My name is John Byun. I'm with the software team at Jefferies, led by Brent Thill. Today, I'm very happy to have the CEO of Intuit.
Recording in progress.
Actually, my second.
Second time.
Yeah.
Skipped last year. Great to have you. Just a quick intro. Sasan Goodarzi, CEO. Been CEO since 2019. Brought the whole shift to AI to the company. You have been at Intuit for a long time, led the consumer tax group, led the small business group. Even before that, you were GM of ProTax as well as IFS, Intuit Financial Services, which many people might not remember.
Been a fun ride, 20+ years.
Awesome, awesome, yeah. I think being a U.S.-centric company, I think a lot of people may not be as familiar, but we followed you for a long time. Stock's been up 15 of the last 16 years. This year is up again. Of those years that were up, 80% of the time was up double digits. Main business, again, it's tax and small business. I guess maybe you can start at a high level as to why do you think Intuit continues to consistently deliver on, I guess, those two major vectors and others?
Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. We serve consumers, small businesses, and now large businesses. Really, the backbone of the company is to power their prosperity. Consumers rely on us to help them from credit building to wealth building. For businesses, they rely on us from helping them from lead to cash. Over the years, we've really built out our capability to become a platform, to become a one-stop shop so that consumers can achieve their financial prosperity in one place, businesses can thrive and grow in one place. As you said, core to our investments from six plus years ago has been data and AI.
A lot of our results today, a lot of our innovation is all happening because of all of our investments to become a platform company, really an AI-driven expert platform company to fuel the success of those that we serve. We're excited about where we are, but we're more excited about what's possible in the next two to five years.
All right, great. I think it's a good intro. Obviously, you reported very strong Q3. They followed, actually, two very good and consistent quarters in fiscal Q1 and fiscal Q2. Maybe just bring us up to speed and unpack what drove the outperformance. It looks like Credit Karma continues to be very strong. Tax really came through on the assistive side. Maybe kind of do a quick recap on what you think really made the difference.
Yeah, I mean, the company grew 15% in the quarter. We also guided that we'll grow 15% for the year. I would just say that our strategy of becoming a platform to help fuel the success of consumers and businesses is really working. We, for very practical reasons, more than six years ago said, hey, we're going to invest in data and AI to deliver done-for-you experiences so that for consumers, we can help them from credit building to wealth building, for businesses to help them from how to create leads to get to cash. That strategy is working. In the last quarter, not only did our consumer group, both tax and Credit Karma, which makes our consumer platform, grow double digits, our business group grew 20%. It's really all because we're the backbone of what businesses need to grow their business.
Because now in one place, you can grow and run your business all in one place, our businesses that we serve tell us they're actually spending less money because they get to eliminate the use of other apps. They're saving more time. They actually understand what's going on in their business because their KPIs are all in one place. I just think the best is yet to come with a lot of what we're launching in the months to come to truly do all the work from marketing campaigns are done for you to your cash flow is done for you to your books are done for you all in one place. That's really what was the big driver of our growth in the last quarter.
Yeah, no, I think it's probably a continuation of a lot of the work you've done so far this year. I guess in terms of small business in the U.S., where obviously you have a very good pulse on it, it's been tough and challenging. Looks like they are being very resilient. Also, it looks like the NFIB Small Business Index actually finally perked up. Just came out this morning in terms of the data. How are you thinking about for the rest of the calendar year in terms of what the macro looks like for small businesses in your base?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, just as a reminder, we serve a lot of different industries, right, from IT services, construction, real estate, wealth management, RV parks, plumbers, landscapers. We are very, very diversified. We are not concentrated in any particular industry other than services, which is not impacted by any potential tariff issues globally. Generally, what I would say is businesses that are on our platform, their profits and cash flow is up year over year. As you said, they are resilient. Everybody is impacted by higher costs, by potentially what tariffs may bring. They are resilient. Because we are mission critical to their business, we are really fueling their success. In terms of what I expect the rest of the year, the word I would use is stable. Businesses are fighting for growth.
The majority of who we serve is really not impacted by the current environment. Certainly, from a sentiment perspective, it's on everybody's mind, enterprises, large businesses, small businesses, consumers in terms of what the current environment could hold. We see stability in our base.
All right, great. We'll come back to the S&B segment, but I want to kind of pivot back to the tax side. Just finished a very strong quarter. It looks like a year. On the assistive side, which is TurboTax Live Business, the medium-term targets have been 15% to 20% growth. This year, you already forecasted a full year to be at about 47%. So a really big jump in the last two years, it grew at 17% off of a smaller base. What do you think finally happened to get from 17% to 47%? And how much of that do you think could be sustainable in the next season?
