Intuit Inc. (INTU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Excellent. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. My name is Keith Weiss. I run the U.S. software equity research franchise here at Morgan Stanley. And really pleased to have from Intuit, CEO, Sasan Goodarzi. Thank you for joining us.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

You've been very kind in joining us. So a lot to talk about. A lot of big initiatives going on at Intuit, whether it's the move upmarket with enterprise, whether it's going into full assist with tax, whether it's the assisted products within online services, but you threw a curveball at me yesterday. You guys announced a new platform relationship with Amazon. And if I'm reading this correctly, we're going to be integrating the functionality of Intuit straight into the Amazon platform, make those services available to their merchants, to their sellers, which would be a massive expansion of your opportunity. So can you talk to us about what you guys announced yesterday and what it can mean for Intuit on a go-forward basis?

Yes. Well, first of all, we're very excited about the announcement. It's been in the works for quite some time. And as all of you may or may not know, 60% of the products that are sold on Amazon are by the sellers on the platform. And the sellers can see their sales, but what they can't see is their profitability, their cash flow, inventory and then opportunities to go beyond that and market on the Amazon platform. And so really, the essence of the partnership is really about data and AI. And we are integrating our data and AI capability, so that going forward the sellers in one place are going to be able to see their sales, profitability, cash flow, inventory, it will be deeply integrated across the platform. And then we'll have the opportunity to actually help the sellers be able to do even a better job marketing on the Amazon platform and then eventually use the rest of our services. And for us, this is a big deal because it helps sellers fuel their success. It helps Amazon, but it also helps us from a growth perspective because when you look at the overall marketplace, 70% is service-based businesses, 30% is product-based businesses, and this allows us to really serve those customers and there's no discounting, everything is at full price. So we're sort of excited about what it could mean for us in the long term.

Got it. Got it. So I wanted to ask you a high-level question, a big picture question. Coming out of the Analyst Day, I think the investor impression of Intuit, established franchise, strong brand, differentiated go-to-market, a solid margin franchise. So from our perspective, would be very easy to kind of put the company into autopilot and just yield on a go-forward basis. You came out at Analyst Day talking about aggressive investment across a couple of key bets that the company is making and you wanting to position Intuit for that opportunity. So what sparked that excitement in you that like let's not rest on our laurels, let's aggressively go after these opportunities in a way that like shareholders are going to have to trust you, right, if you will, in terms of that these bets are going to pay off over time. What is it that you saw that sparked that excitement?

Well, Keith, it's continuity and momentum. When you think about the essence of what we've declared strategically and with our 5 Big Bets, it's to create a done-for-you set of experiences as a platform company with data and AI being the fuel. It's to take that platform and fundamentally digitize and virtualize how assistance is provided across bookkeeping, tax, accounting and across marketing and it's to really win in mid-market. And that's something we declared 5 years ago. And as part of our planning process, we saw substantial proof that these are areas that we wanted to accelerate the growth of the company, which means we need to accelerate investments, but doing it in such a way that creates the next S-curve of growth but preserves our margin expansion that we've not only delivered in the last 5 years, but we would expect in the next 5 years. So it's momentum in the areas that we've declared.

So in terms of that opportunity, you mentioned this in relationship to the Amazon relationship that is being about kind of data and AI. We made it 4 minutes into the conversation. We got to start talking about generative AI here. When I think about -- when I tried to describe the core capability of what generative AI does, it's -- it speeds up the path to proficiency. It enables people to be more proficient at skills that they don't necessarily have themselves. We've seen this in terms of like co-development and probably the most known use case and makes developers be able to code with language that they are not particularly familiar with. When I think about the Intuit customer base, a lot of small business owners that have to be proficient in areas that aren't necessarily what is in their core, right? They have to be -- act as a CFO, even though they don't know a lot about working capital model. They have to act as a CMO, even though they don't know a lot about marketing attribution. And it seems to me to be a really big opportunity for Intuit to step in and provide that generative AI to be that accelerant to proficiency, if you will. So you could talk to us a little bit about where you've gone with sort of that opportunity, where we are in that generative AI opportunity within Intuit? Where is it working today and what's on the come?

