Intuit buys data analytics startup as part of AI expansion efforts
Intuit said on Tuesday that it's buying data analytics startup Origami Logic as it looks to spread artificial intelligence across more of its platforms. Origami Logic claims to deliver "transparency into the murky media supply chain and helps brands and agencies share ownership of paid media measurement data." Intuit plans to use the platform to better analyze multiple data sets, which would allow for more personalized services and products across its portfolio.
Artificial intelligence has been a focus for Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi since he took the helm of the financial software firm in 2018. On a conference call following the company's third quarter earnings report last week, Goodarzi said the core of Intuit's growth strategy is to become "an AI-driven expert platform" that's open and easy to build on.
The aim is to take a financial advice service such as TurboTax Live and expand it across the company's consumer, self-employed and small business products.
"It's about significantly accelerating our application of artificial intelligence, which progressively learns from the large data set across the platform," Goodarzi said. "For Small Business owners, we are focused on being the center of small business growth using AI across our platform to accelerate faster funding and payments and to help our customers access capital. Over time, we see an opportunity to better serve product-based businesses as they find and sell to customers across channels."
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Intuit's AI endgame is to make its platform a year-around financial services tool rather than a once-a-year tax filing site, and develop more steady sources of corporate revenue. Intuit transitioned to the cloud, broadened its total addressable market, doubled its customer base to about 50 million users and doubled revenue under former CEO Brad Smith and former CTO Tayloe Stansbury. Goodarzi is now working to make Intuit's entire product ecosystem more compelling via AI and hyper personalization.
"As we enter our next chapter of transformation, having a strong data architecture lies at the heart of Intuit's strategy to deliver valuable insights to our customers," Goodarzi said.
As for Intuit's third quarter financial results last week, Intuit reported EPS of $5.55 a share on revenue of $3.27 billion, up 12% from a year ago. Analysts were expecting earnings pf $5.40 a share on sales of $3.235 billion. For its fiscal fourth quarter, Intuit said it now expects non-GAAP earnings between $6.67 and $6.69, above estimates for $6.54 per share. On the revenue side, Intuit anticipates between $6.74 billion and $6.76 billion, with non-GAAP operating income of between $2.26 billion and $2.27 billion.