At Intuit Connect 2026, one of the biggest themes was the growing role of artificial intelligence in managing business finances. But the conversation is moving beyond AI that simply answers questions or generates reports. Intuit is increasingly focused on AI that can perform work, identify financial problems, and help business owners make decisions without spending hours analyzing their numbers.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Arundhati Singh, Senior Vice President, Platform, Small Business, and Accountants at Intuit, to discuss the company’s expanding Intuit Intelligence Platform and what these changes mean for small businesses.

Our conversation covered everything from AI-powered financial planning and automated invoicing to business credit cards, access to capital, accountant relationships, and the challenges of maintaining human oversight as AI takes on more financial responsibilities.

One message emerged throughout our discussion: Intuit wants AI to become an integral part of running a business, rather than another application that owners must learn to use.

Turning QuickBooks Into a Financial Thought Partner

I started by asking Singh what small business owners who already use QuickBooks Online would notice first as Intuit expands its Intelligence Platform.

Arundhati Singh:

Absolutely. So, we’re really excited about the expansion of the platform, and just to briefly recap, it is a platform that spans across QuickBooks, Intuit Accountant Suite, and Intuit Enterprise Suite. One of the key things—or maybe two key things I’d call out that our customers will notice—is we’ve gone much deeper with insights and truly becoming a financial thought partner.

Examples of that would be introducing conversational financial planning skills and forecasting. You can actually start to have a conversation about: “Is this the right time to invest in a new piece of equipment that might be expensive?” or “Help me scenario-plan if I start increasing my marketing expenses; what could that potentially look like?” That’s one key piece of investment that I think customers will benefit from right away.

Another area of focus has really been how we move from insights to taking more and more work off customers’ plates by automating tasks. Just one example of many would be automating the process of collecting invoices. We know from internal data that as many as 60% of small businesses on QuickBooks have invoices that are 30 days past due, and that’s just dragging their cash flow. If you can automate the process to get those reminders out and stop chasing once the payment’s made—there is $2.7 trillion of invoices on our platform, and customers who are using invoice automations are getting paid up to four days faster. Those are the types of things where we’re looking to do more in automating work, as well as going much deeper with insights that can truly be like a thought partner on how to grow your business.

That last point stood out to me because small business owners often wear multiple hats. Managing invoices and following up on payments are important, but they also take time away from the reasons someone started a business in the first place.

When I brought that up, Singh agreed.

That’s the goal, because they didn’t get into business to manage the paperwork, right?

I responded that business owners generally get started because they are passionate about what they do.

I mean, really, though! There are things that they’d much rather spend their time on, and so if we can take that work off their plate, that’s incredible for us and hopefully for them.

Moving From AI Recommendations to AI That Completes Tasks

One of the more interesting developments is Intuit’s effort to move beyond AI that recommends actions to systems capable of completing business processes.

I asked Singh to walk through a practical example of how that would work and, importantly, when a business owner would need to intervene.

Arundhati Singh:

Sure. Well, one example that I walked through at just the highest level was invoicing, but let me unpack that one a little bit deeper, and then I can give another example as well.

With something like invoicing, the real end-to-end version of that is you don’t even need to think about, “Hey, I need to go in and set up this automation.” What would happen for a business owner is if we see that opportunity for you—that you have unpaid invoices dragging your cash flow—we should surface that proactively to you the minute you log in. If your unpaid invoices are climbing, you can click in, take a look at information on where those invoices are from, and see if they are concentrated in certain types of customers. You can actually benchmark against how your accounts receivable look relative to other businesses like you, so we can provide you some context for what’s typical for your industry and businesses of your size.

Then we can actually suggest, “Hey, we can set up this automation for you that will go chase those invoices.” But you have the ability to configure the thresholds—for invoices that are maybe only past 60 days due, 45 days due, or 15 days due. You have the control to do the configurations and set the threshold of how much is outstanding. The business owner always has the ability to control, review, and edit, but our goal is to be as proactive as possible in surfacing, “Here’s what could help you; here’s what we think you need to focus on.” Then, when you choose to act on it, make it one tap to get that going for you. That’s one example for invoicing.

