Exclusive: Intuit is laying off 1,800 employees due to AI transformation

10 comments

1. The same should be done at the IRS

2. >Intuit plans to hire approximately 1,800 new people with strategic functional skill sets primarily in engineering, product, and customer-facing roles such as sales, customer success, and marketing—and *expects its overall headcount to grow in its fiscal year 2025*

3. In fairness, the notice and severance package looks pretty fair.    It’s not good news for those impacted, but two months notice plus a four months package plus another two weeks for each year of tenure should give everyone a fighting chance, and should forstall damage to morale, trust and sense of safety for those remaining staff; you can’t really expect more than that for a soft landing imo.   

   Announcing that a little more than half of them had fallen short in performance, however, was unnecessary and a knife in the back, and means that even the 800 or so where performance was not an issue will be unfairly stigmatized in the job market.    That looks to me to be the black mark on what seems to be otherwise well handled overall, but it’s not a small one.

4. It’s going to be really interesting watching wealth concentration intensify over the next decade or so as AI replaces more and more roles but I do wonder what happens when we hit the inflection point of “why automate it or do it at all when there’s nobody left with an income to buy it?”  I’m pretty sure that the end result feels like it will be a few billionaire/trillionaires trading trinkets made by robots back and forth with each other while the rest of us are trying not to get arrested for sleeping in the park.  Which by that point will just be a wasteland of urban and rural decay.

5. It’s because I didn’t upgrade my desktop software to their cloud/online software and I’m okay with that.

6. “AI Transformation” is a weird way to say “downsizing because the IRS decimated on of our key revenue streams”

7. CNN laid off 100 due to “AI transformation” as well. This is just an excuse to cut head count.

8. Intuit also just increased prices on its QuickBooks Online subscriptions by about 20% in April. Interesting timing.

9. The interesting thing will be when they need to hire so many people back when the AI boom turns out to be fool’s gold… And the companies that held onto their employees ready their lunch…

10. What’s that you say we don’t actually need a human company involved in filing our taxes so we should definitely let the IRS do it for us since private companies can’t even say they’re employing people now