But is it really due to AI?
Lay Off Season
Intuit, which makes the tax prep software TurboTax and other financial apps, is laying off 1,800 workers, or about 10 percent of its global staff, in an ostensible effort to catch the AI wave.
“Companies that aren’t prepared to take advantage of this AI revolution will fall behind and, over time, will no longer exist,” wrote Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi in an online letter posted Wednesday, explaining the business software’s rationale on the mass layoff.
The firings are happening at the same time as Intuit hires more workers to bolster its AI efforts, but Goodarzi’s letter does not say how many people the company plans to hire in order to change its “traditional workflows to AI-native experiences.”
Intuit is also laying off a bunch of executives in order to “continue increasing our velocity of decision making.”
Intuit isn’t the only one pushing people into the unemployment line. Masses of people have been laid off elsewhere in the tech industry this year and in 2023, with companies like Google and Microsoft engaging in their own massive bloodbaths — often inextricably linked to their own forays into AI.
Business Disrupted
A report from Ars Technica suggests that Intuit using AI as a explanation for the layoffs is just a ruse to eliminate underperforming staff.
But other forces are likely at play as well.
This year, untold numbers of American taxpayers used a free government service, Direct File, to file their taxes instead of using commercial providers like TurboTax. For this past tax season, about 19 million people were eligible to use this new pilot service — a direct threat to Intuit’s core business.
For decades, Intuit has lobbied hard against any free online service for filing taxes, even going so far as to say it’s bad for Black people and misleading customers on who’s eligible for its own free version of TurboTax.
Maybe these layoffs at Intuit are really due to AI restructuring and trimming underperforming staff. But we can’t help but think the specter of a free tax service could have scared them into the cullings.
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