretionaries. But net-net, I would frame it as a stable macro environment for the SMB segment.

Let's go a little bit deeper into what you alluded to earlier, which is the pricing change on QuickBooks. So the last time we think you had a free edition for QuickBooks was QuickBooks Desktop back in the 2000s. Tell us a little bit about the cohort that you think you can reach by offering the free version of QuickBooks.

If you allow me, I'm going to steer it a little bit because the desktop was before my time at Intuit, but let me bring it back to some of the iterations we had on the lower end of QuickBooks during my decade at the company. We see the opportunity to get customers earlier onto a platform. For context, QuickBooks is a great platform for you to run your business, but we typically see that businesses have been out there for two-plus years before they reach the level of complexity where they want to invest to onboard into QuickBooks. And we tried a few years ago to try to get customers through what we call a self-employed. This self-employed offering was built on a different platform, so meaning if you adopted self-employed and your business was successful, and we do see that over time businesses on QuickBooks tend to be more successful than the macro, you had to cancel your subscription, download all your data, and re-onboard onto QuickBooks Core. So that didn't really quite pan out. What we've built now in QuickBooks Lite and QuickBooks Free is a bare-bones QuickBooks offering. This is an offering, for example, you could onboard into super easily. We've done massive product innovation to get you onboarded. Start sending your first invoices. Before you even hire an employee, you hire a contractor. You could onboard that contractor on our payroll offerings. And over time, as you grow, you very easily get into Simple Start. It's on the same platform. And when you're immensely successful on a platform in our mid-market business making $50, $60 million a year, that same platform extends all the way to IES. So that's a net new change. And the other thing that allowed us to lean in heavier here going forward is the capabilities we built around lifecycle marketing. Around four years ago, we didn't have the best-in-class lifecycle marketing motions. Today, as we look at the progress we've made getting customers to come onto a platform to discover, discover and adopt multiple parts of the platform to drive deeper consumption of the multiple parts of the platform, the higher ARPC that we get over time. That is giving us the confidence that there is an option to go with the smaller businesses and the earlier entrepreneurs to capture them early and help them grow with us over time.

The ARPC argument, I think, is a really good one. Let me ask you about the imperfect nature of the data set. What I mean by that is you have these cohorts that have been part of Intuit for many years, but none of them look quite like this new cohort that you're trying to reach to expand the top of funnel. How do you take that data set on customer journey and to your point on life cycle marketing and now apply it to this new cohort where we can argue there are some parallels, but it is a new cohort?

It is a new cohort, and this is where product innovation comes in. Entrepreneurship is a very lonely skill. These folks don't have investment committees to bad run ideas with. These folks don't have teams like I do to bad run ideas with. And this is where Intuit Intelligence, helping them onboard Intuit Intelligence and be able to have a conversation. Hey, I've got these jobs. Does it make sense for me to hire my first contractor? Should I have this first employee? You start deepening that engagement, and we know that matters for entrepreneurs, whether they're in year two or month two, right? So that know-how applies. We also know what are the trigger points at which people want to adopt payments. What are the trigger points in which they want access to capital and how much data we need to be able to underwrite that capital to them. At which point do they start having a need for a business card, which is even earlier than access to capital. These are all the capabilities in our portfolio that we've added meaningfully over the last couple of years that position us. So the learnings, the know-how is applicable to year two business and equally to the month-to-business, but it's really the portfolio that we have now that allows us to be able to sell to these businesses earlier.

You alluded earlier to the proprietary data set that you have through the QuickBooks business through GBS broadly. And I think being able to take that proprietary data set and turn it into agent functionality is a huge opportunity. It is, yes. So there are a couple of hurdles along the way, And we can almost describe it as adoption versus monetization. So let's take adoption first. The example you and I have talked about is the automated reconciliation on the accounting. So when an entrepreneur is trying to reconcile the books at 10 p.m., it's magic. It happens. What can you share in terms of how you get over more of the learned behaviors to get entrepreneurs over that hump of actually using some of the AI tools?