So first of all, I think you said it really well in the way you asked the question. When we declared data and AI being sort of the core premise of all of our investments more than 5 years ago was for very, very practical reasons. And the reasons were -- it starts with our TAM. We have over $300 billion total addressable market. We have less than 5% penetration. And our TAM is mainly nonconsumptions. Businesses, consumers are all doing the work themselves manually. And so the whole premise of our AI investments was to deliver done-for-you experiences. And what we mean by done-for-your experience is -- and I'll use a business as an example, is your customer management and marketing is done for you, your quotes to cash is done for you. Your bookkeeping taxes and accounting is done for you with the customer always in control. So the whole premise of all of our launches has been -- AI has driven automation. AI agents are doing the work for customers. And on our virtual expert platform, when AI runs out of capacity, we have AI-powered experts, live experts that will actually finish that last mile. And so I'll end with what we just announced most recently that became generally available now businesses can take a picture of a handwritten estimate on a job on a construction site. We'll actually create the estimate. We'll create the invoice, progress billings, and we'll execute the whole experience for them. And they can actually see and control the whole experience, but we do allow for them. And that for a business is game changing because they're in the business of construction. They're in the business of landscaping or running a hair salon, not in the business of managing their finances. And on the background, we do all of the bookkeeping accounting for them. So that, for us, is the power of AI. It's doing it for you with you always in control to drive your revenue and profitability growth. And I think as you look at the next 3 to 5 years, what you can envision is all experiences end-to-end because of all the data services and AI investments that we've made, they will be done for customers. And for larger businesses, imagine automating functions, automating the CFO role, marketing role, the CEO role, but the customer is always in control, so they can do a lot more with a lot less and focus on revenue and profitability. And that's really what's been our focus, the focus of our launches and the next 5 years will look like.

And I'd imagine there's an awesome ability to optimize those business processes on a go-forward basis. And when we think about the integration of Mailchimp with the core financial management, all of the marketing sort of experiences that you're trying to incent for the end customer, they're going to end up in the financial management system. So you're going to understand how effective those marketing campaigns are going to be and you'll have the ability to give the customer the visibility of not just sort of what campaigns do you execute, but how well do they end up, what was the actual sort of attribution of that marketing spend. And you're starting to get a broader and broader [indiscernible] expense.

That's right.

So where are we with the product today? Like maybe use a baseball analogy, it's probably not going to go over at this audience. But what inning are we at in terms of bringing out that generative AI capability and Intuit's ability to monetize that?

So the -- I'll start with the way we monetize is, one, new customer growth and adoption of all of our services. The second is adoption of our AI-powered live experts. And the third is just imagine stand-alone SKUs where we do all the work for you, and it would be priced for value. So that's the starting point of monetization. If I continue to use businesses as an example, the structure of the market is our self-employed, which is about $40 billion in TAM, small businesses, which is about $50 billion in TAM, the $90 billion in TAM is mid-market customers. I would say on the low end to the mid element of the market, we are focused on complete automation. And I'll just point back to what we just launched, that's generally available, where from PDF upload or taking a picture of the handwritten note all the way to cash, it's now -- GenAI does all the work for you. That's our data and AI platform at work. On mid-market, what we just launched with Intuit Enterprise Suite, first and foremost, it helps you understand how your business is performing. But beyond that, we actually give you insights. We share with you it's time to buy inventory, it's time to hire more employees or the construction site, this particular residential is not running on target and then we provide insights for you. That's where we are today. As you look ahead, our goal is to automate all of the functions. So our AI agents and AI-powered human experts can, in essence, do the work for you. And I would just end with saying those that are on Intuit Enterprise Suite today, the amount of time savings, proficiency to understand their profitability and then the insights that they're getting to drive revenue growth is quite significant. Our goal is to work with them to automate everything so they can do a lot more with a lot less, and that will all be AI-powered.

Got it. Got it. In the discussion that we have with investors around generative AI. There's the opportunity side of the equation. Software, the value proposition is always kind of a share of the productivity gains that you push into your end customers. And you definitely will describe a lot of potential productivity gains. But there's also a competitive risk from generative AI on a go-forward basis. And coming out of Analyst Day, I think a question a lot of investors are asking of me, because they started to see kind of what the generative AI could do, was why do we need the person in the equation, right? Why can't we go the full sort of like in terms of tax? Why do we need a tax professional? Why can't the large language model just do my taxes for me, right? When it comes to the bookkeeping, why isn't the model just doing it all for me, what's the necessity of keeping a person in that process?

