Intuit, the U.S. financial and accounting software giant, has unveiled its first customer-facing generative AI–powered solution: a digital assistant to assist small businesses and consumers.

Called Intuit Assist, the digital assistant is embedded across Intuit’s platform and products, namely TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, with a standard user interface to offer personalized recommendations using contextual datasets to the company’s over 100 million small business and consumer customers across the world. The offering also provides human assistance using Intuit’s live platform when needed.

The assistant was developed using the software behemoth’s generative AI–based proprietary operating system named GenOS, which was launched in June to help Intuit developers incorporate AI across the company’s products.Within TurboTax, Intuit Assist uses the company’s tax domain expertise, rich data, and proprietary, AI-powered Tax Knowledge Engine to determine consumers’ specific tax situation and navigate the tax code. It will create a personalized tax checklist based on data a customer shares at the start of the tax preparation process to provide answers to their questions, customized insights and recommendations. The assistant will also work with TurboTax Live to assist human experts with personalized answers based on aggregated insights, the company said.Similarly, for Credit Karma users, the digital assistant will help them provide personalized answers to their money questions. It will use customers’ financial data to offer distinct answers and recommendations, including a personalized set of financial options.

The assistant will also be a part of QuickBooks to help small businesses by, for example, showing cash flow hot spots and identifying top-selling products and spending anomalies. It will also help small and midsize businesses to get started with QuickBooks if they are new to the platform and will help to import data from their website to personalize the profile. Further, the assistant will help generate invoice reminders, which can be customized in terms of tone and length, the company said.

For small businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers running email campaigns using Mailchimp, Intuit said its generative AI–based assistant will help them personalize their marketing at scale and create their campaigns based on their brand’s identity and market intent. It will allow them to change the tone, text and image faster.Once the campaign is designed, Intuit Assist can help schedule it to be sent and added to the company’s marketing calendar. Additionally, it can generate automated draft email content using product and service data from QuickBooks. The assistant can also add customers to the Mailchimp sales pipeline for long-term tracking in case businesses have longer sales cycles or lead qualification processes.At the core of Intuit Assist is GenOS, the operating system that comprises four blocks: GenStudio to interact with large language models, GenRuntime to allow automatic orchestration, GenUX to provide customer-facing applications for user interaction and user flows based on large language models, and finally, large language models themselves, which include both the third-party ones and Intuit’s in-house models.

Intuit chief data officer Ashok Srivastava told TechCrunch that GenOS could switch between the company’s own large language models and those developed by third parties based on the need of the context. The company did not want to have a “myriad of point solutions” — separate options for different products — and thus chose a single solution.“I’m fully aware that other companies are investing in large language models, and I congratulate them on that. We’re not only doing that, but we’re [also] building an entire operating system on top of it,” Srivastava said in an interview.

Intuit has been looking at AI as its next focus area for some time, and its CEO Sasan Goodarzi well conveyed it in the past. In 2020, the company even laid off hundreds of employees with obsolete skills and added a similar number of new roles to mark the shift.