Other examples could be cash flow, and this touches on where a business owner potentially wants to be more involved. Can we proactively surface for you, “Hey, looking at your potential expenses, you might be short this month, or you might have to figure out a bridge”? We can surface potential solutions for you, including a line of credit that we could underwrite based on our knowledge of your cash flow data. But that’s a case where we’re not going to proactively tap that line of credit for you. We’ll surface it for you as a business owner, but give you the chance to really think that through, as well as connect with your accountant if they’re working on our platform and get their opinions and insights as well.

It is a spectrum of, “Hey, this is something that we can suggest, and you can largely tap and approve it, and you should be good to go”—with something like invoicing, you can customize it if you want, but don’t really need to—all the way up to, “Hey, we’re surfacing options for you that you should really consider thoughtfully and then think about and act on.”

That distinction between routine automation and higher-stakes financial decisions is significant. Sending an invoice reminder and taking out a line of credit are very different actions, even if both can be informed by the same financial data.

I followed up by asking how much control owners would have over the automations, including which tasks AI could perform independently.

Arundhati Singh:

There is a significant degree of customization. One of the things that we launched earlier this year in August was the notion of custom skills on the platform. The tasks that we can automate across 100-plus workflows are things that customers can set the thresholds on, set the frequency on, and set what the approval thresholds are. Those are all things that can be configured per customer.

For business owners, this approach could mean automating repetitive work while maintaining control over when the system acts and which actions require approval.

Why Intuit Uses More Than 60 AI Models Instead of Just One

Intuit says its platform orchestrates more than 60 specialized language models and over 100 AI skill agents.

With so much attention focused on individual AI models, I wanted to understand why Intuit was taking a different approach rather than relying on a single powerful model.

Arundhati Singh:

Yeah, it’s a great question. There is so much innovation in this space right now, and it’s very hard for a business owner to keep on top of what is the best model for any given task. What we’re seeing in the industry is there’s no one model that is uniformly better. For us to be able to take that work off their plate, we think about, “Here’s the model that would be best for one workflow versus another, based on all of the evaluations we do internally,” and we can do that at scale on massive datasets.

It also allows us to manage cost. If you were to do this all on your own in an external system, you’d have to optimize a lot of those token costs. We can think about how to manage that for you and make that efficient for performance and quality on massive datasets.

This raises an important question about how QuickBooks fits into a business environment where owners may already use ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools.

Rather than forcing customers to choose between those tools and QuickBooks, Intuit is building connections to the broader AI ecosystem.

I specifically asked Singh about Claude and whether users could connect external AI systems with Intuit to access information and support their workflows.

Arundhati Singh:

Yes, absolutely. Our guiding principle here is: How do we meet our customers where they are and make their workflows easier? The way we think about this is the same way we thought about online, mobile, and now third-party connectors. When you meet your customers where they are, you’re able to increase their overall engagement and make it more convenient for them. At the end of the day, what they’re trusting us with is securing their data and managing very complex regulated workflows across tax, accounting, payroll, and payments.

If those connectors help them get their work done more efficiently—and we do participate across the ecosystem with connectors for Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Muse, and are constantly looking at what else makes sense for our customer base—we see that as additive to the value they get on our platform, as opposed to any sort of replacement for our relationship. It actually deepens the relationship we have with them.

How Intuit’s Partnerships With Major AI Companies Fit Into Its Strategy

Intuit provided additional information about its LLM strategy, including partnerships with Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity.

The company explained that these partnerships are designed to help small businesses use AI tools they may already be familiar with to better understand their finances, benchmark their performance, improve cash flow, and find ways to grow.

Intuit sees conversational AI as an entry point into more complex financial workflows. A business owner might begin by asking a question in an AI assistant, but completing a payment, managing payroll, or performing other regulated financial activities requires access to reliable financial information and systems capable of executing those actions securely.

That is where Intuit believes QuickBooks provides additional value.

The company also shared an early observation: QuickBooks customers connected to frontier large language models are showing higher engagement with Intuit’s core products than customers who are not connected. Intuit did not provide specific engagement figures in the additional information I received.