Well, in our view, in our space, whether it's taxes, bookkeeping, accounting, marketing and the role of marketing agencies, we believe there are those that use AI and then there are those that don't use AI. And even if you use AI, we believe that last mile, you're going to need a human, at least in the next 5 to 10 years. And when you look at the work that AI is doing, it can execute a lot of the experience that I just articulated. But to really then be able to help you with complexity of business decisions to be able to reason in terms of what choices that you need to make, making sure you're ultimately -- your taxes are 100% right, you're compliant, your books are done right, your accounting is done right, that's where the handoff to an AI-powered expert is so important. I think, Keith, the thing I would say is our experts sit on our virtual expert platform, so they're leveraging all of the data and AI capabilities. But we think that last mile, right now, it's not the last mile, it's the last 10 miles that the human experts are doing. But we believe over time there's going to be a huge role still for that AI-powered human expert to go the last mile. And for us, it does two things. One, it gives confidence to the end customer, consumer and business because the majority of our entire industry is manual disaggregated businesses, disaggregated data where assistance is sort of proliferated everywhere. Our focus is digitized and virtualized all that. The last mile is going to be critical for a human experts and we've built out all the capabilities to do that. And it helps us with ARPC and ultimately, monetization over time. So we think it's going to be critical in the long term.

Got it. I want to touch on the reduction in force that was executed back in July. 1,800 jobs eliminated. It was about 10% of the workforce. And from an investor perspective, typically, when we think about reductions in force, it's usually either indicating that there's a steep drop in demand or there's a large inefficiency from the organization and neither of which seem to apply to Intuit. Like the demand environment seems very solid for you guys, and you've been always a very efficient company. So knowing that corporate culture is so important to Intuit and these types of moves can be disruptive to corporate culture, what was the problem you're trying to solve? What necessitated that headcount reduction?

So it actually ties to the -- one of the first questions that you asked. It's really about -- not Amazon. No. Continuity and momentum. When you look at the 3 areas that I mentioned earlier where as we went through our 3- and 1-year planning process, we felt like, one, we could accelerate our investments in AI and to create a platform with done-for-you experiences. . We felt like we could accelerate disrupting, virtualizing and digitizing the assisted segment. And we felt like, based on all of our progress, we could even move much faster in mid-market. So we already had accelerated investments in the plan. We felt like these 3 areas necessitied even more investments. And so we chose in the areas where we saw a lot of productivity internally to reduce our head count by 1,800 folks and then take the dollars and add in these areas. So it's really about momentum. It's really about continuity of executing on our strategy. Although tough, we believe that there's a lot of growth ahead of us.

Got it. So having the right people at the right -- in the right initiatives, right, and doing it decisively.

That's right. That's right. And because when you think about the talent we're continuing to add around data, around AI, around mid-market and disrupting the assisted segment, this continues to be a different type of talent. We've been transforming the company in the last 5 years in this area. We just felt like we had substantial proof points to significantly accelerate, and this was an acceleration play for us.

Got it. Got it. I want to dig into some of the segments, starting with the small business segment. Can we talk about that first, just kind of the overall macro landscape and sort of the small business environment, it's something I think investors have been getting more optimistic about. We've been getting more optimistic about it. And your comments on the most recent conference call, I think, helped stoke that excitement. I think you talked about the potential of seeing some better sort of spending patterns in the data that you're looking at as we enter calendar '25. Can you talk to us about specifically what you're seeing that that's getting a little bit more optimistic about the macro as we head into 2025?

Sure. I mean for your audience, we have over 100 million customers, consumers and businesses on our platform. And so we see a lot of businesses across a lot of different industries. And the word I would use is stable, and that's not a word that I used a year ago. We see in our base, profits are up, cash flows are up year-over-year. We see stability with consumers, although they're credit balances on their credit cards and personal loans are up versus a couple of years ago. Job market is generally strong, and there is more confidence and more stability. That's really important as we look ahead because we've been delivering very strong growth in a very uncertain macro environment. And as we look ahead with the optimism of consumers, optimism of businesses, there's always a -- it's always a leading indicator into accelerated hiring more employees, buying more inventory and leaning into their business, whereas in the last several years, in general, businesses have been cautious to lean in. So none of that is contemplated in our growth formula or in our guidance, but we believe the next several years will be better than the last several years in terms of just confidence in consumer businesses.