The key is that you can't have AI seem like a side gimmick. It has to be core to the fabric of the offerings that you're delivering. These entrepreneurs aren't living in our world, which is they want to geek out on the latest tools. They are trying to run a business. They are working 80-plus-hour days. They're running this business, but they're also raising a family or have lives outside of it. So what we have done is integrated AI into the core offering. The example you and I talked about, someone sits down on a Thursday evening after running a bakery all day and want to do their books. They had already had a habit of knowing it takes me about an hour to get this stuff done. They log in. We say, hey, Intuit Intelligence has done all this job for you. Is this right? Anything you want to change? Oh, wow, that's amazing. Let me just change these two things and I've saved them hours, and that's saving them 12 to 14 hours a month. But also beyond that, we understand how a plumber works. We understand how a nonprofit works. So when a non-profit administrator, for example, logs in to do their books, we've already said, by the way, we have tracked that this is how these donations were spent. And they already link up to the constraints that the donors had put on there. And we've already generated the letters and the documentation you need to send back to these donors. So that comes from our domain expertise. That comes from having supported millions of customers across multiple industries. And that is what's allowing us to really take the power of AI and amplify it significantly and make a meaningful change in the life of customers. We're not asking them, hey, do you want to play around with the side gimmick? We're just doing it for them and allowing them to stay with the delight when they log into QuickBooks and experience a new product.

How do you track it?

How do we track the usage? We are, in fact, one of the things that we talked about as CEO staff earlier this week is we have a proliferation of dashboards. we're so instrumented, we're tracking the few golden metrics that really matter how many people are logging in, how frequently they're logging in, and most importantly, how many people are allowing our intuitive intelligence to take action on their behalf. It's not just about giving them advice, but taking action, and that's the key differentiator, and all of those metrics, we're very pleased with the progress the team is making.

So the other half of this question is, how do you monetize it?

There are multiple ways to monetize this. One is by building AI into the core fabric of the offering, we gain pricing power. And the recent price change we did, the communication leaned into all the innovation we baked in. Most of the innovation was AI-enabled. A lot of the innovations saved people hours, which were very tangible benefits that resonated with their mind when they saw the price change, helped people get paid multiple days early. So that's one way. Second is we're early in this journey, but what we're seeing is AI is driving better discoverability, better consumption. And also as we do more actions on behalf of the customer, it opens up the aperture for downstream modernization capabilities, which we are, given the early innings, we are driving AI adoption and proliferation across our base. We are preserving the optionality for downstream in terms of monetizing their consumption.

Say more on that. How do you mean?

For example, when people are using AI, they have an ability to discover our payment offerings more, sending them more payment-enabled invoices and getting that monetization on payments is what we do today. But downstream, it could be that we could have agentic offerings which we just manage the treasury function for them and could monetize that separately. These are things that we are building that we have optionality for downstream, but right now the focus is to drive adoption, drive repeat usage, and have more customers allow us to take action on their behalf, not just us who render it twice to them.

I want to ask you about the big bet in QuickBooks moving up market. We've seen many software companies go from being very S&B focused to trying to moving up market, and the go-to-market changes, the competition changes, it takes longer. I know that you're actually well into this journey. So how is it going? Are you noticing any change in the competitive landscape? What has been your learnings from the last year that now allow you to lean into that?

We have been very pleased with the progress we're making in mid-market, not just in the accounting side, but also the adoption of services. We talked about mid-market customers having 9 points higher payment, 15 points higher payroll, and that allows us to get the customers into these offerings and monetize them. But if I step back, here's the opportunity that got us into mid-market. These mid-market customers, their needs have gone complex, and they faced two choices, neither which one that was ideal. One was stay on QuickBooks with their bursting at the seams or hire administrative staff and spend six figures to migrate into an ERP that's overkill for the solution. So we came up with QuickBooks Advanced, and we came up with IES. That is an end-to-end platform with integrated payments, payroll, capital that addresses their needs and is the right offering for them. IES goes even further than advanced by having industry additions around construction at this point, but we're looking at other industry additions, multi-entity, et cetera. But these are the rights for them offering. Then we saw that there were 800,000 customers in our own base that were ripe for this upgrade, and we started sharpening our skills in driving product market fit, driving the upgrade motion, while also spending some energy sharpening our teeth on new to the franchise acquisition. That did really well. Three-quarters of the growth in mid-market came from the upgrade motion. And we are now looking forward, leaning into the new to the franchise. There continues to be tremendous opportunity to upgrade. There are around 700,000 entities in QuickBooks that could upgrade into Advance or IES, so we are leaning into that. But we want to go new to the franchise. And here's the other aspect that is really going to be an accelerant going forward is our partnership with accountants. 70% of mid-market customers have an accountant, And accountants are a massive influencer in terms of what they adopt. And we have been deepening our relationship with accountants. We declared accountants as a customer, not just a partner several months ago. So this is further strengthening the network effect we have across accountants and the businesses to get the flywheel going on mid-market. But I think it will also have benefits to us beyond the mid-market segment.