More information about the individual partnerships is available through Intuit’s announcements covering Meta Muse, OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic and Claude, and Perplexity.

Bringing Advanced Financial Planning to Smaller Businesses

Many small businesses don’t have a dedicated finance department. Some owners handle virtually every financial decision themselves, often with limited time to review reports or develop detailed forecasts.

I asked Singh how Intuit plans to make financial intelligence traditionally associated with larger companies accessible to businesses with just one or two employees.

Arundhati Singh:

That’s one of the things we’re so excited about in the work the team has done in the recent six months. I briefly touched on conversational financial planning: this is the ability for a business owner, potentially just on their phone in between meetings, to access pretty comprehensive financial advice. It can walk me through my cash flow forecast, help me think about where I should be investing, identify opportunities in my business, or evaluate whether I can take on an additional employee. It can really help you think through the types of questions that you traditionally either may not have been able to access or would have had to pay a significant amount of money for from an external advisor.

Again, this doesn’t replace that advice, particularly as businesses get more complex, but it helps them come with more informed questions if they’re already working with an accountant. If they don’t have that luxury, then it’s a significant boost over what they might be able to get from a general-purpose model because we have all of their accurate financial data, our answers are grounded in that, and it’s on a secure platform. For those businesses that are smaller or earlier-stage, this can be a significant boost to what they’d be able to do on their own with generic tools.

The ability to ask financial questions conversationally could be especially useful to owners who understand their businesses but may not have the accounting background necessary to build complex forecasts.

It also highlights a distinction Singh returned to several times: AI can help business owners become better informed without necessarily replacing professional financial advice.

Business Credit Cards and Financing Based on Actual Cash Flow

Access to financing is another challenge that many small businesses face, especially during their early years.

Intuit is bringing together the Intuit Business Credit Card, bill payments, and access to capital within QuickBooks. I asked Singh how these services could change the way small businesses manage money and evaluate their financing options.

Arundhati Singh:

The first thing is expanding access to financing options, making it faster to understand what’s available, and being able to tailor it based on what we know about the business. Particularly as you look at smaller businesses, it can take a very long time for them to work with multiple individual players to understand what they might be eligible for. If they already are working with us on our platform, we have their cash flow history; we can understand within as little as 24 hours if they’re approved for a line of credit. That significantly reduces the overhead, providing a seamless process on the platform to complete that.

That really compresses the amount of work it takes for an owner to understand what their options are, and it’s all inbuilt into our systems. They can have a conversation with Intuit Intelligence about how that could potentially impact their cash flow projections based on the offers they see.

With things like the credit card, for smaller businesses, the underwriting is actually based on what we know about their business cash flow and not just the owner’s personal credit. We may be able to offer a much more complete answer into what that business can qualify for, and it isn’t just secured to their personal credit.

As a small business owner myself, I understand the difficulties of obtaining financing during those first few years. Even when a business is generating revenue, lenders may view its short operating history as a significant risk.

I raised that concern with Singh, asking whether Intuit’s access to financial information could help newer businesses qualify for credit without relying so heavily on how long they have been operating.

Arundhati Singh:

Yes, that’s exactly it. If you’ve been on our platform 6, 12, or 18 months, we actually have that cash flow data. That is exactly why we think this can be very compelling for businesses of all stages on the platform.

Intuit’s New Business Credit Card

In July 2026, Intuit launched the Intuit Business Credit Card, which the company describes as the only card that natively integrates with QuickBooks.

The card is designed to bring spending information directly into the accounting platform, giving business owners more immediate visibility into expenses and cash flow.

The integration also brings together spend management, rewards, and financial insights within QuickBooks.

For smaller businesses, the combination of accounting information, spending data, and financing options could make it easier to evaluate cash flow without switching between multiple financial services.

However, business owners still need to consider the specific terms of any financing offer, including interest rates, fees, repayment requirements, and how additional debt could affect their finances.

Making Sales Tax Compliance Easier Without Eliminating Responsibility

Sales tax compliance can become complicated quickly, particularly for businesses selling products or services across state lines.

Intuit is adding improved sales tax reporting, pre-file checks, and in-app filing capabilities. I wanted to know how much of the compliance process QuickBooks could now handle and what responsibilities would remain with the business owner or accountant.