Yes. And we definitely see that across a variety of vendors and across a variety of data points. The small businesses definitely seems to be firming up and consumer sentiment going in the right direction, small business sentiment going in the right direction. Another theme that Intuit has been talking to for a while, and we mentioned this is the move-up market, trying to serve a more sophisticated customer. For the past couple of years, the initiative that I have associated with that move up market has been QuickBooks Advanced, a broader set of functionality for those customers. I think that grew 28% in terms of units in FY '24, but you recently introduced Intuit Enterprise Suite. And can you talk to us a little bit about what's the difference between sort of QBO Advanced and what you now have with that broader Enterprise Suite?

Yes. I love the question. We're so excited about mid-market. And first of all, the way we would want you to think about mid-market and sort of how to grade us is it's our QuickBooks Advanced platform. It's now Intuit Enterprise Suite and then all the services that come with it, money, workforce solutions, Mailchimp and live. So that how to think about it when we talk about mid-market. This has been in the works for 5 years, just like everything else we've been talking about QuickBooks Advanced, I would say, serves a lot less complex businesses. It's probably better to describe what Intuit Enterprise Suite does. Intuit Enterprise Suite really helps businesses that have -- think about a construction company, where they have multiple different companies within the construction company. They have a number of residential companies, they have a number of commercial companies. And before they would have to manage all of these entities separately, they wouldn't really understand what the overall performance is. They wouldn't have real-time dashboard and data to understand profitability per project. Intuit Enterprise Suite brings all of that together. So now in one place, they have a lot of the same needs Intuit has, which is how is each segment performing, what is the consolidated reporting, what's the profit margin of my customers and real-time performance understanding and then real-time insights, what choices and decisions should I be able to make? That's what Intuit Enterprise Suite does. And just in the last several months, since we've gone GA, we're serving dialysis businesses, businesses that are in construction, big RV parks, organizational development companies, all kinds of variety of companies that have multiple businesses, multiple entities. And the biggest thing we hear from our customers is the experience has dropped that easy. The price is disruptive relative to alternatives and then the total cost of ownership is a lot lower. But think about enterprise suite as the more complex businesses, multi-entity, multi-branches, several hundred million dollars in revenue.

Got it. Got it. So you guys talked about an opportunity to better service 800,000 current QBO customers. So we think about those 800,000 current customers that are already paying Intuit it for QuickBooks, what's the incremental opportunity, what's the net new within those 800,000 customers in terms of what they can be doing with Enterprise Suite from a financial perspective?

So those -- we have about 800,000 customers in our base that are eligible based on their business type to either upgrade to QuickBooks Advanced and all the services that come with it or they have an opportunity to upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite. And so the way I would dimensionalize that for you is QuickBooks Advanced has 5x the ARPC than just QBO stand-alone, 5x ARPC, and that's like for like. And Enterprise Suite has significantly higher ARPC than QuickBooks Advanced. So what it means for us is significant growth because these are customers that we can upgrade and are upgrading to either Advanced or Intuit Enterprise Suite. And if you think about the last earnings call, we shared that our overall online ecosystem revenue growth in our business group is growing 20%. And what we talked about is the mid-market segment is growing 42%. A lot of that is being fueled by Advanced upgrades, Intuit Enterprise Suite and all the services that come with it. .

Got it. So that uplift in the ARPC comes from -- you're providing kind of net new functionality in terms of visibility and consolidation across these multiple entities. But I'm assuming you're also bundling in more of the online services, so the payroll, the payment and the like...

That's right. When you look -- that's exactly right because the first step is upgrading them to Intuit Enterprise Suite, but also with all of our innovation and money. It's things like bill pay, payments that come with invoicing, instant deposit, line of credit, tap to pay, a lot of innovation in our money portfolio. That plus workforce solutions, we're able to first upgrade the customer and then make sure all of their services are on our services. And if you look at our online services growth, if you exclude Mailchimp, which was a drag on our growth in this last quarter on online services, we grew in the high 20s. So it's really contributing to our overall growth.