This all makes sense. Okay, let's talk about tax.

Let's do it.

I'd love to spend a little bit of time on the vision because I think the nature of tax and with Credit Karma now and with a number of other products you've announced along the way you can provide something much more comprehensive and take something that's episodic to more recurring what does that look like if I'm a TurboTax customer how do you get me to engage across more parts of the consumer platform so to your point It taxes a very, very deep engagement, about two days a year.

And what we have spent time since acquisition of Credit Karma, but really leaned into the last two years when we restructured the organization and put Credit Karma and TurboTax under one leader, is to build a comprehensive end-to-end consumer platform. And that allows us to really lean in, particularly for the price-sensitive consumers, to give very competitive tax solution, which could be free or very low, because we see them monetizing other areas. We saw 35% of the customers pick access to their refund faster. Keep in mind, this is the biggest check most people in America get all year, and they would love to get that a few days early. We saw them engage across Credit Karma to get a new personal loan, maybe a 0% balance transfer loan to pay off the debts early. So we now have that broader aperture of what we could bring. That's allowing us to be more competitive on the tax side and monetize the customer. So that is a new capability that's allowing us to have a different go-to-market approach going forward. So one of the focus areas is rebuilding that DIY funnel so we can retake share in tax because we are definitely not the best we could be having lost share the last couple of years.

Sasan made a comment on fundamentally reinventing the tax experience with AI. You and I even talked about how, look, if you just give consumers historically the end number on how much they owe or how much the refund is, there's a little bit of skepticism if you don't actually go through the questions. So what does this mean to fundamentally reinvent TurboTax with AI?

The fundamental reinvention extends across both the go-to-market and the product. So let me touch on the go-to-market side. The go-to-market side is, if you think about TurboTax Core, that product is one of the best tax filing solutions out there. It's resonating. It has 76% retention rate. And the innovation we built in there, including AI agents that help folks identify deductions they might have missed, they help people who get paid with the RSUs adjust their tax bases, which is yielding to thousands of dollars that people are leaving on the table because their tax basis weren't right. So that is resonating. But we are also seeing that we were losing a price-sensitive consumer that didn't ascribe as much value to all that product innovation and wanted a right price to value for the tax filing, but is willing to engage other parts of the platform. So that's the go-to-market evolution we're making, that you'll have more front doors into the tax solution, and we will monetize them in other ways. Now on the product side. TurboTax, we are reimagining with AI first. everything from data ingestion to a user interface that could be a natural language conversation, and that is going to be applicable to the vast majority of the tax filers out there. So that is across both the go-to-market and the product innovation. We're fundamentally rethinking the tax solution.

You've talked about probably the two most important pain points that I have with TurboTax, so maybe just a little bit more here. How do you make the data ingestion easier?

It comes with persistent connections, partnerships with a lot of the players. Intuit data exchange is one of the best out there in terms of connections we have to FIs as well as partners such as ADP, Paychex, et cetera. So imagine, and I'm not sure if Goldman uses for the payroll provider, but it's ADP. Gabrielle, next year when you go in, we'll be like, Gabrielle, we have your W-2. If you have the same bank connections, we have information from GSP, WM, et cetera. Let's get your filing done in 15 minutes. And hopefully you will also pick human accountability and take the assisted offering, and that's the approach.

What about the UI?

The UI will be very different. The UI will be much more user-natural language-based interface. If you have been using TurboTax for years, you notice that interview process. You go through multiple screens. That had its purpose. In fact, to your point, when you go through the interview too quickly, people are like, I must be leaving some money on the table. This can't be this easy, right? So you have to have the right pace. But AI empowers us to have a much more easy and natural language conversation. And in that journey, as we're going across doing a tax filing, describe to you exactly what's happening in the background of some of the changes this year versus last year. So every step is giving you immensely more confidence in the filing that you're doing.

Absolutely. Okay, let me ask you about your partnerships with the Frontier models. We get a lot of questions on, for example, Salesforce and what they announced with CodeForce a couple of weeks ago now. You've actually had relationships with both Anthropic and OpenAI for some time. Do you need a formal partnership like that, or do you already get what you need out of that relationship? And what does healthy look like between a software company and a Frontier model relationship?

You know, we are top intended to be where the customer's eyeballs are. So we want to make sure we're showing up in these AI models. But more importantly, there's a lot of innovation happening at the cutting edge. So we are leaning into the partnerships. For example, the Astra model, our CTO was one of the very few CTOs invited to this early preview, having access to Mythos from Anthropic. So these are things that are helpful as we are making sure we're staying ahead of the innovation and really thinking through how this innovation connects to the benefits that customers are seeking. So we'll continue to lean into those, and we've been pleased with how those partnerships have been going.