Arundhati Singh:

The goal of the improved sales tax reporting is to really reduce the amount of time that the individual business owner or accountant has to spend on computation of sales tax. With the improved reporting and capabilities, we should really be able to do a lot of that work for them. There is also a pre-file check that gives more assurance, but we think of this as doing an audit and review on your behalf for what we can catch.

Ultimately, it is still the responsibility of the business owner and the accountant to validate the accuracy before submitting. But we do believe that being able to catch errors on their behalf and flag things for them significantly reduces the amount of time they need to spend doing that accuracy check. It’s really about helping get to more accurate calculations faster and then giving more confidence as they do that final review. Those are what we’re trying to offer with the new features.

I described the approach as getting business owners close to the finish line so they could complete the final review themselves.

Singh agreed.

The distinction matters because automating tax calculations does not eliminate a company’s responsibility for accurate reporting. Instead, the goal is to reduce the manual work required to reach a point where an owner or accountant can review and submit the information.

Expanding Beyond Payroll Into Employee Management

Intuit is expanding its human capital management capabilities with the launch of QuickBooks Workforce, an AI-powered solution that brings hiring, employee onboarding, payroll, time tracking, benefits administration, and other HR functions together in one platform. Integrated directly into QuickBooks, the new offering aims to reduce the need for disconnected employee management tools while giving businesses greater visibility into workforce operations and labor costs. Additional details about its features and capabilities are available on the QuickBooks Workforce product page.

I asked Singh what drove the launch of QuickBooks Workforce and how bringing these capabilities into a single platform could help growing small businesses simplify employee management, reduce administrative work, and eliminate the challenges of relying on multiple disconnected systems.

Arundhati Singh:

Part of it is just trying to help business owners who prefer not to use disconnected tools by broadening what they can do on our platform. We’re responding to customer feedback about where they’re seeing value and what they’re using. For example, within our Workforce Suite, new employee onboarding is one of our most used features. We heard feedback asking if we can make that easier, and have recently released new self-service features. Employees can self-submit their required documents and do their benefits selection ahead of starting. That reduces the burden on businesses and gets those employees set up faster so they can hit the ground running on day one.

It is a combination of helping our customers use fewer tools and deal with less fragmentation if they choose to, while directly responding to the features that they’re telling us would add value. Another one is payroll self-service corrections. Being able to do that self-serve reduces back-and-forth if they’re working with an accountant to help manage payroll; when they need to make an adjustment, it is just faster to do on their own now.

For small companies without dedicated human resources staff, reducing administrative work during onboarding and payroll management can have practical benefits.

It also reflects Intuit’s broader strategy of bringing more business operations together within a connected platform.

How AI Could Change the Relationship Between Businesses and Accountants

One of the biggest questions surrounding AI in accounting is what happens to the accountants themselves.

As AI handles more bookkeeping, categorization, reconciliation, and other routine tasks, the work accountants perform is likely to change.

I asked Singh whether she sees accountants taking on a larger role in helping business owners make strategic decisions as more administrative responsibilities become automated.

Arundhati Singh:

Yes, and that’s one of the things we’re most excited for, and we’re also hearing a lot of excitement from our accountant customers. At the end of the day, what motivates them and what they’re really there to do is help their clients grow. It isn’t about spending time doing manual data entry. If we can take that off their plate, they would much rather be able to grow their advisory practices and spend more time guiding their clients on strategic decisions.

The types of things we’re trying to make easier for them include everything from chasing answers on, “Hey, what exactly was this expense? Can you give me a receipt?” By having a much more seamless experience, accountants can ask for that information inline to their workflows in Accountant Suite. Rather than having to chase the business owner on the phone or across multiple email threads, business owners can see all of those requests in one place on the QuickBooks mobile app while they’re on the go. Often they have a receipt on their phone, and it’s really easy to get that done on the go.