Got it. Got it. I wanted to into that sort of ARPC side of the equation and how it relates to the broader growth equation for the small business growth. You guys have laid out a formula for like durable 15% to 20% growth. You talked about 10% to 20% growth in the ARPC and 10% to 20% growth in subscribers. And some investors and some analysts, we won't name, have been concerned that you might be pulling the lever too aggressively...

You're one of them, aren't you?

I'm not going to name names, not in this forum. But how do investors get comfortable that it is a balance because it's you providing more value to the customers. And then we're also seeing the good kind of unit growth underneath it that will prove more durable?

Yes. I'll tell you this is an area that I'm not sure we've done a great job unpacking and so I appreciate the question. I'll start with when you look at the total addressable market of our business group, about $40 billion is self-employed, about $50 billion is small businesses up to 10 employees. And the mid-market is 10 and above, and that's $90 billion in size. So to your question around price, we're actually the low-cost provider with self-employed. We're either completely free with like QBO Money or we're at a very competitive price. So price doesn't actually play a role in that $40 billion TAM. We're actually the low-cost provider. In the middle segment, which is the small businesses, that's where we actually have a lot of pricing power because the more we get businesses to use our end-to-end platform, we're actually saving them a ton of money, we're saving them a ton of time and we price for value. And a lot of pricing that we do, we do a lot of testing. And that's why, by the way, we shared at Investor Day, our retention is actually up a couple of points compared to the last couple of years because of the value that we create. And then in mid-market, we're actually, again, the low-cost disruptor. A lot of our ARPC growth comes from the fact that it's not priced at all, it's all ARPC growth because the customer is so much larger. So when you think about price, price doesn't play a role at the low end of the segment, and it doesn't really play a role at the upper end of the segment, because that's all ARPC. It's mainly the middle. And so as you think about our equation going forward back to the 10% to 20% ARPC growth, a lot of that is mix, a lot of that is being able to serve far larger customers, which is why at earnings we broke out and said, "Hey, mid-market grew 42%. " That's all services, it's money, it's workforce solutions, and it's far bigger customers that are paying us far more. We actually believe in mid-market, we have so much room for ARPC and pricing, which we haven't even exercised yet. So revenue growth, volume growth and mix will always be the biggest part of the equation.

Got it. Got it. There's a lot more to talk about in small business, but we only have 5 minutes left. So I want to make sure we talk on some of the other parts of the business. Consumer, one of the bigger parts of Intuit. A really big opportunity within the assisted category. I think you described overall tax as a $35 billion opportunity, of which $30 billion is in business tax and the assisted category. Intuit has made its name on the DIY side of the equation, you have 85% share on that side of the equation. What's the right to win assisted? What gets you sort of the momentum in that assisted category to really target that 6x, right, if you would.

Yes. So first of all, I'll just start with the total addressable market is about $40 billion. Out of that $40 billion, $35 billion is assisted, $5 billion is do-it-yourself. And as you said, Keith, we're the revenue and share leader in the do-it-yourself category. So the massive opportunity for us is assisted. If you look at the assisted market, these are folks that go to somebody else to get their taxes done. It's extremely manual, extremely high priced. The competition is several hundred thousand mom-and-pop shops. So it's very, very disaggregated. And we went on experience, price and the immediate access to your money. And so with our platform, with our virtual expert platform, we have AI, AI agents and AI-powered human experts that can virtually, we leverage your data as a customer to match you to an expert that knows your exact situation. We ingest the data and in less than 2 hours, your taxes are done, unmatched. Can't match our pricing, can't match the experience, can't match the speed. And last year, that was about 30% of our franchise and tax grew 17%. And we think that we're at an inflection point where we have an opportunity to accelerate that, both in terms of how we raise awareness because many are still not aware of the fact that there's a new way of getting your taxes done. So you're going to see a very different sort of campaign and also the experience we revamped it once again. Last thing, although you didn't ask about this, is we also are going to be very aggressive with our product lineup, which is a rolling thunder. By the way, it's coming out in December and January. So anything you see in the marketplace today hold your horses. We have shock and awe coming, but we're going after the low-income customers to really win low-income customers across both do-it-yourself category and the assisted segment. So experience, price and immediate access to your money is really our right to win.

