Users of Intuit’s small business tools QuickBooks and Mailchimp will soon have help from an AI assistant.
The tool, dubbed Intuit Assist, will be able to greet business owners with daily personalized briefings, answer specific questions and requests about their finances and marketing plans, and automatically draft and tweak emails, from marketing campaigns to requests for payment. And while owners of the types of small businesses that use QuickBooks for accounting and Mailchimp for marketing can be wary of new products, Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar says she’s confident users will find the assistant inviting rather than intimidating.
“It’s embedded in such a way to make it very natural and not feel like they have to learn something new in order to get the benefit of it,” she says.
Mailchimp users will soon be able to create customer segments for targeted marketing by describing the audience they want to reach in plain English, and businesses will be able to automatically generate draft emails to new sales leads that they can edit or send with the touch of a button, according to Intuit. Prompts within the email editing interface will let users ask the AI to make tweaks to email content, like lengthening and shortening messages, tweaking the tone, or cleaning up a draft’s spelling and grammar.
In QuickBooks, the AI will also be able to flag unusual situations, like if invoices are taking longer to get paid than usual or inventory is taking longer than usual to arrive, and offer advice on what to do about them. The AI can also suggest looping in the Intuit Expert Network, the company’s collection of accountants, bookkeepers, and other experts that can be hired to help users with financial matters.
“It’ll be a button that they can click when they need to reach the expert,” says Succar. “We’ve got a well-established business model for how this works.”
Intuit isn’t the first company to roll out AI assistants that can help write messages or organize data, but it does have a seemingly sizable advantage in that many small businesses already keep their sales, marketing, accounting, payroll, and other data into Mailchimp and QuickBooks. That enables its assistant to in many cases provide guidance and automate tasks without needing to input any new information into the system.
The company has been integrating QuickBooks and Mailchimp since acquiring the marketing platform in 2021, and Mailchimp has for years expanded from its email automation roots to managing a wide range of online and even offline marketing for small businesses.
“This is a single platform they’re using to run and grow their business,” says Succar. “The data on the platform is unparalleled.”
The company, which is also rolling out versions of Intuit Assist for its consumer-facing tools TurboTax and Credit Karma, plans on making the new AI features available over the coming months.
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