It ranges from making it easier to automate day-to-day interactions all the way up to making it faster for the accountant to get to insight-ready books on behalf of their clients, with more transactions ready to post. On transactions where we can suggest the category, class, location, and payee name based on previous data, 93% of the time the accountant doesn’t need to change anything. That saves them time to focus on the ones that do need their guidance and expertise, and the other tasks they need to complete to get the books closed. It enables them to really focus their time on strategic questions as opposed to routine, repetitive tasks. Both businesses and accountants have told us they’re very excited about that.

Intuit has also pointed to an estimated 30% reduction in manual work for accountants using its AI capabilities.

That raised another question for me: Would those efficiency gains eventually result in lower accounting costs for small businesses, or would they primarily translate into expanded services?

Arundhati Singh:

It should ideally translate to both better service and more value. Costs will be a question for the accountant community on whether that enables them to lower costs or put more value into the relationship. By more value, I mean better, more detailed reporting. With the skills and tools we’ve built for accountants for anomaly detection across their client portfolio, we can proactively flag opportunities to them: “Take a closer look at what’s going on with this client. There may be an opportunity for you to lean in and provide more detailed guidance here.”

We’ve added the ability to set up KPI scorecards that can vary by client, so they get the most important metrics at a glance for each particular business, all the way to proactive advisory insights that make the process of advisory easier for accountants. We also made significant improvements in our report suite over the summer, which generated positive feedback on making it easier for accountants to create deliverables so they can spend more time helping clients understand implications and outcomes rather than on artifact creation.

There is also the possibility that some accountants will view automation as a threat to their existing business model.

I asked Singh directly whether accountants were concerned that AI might reduce their workloads to the point of losing clients or revenue.

Arundhati Singh:

What I’m seeing in the conversations I’ve had is that all of our accountant customers understand that the industry more broadly is changing. What they’re really looking for is for us to be a partner in getting them the best tools based on verified data and deep knowledge of specific financial workflows and industries. They’re looking for a partner they can trust to guide them through the fact that the world is changing around them, and to see what opportunities that can help unlock. Most of the conversations I’ve had have been an acknowledgement that this is an opportunity for the profession to provide higher-value service and guidance, which ultimately is what motivates them most.

Whether that transition leads to lower costs, more sophisticated advisory services, or some combination of the two will ultimately depend on how accounting firms adopt the technology and structure their services.

Supporting Industry-Specific Needs and Growing Businesses

Intuit is also introducing capabilities aimed at specific industries, including construction, manufacturing, and nonprofit organizations.

I asked why those industries were priorities and what challenges general-purpose accounting systems have struggled to address.

Arundhati Singh:

We’ve prioritized industries partly based on feedback from our accountant customers, but also based on which are the fastest-growing areas for advisory. These are opportunities for our accountant customers to lean into industries seeing high growth and demand for advisory services.

In terms of what this helps provide, it’s that single pane of glass for how a CFO would like to look at larger enterprise businesses: looking at multi-entity reporting in a consolidated way, and supporting cross-border businesses. We are seeing a lot of our mid-market businesses that have both UK and Canada operations, for example. We looked at how we can help them better within the existing Enterprise Suite. Those types of conversations have informed the roadmap for the enterprise product.

Growth can create another problem for small businesses: eventually, they may outgrow the accounting software that helped them get started.

Migrating financial records and business operations to a completely different enterprise system can be expensive and disruptive.

I asked Singh how QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite are designed to help businesses avoid that situation.

Arundhati Singh:

This is one of the most important growth opportunities for us: to better serve businesses that would really like to stay with us. Prior to the introduction of Enterprise Suite and improvements in Advanced, they were faced with the choice of going through a difficult migration where they were being overserved and overpaying for the value derived, when they really just needed a handful of things that we can provide to help them stay and grow with us.

I already called out multi-entity. We’re also investing significantly in inventory management capabilities in Advanced, and we’ve brought together a suite of products, including bill pay capabilities, that help a business scaling into the tens of millions of dollars of revenue maintain historical relationships, avoid legacy migration, and tap into additional capabilities that make it easier to stay on top of operations as they scale in complexity.

For growing businesses, the ability to add capabilities without replacing the underlying financial system could help reduce disruption.

However, it also means owners must evaluate whether the more advanced tools meet their operational requirements as their businesses become increasingly complex.