Got it. So that shock and awe, I'm going to use that. In reference to sort of gaining back the share that you guys lost at the low end of the market. And that's important because that's the top of funnel for kind of future tax filers on a go-forward basis. When it comes to like the core assisted filer, right, like the higher-end filer that's going to an accountant today, is there a different go-to-market or a different marketing needed to bring those guys in? Because we wait for the Super Bowl commercials. They're always great, and then we see them like, oh, yes, we got to do our taxes, and we go on to the DIY side of the equation. It seems like you would need a different type of go-to-market, a different type of marketing to get at the assisted category.

So first of all, it's important to note that the assisted segment is not just high-end customers. There's actually more low-end, low-income customers in the assisted segment than there is in the do-it-yourself category. And there's a misperception that everybody that has somebody else do their taxes for them, are sort of complexities very high, high end, high income. That is absolutely not the case. So that's really important premise because there's actually a lot of low income folks that pay a lot of money to get have somebody else get their taxes done for them because of confidence because they don't -- they want to delegate all responsibilities to somebody else. With that as context, it's really 2 big things, Keith, to answer your question. One is showing that what a new way of doing your taxes done virtually within less than 2 hours and the best price, what does that look, what does that actually mean? And you're going to see an evolution to how we talk about that this coming year based on everything that we've learned in the last year. The second is there's over 6 million people that use an accountant to do their taxes that go do a search because they want to switch. Well, we would never traditionally show up in those searches. We've done a lot of work to actually now have our experts, which are within a 10-mile radius of 80% of the households in the U.S. show up in the search. So it's things like show up in the search, be where the customer is. Two, campaigns to show the new way of doing taxes and then ultimately, the experience. And I think you're going to see that across the board with the notion of best price we guarantee it.

Got it. Got it. So I apologize. I didn't -- we have 30 seconds left. So I want to just touch on a concern I hear from investors a lot, and that's about the federal government getting into taxes. And there was a threat file offering that they launched last year. 140,000 users isn't huge, but they're expanding that program. They're expanding it from 12 to 24 states. . 90% of users said the experience was excellent or above average. You have Elon Musk, not doing you any favor by tweeting that the U.S. government should have a mobile app for this. Should investors be concerned about the IRS getting more and more into your backyard?

Yes. I've gotten this question for 20 years, and I'll be brief in answering it since we're almost out of time, but this is actually really, really important. Free already exists. Every single person in the United States has access to free software. Keith, you could get your -- do your taxes for free, but the majority of folks don't because they want to delegate the responsibility, the accountability to somebody else. So another free tax software, which already exists, the government has 2 versions of free tax software that's already available, will not structurally change the market. And I'll just remind you that there are two formidable players that came to market with free tax software. One was Credit Karma with 100 million customers before we bought them. No change. When we bought Credit Karma, we sold that tax business to Block Square, no change in the market. Why? Because structurally, free is available to everyone. So it's just simply not a threat. Plus, when you look at free, it's not something we monetize. So it's not a threat at all. The big future is the assisted market.

Got it. Got it. And just on a positive note, Credit Karma had an amazing quarter in the most recent quarter, almost 30% growth. How durable can that be on a go-forward basis? This business has been somewhat volatile and by its nature, somewhat volatile. But it seems like you're diversifying the portfolio of kind of the product being sold there. Could this become a more durable grower and more consistent grower on a go forward basis?

Well, first, Keith, I'll start by saying the durability of Credit Karma is, we bought it because we wanted to have a platform where consumers can engage with us on an ongoing basis. Tax is once a year. Credit Karma, over 40 million monthly active users that engage 5x a month. So really, the reason for the acquisition was to integrate TurboTax and Credit Karma. So we're engaging with you monthly. And when a tax time, your taxes are done for you. So it's really about how do we engage consumers year round and how does it become a driver of growth for TurboTax. With that as context, 50% of our growth that we're experiencing is our own innovation, 50% is macro. And so a lot of the work that we're doing is to drive the durability. And we'd be very happy with the business that grows north of 15% on a sustained basis, and that's what we're solving for, but it's seeing much better growth as we speak.

Right. Outstanding. Well, thank you so much for the time, a fascinating conversation as always.

All right. Thank you for having me.