And I know you get, I think you got asked this two quarters ago, the fox in the hen house question on, look, tech partnerships come and go. At any given time, could one of your partners decide that they want to get more competitive. How do you apply that, or how would you answer to investors that have that concern about Anthropic and OpenAI?

So there are modes and there are principles, right? So you have the data across millions of customers, the know-how across certain industries, the know-hows across certain domains. It's also how you structure the partnership, what visibility the partner gets into it, what renders on the partner, but the know-how remains with you. So these are things that we are very cognizant of as we make sure we're building a durable, long-term growth franchise.

The other question I wanted to ask you, so I remember during this tax season, to the best of my knowledge and to the best of your data, I don't think you saw an impact from AI-native competition. So we have a little bit of a sense of what AI-native competition could look like versus six months ago where I think it was mostly theoretical. When you look at some of the initial AI-native tax offerings out there and your product team extrapolates, okay, this is what this could look like 12 months from now, and you have your own roadmap, of course, where do you think the modes that Intuit has in TurboTax get stronger, and where do you think AI-native companies might actually have a leg to stand on?

Yeah, so there are a couple of prongs to this question. One is on the DIY side, which is, as we shared, we're fundamentally reimagining across both go-to-market and product, and that is making sure we stay ahead of the curve in terms of the customer's expectations and really what's possible with AI. But more importantly, I bring us back to where the growth opportunity is with TurboTax. 88% of the market is in assisted tech, right? And what people are attracted to assisted tech is outsourcing to human accountability, right? So that is something that AI is not going to be able to go after. AI is actually a help to us there because we're using AI with our experts, the humans on our platform, to improve the unit economics and be even more disruptive in the space to be able to take share. So I actually see AI in the tax field as an accelerant to ambitions to take share in the assisted tax.

Let's stay on this because I think it's super interesting. I think this argument on can the humans that offer assisted in the classic market, the classic professional services market that historically you've gained a lot of share from, could they also now turn around and say, well, it's a lot easier for us to use AI as part of our processes. Our time spent per tax return is going down. Therefore, we can now be much more aggressive on pricing such that you now have a pricing question also on the assisted side.

So on the assisted side, our strategy is to be price disruptive. In fact, this past year, we had an offer out there for $150. We get your taxes done in the assisted method. For an assisted, what people are really looking for is to get human in the loop, and we call it have human accountability. And different people put different pricing in it. It pains me tremendously when people with very simple tax filings, $50,000 adjusted gross income, walk into one of our competitors and pay $400, $500 to do a tax return, because we could do it for a fraction of that cost. So I think using AI, having the ability to be price disruptive is actually an on-strategy for us, and it's actually an accelerant for what we're trying to do.

I want to spend a couple of moments here on some of the feedback that you've gotten from your investor base over the last several months. I'm curious from – this is a question about discovery value in the stock. I'm curious if there are things that you've heard from the investor base, especially as you go into next week, which have made you think, huh, this is not actually well understood. We can do a better job explaining X, Y, Z, such that a year from now, investors will understand better why this is important for the Intuit story.

Yeah, I think as I think through the year from now, there are a couple of things that the investor will have a different perspective on. It is what is the focus on the new-to-the-franchise customer growth. It is building that durable, long-term customer base, expanding the customer base that allows us the opportunity to drive better mix and monetization down the line. We continue to scale our big bets, and you'll see next week when we unpack even more data on the big bets. The breadth of performance is impressive across all of these big bets. They have multiple billion dollars driving customer growth and revenue growth at a very healthy rate. They transcend multiple customer pain points and different markets. So we're not just betting on one market, one customer base. But we need to complement that momentum we have in the big bets by also scaling the platform. And that's an area where if you go back just four years ago, we were delivering order magnitude higher new to the franchise customer growth. And it's because of our deliberate focus and investments towards the big bets that took some of the focus off and new to the franchise growth. So we're going to reinvigorate that. So a year from now, it'll be very clear that Intuit, Say, Do is still there. When we say we are going to do X, we actually do it. And we are saying we are going to continue to scale big bets and grow new to the franchise customers. and that is what investors would look back and see that that is a consistent delivery for Intuit.

It's a perfect place to leave it. Please join me in thanking Sandeep for his time.

Great. Thank you, Gabrielle. Thank you, everybody.