Maintaining Trust and Human Oversight as AI Takes Action

As AI systems become more capable, they also gain the ability to influence increasingly sensitive business activities.

Automated invoicing is one thing. Systems that interact with financial accounts, initiate payments, or make recommendations involving credit introduce additional concerns about accuracy, security, and accountability.

I asked Singh how Intuit is balancing automation with data protection and human oversight, particularly when an AI mistake could have serious consequences for a small business.

Arundhati Singh:

This is such an important question, and one where customers are looking to us for guidance on how to navigate. There are really three pillars we think deeply about: trust, security, and control.

Our approach spans permissioned data, a very secure data platform, and robust audit capabilities. We have the Intuit Intelligence audit log, providing a very clear view of any actions AI takes on our platform, who authorized those actions, and what changed in the system. It also includes knowing when to route to a human for approval: what thresholds automation should be configured against, and when a question should go directly to the business owner or their accountant for input before automating something on their behalf.

Because of our knowledge across different financial domains and access to expertise through our inbuilt relationships with accountants, we are able to build on a trusted data platform and AI models while knowing where to route and how to set permissions and thresholds when a human needs to step in to approve and review.

The ability to review AI actions and understand who authorized them will be particularly important as businesses become more comfortable delegating routine financial activities to automated systems.

For owners considering these capabilities, the question is not simply how much work AI can perform, but how much control they retain over the process.

What Small Business Finance Could Look Like in the Next Two Years

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Singh to look beyond the current announcements.

AI capabilities are developing rapidly, and I wanted to understand how she expects the way small businesses manage their finances to change over the next 12 to 24 months.

Arundhati Singh:

The biggest change we’ll see in that time period is less need for businesses to fragment their tools if they don’t choose to. We’ve invested in ecosystem connectors and have a large number of partners who connect into our platforms. For our customers, if they choose to, they can manage their entire business from within our platform.

In terms of where we want to continue to push: we talked about invoice automation, and we’re building more automation in bill pay and payroll. We really want to get to the place where a customer can come in, work with an onboarding expert or their accountant to get their automations set up in those first seven days, and then just be off and running. The platform would just come back to them saying, “Hey, I think you might want to take a look at this; maybe tweak how this automation is configured.” Outside of that, they’re not thinking about it, and the only questions they’re engaging with—both directly with our AI and with their accountant—are strategic questions: “How can I grow my business?” Everything else is taken care of for them. That’s the vision we’re building towards.

That vision represents a considerable shift from how most small business owners interact with financial software today.

Instead of logging in to complete a long list of administrative tasks, owners could increasingly rely on systems to handle routine activities and bring important decisions to their attention.

As we wrapped up, I shared a perspective I’ve held about the direction of AI: the companies that ultimately succeed won’t necessarily be those that add the most AI features or chatbots. They’ll be the ones that integrate AI directly into existing workflows so that it becomes a natural part of getting work done.

Singh’s response brought our conversation back to the same idea we had discussed at the beginning.

Arundhati Singh:

It’s in the workflow. Ultimately, the winners or leaders will be the ones who drive outcomes on behalf of their customers. That’s really our focus: Can we get you paid faster? Can we help you make better decisions because you’re able to scenario-plan and forecast with us? Can we give you time back in your day to pour into the business you’re running, rather than managing the operations of it? If those are outcomes we can drive, that’s what winning on behalf of our customers looks like for us.

For small business owners, that is ultimately the measure that matters.

AI technology can be impressive, but its value comes down to whether it solves real business problems. Getting paid faster, understanding financial risks before they become emergencies, reducing paperwork, and making better decisions can have a meaningful impact on a company’s operations.

What stood out to me from my conversation with Singh was how much Intuit is focusing on making AI part of those everyday processes.

The next challenge will be delivering that vision consistently while maintaining the accuracy, security, and human control that businesses need when dealing with their finances.

If Intuit can do that, AI may become less of a tool business owners have to manage and more of a system that helps them spend their time doing what they started their businesses to do in the first place.

This article, “Intuit’s Arundhati Singh on AI, Automation, and the Future of Small Business Finance” was first published on Small Business Trends