First of all, just for your audience listening, the total addressable market in tax is about $40 billion. And $5 billion of that spend is those that choose to do taxes themselves in the U.S. and $35 billion is those that choose to go to somebody else to have your taxes done, whether it's a consumer or a small business. That is really the majority of our growth opportunity because our revenue share of the $5 billion do-it-yourself is quite high. Our growth formula is really about disrupting the assisted segment. To your question about why the breakthrough adoption, why that kind of a growth, it's been six years in the making. Sometimes we celebrate success in the year that it happens. We have built out a platform where data and AI is at the core of what fuels the platform experience.
We can do anybody's taxes for them virtually in less than an hour. We went on experience, price, and speed the money. A lot of what we've done the last several years really culminated into the growth that we had this year. To your point, it grew 47%. It is now 40% of the overall TurboTax franchise. The big compass I would just say you should focus on is we expect it to continue to grow between 15%-20%. When it goes from being 40% of the TurboTax franchise to 50%, 60%, our growth formula flips. It positions us for double-digit growth in the long term. I expect it to continue to grow 15% to 20%. Hopefully, we'll exceed that next year as we did this year.
I'm really bullish because we won this year given our experience, given we guarantee the lowest price, and we give you the fastest access to your money. All that came together in one year for us.
Yeah. I think that point is important, I guess, in terms of the mix shift when that's going to hit over 50%. Just the mix shift effect of that piece going much faster than the DIY, where you had a very dominant position.
That's right.
Could lead to better overall growth for the consumer segment.
That's right.
I think another thing is some investors, especially in the U.S. that are in a different tax bracket, think that the assisted side is for very complex taxes, that it's so complicated that even if you try, you couldn't do it on your own. They go to a CPA, maybe pay thousands of dollars. I think there's also, I guess, in the past, you have mentioned there's actually a large group that do not need to go, but still go to a tax store or still go to a CPA and pay multiples of what they should be paying. How big do you think that group is that doesn't need to go there? How does that translate to the true addressable opportunity?
Yeah. I actually love your question because there are about 100 million consumers and businesses that have somebody else do their taxes for them. The general myth is these folks have very complicated taxes. The reality is we've done a lot of work to understand what's really addressable for us. Out of the 100 million, almost 80 million of those consumers and businesses are very addressable for us. They have somebody else do their taxes for them primarily because of confidence. They want to make sure it's done right. They want to make sure if they're a consumer, they're getting the maximum refund. They want to make sure if they're a business, large or small, that they're getting all the deductions that they need. We already have product-market fit for 80 million of that 100 million.
When we think about our opportunity, it's actually quite significant. It's a very small portion that has very complicated taxes. Even for that small portion, we have the ability to do their taxes. In terms of what's really addressable for us, it's like 80% of the market is addressable for us.
Right. So still quite a bit of runway ahead.
Indeed, yep.
This year, as you mentioned, a lot of things came together on the tax business. Obviously, you went more aggressive in terms of marketing to both DIY and the assisted type tax filer. You started early in the season in December, I think, for that. I mean, how satisfied are you overall with all the different initiatives and anything to think about for next tax season? I know it's still early, ways ahead, but obviously, if you're going to start marketing in December, it's probably not too early.
It's never early. We've been preparing for next year a couple of years ago. It is always in the making. I'll just start with what I shared a moment ago. What really worked is this year, the culmination of a lot of our work came together in terms of delivering a great experience, being at the lowest price compared to alternatives. Then just the way we gave immediate access to your money really resonated, which is what drove the breakthrough adoption of the 47% revenue growth that you touched on. I'm actually more excited about what didn't work. This year, we did a lot of work to drive a lot of interest and traffic for those that use a pro, professional to do their taxes. We were still operating like a software company versus this is a service.
If you want somebody else to do your taxes for them, what they want to do is interact immediately with an expert. To give you an illustrative example, if somebody went on Claude or ChatGPT or Google and said, "Tax Pro, near me," we would show up. The first thing we would make them do is to authenticate. If somebody wants a service, the first thing to do is not to authenticate and create an account. They want to engage with an expert. That is an illustrative example of where we had a lot of falloff this year. When a consumer or a business engaged with our expert, our conversion was 80%. We know the most important thing to do is to connect a consumer with an expert.
We have an enormous opportunity to remove all of that friction that I just mentioned that gives us an enormous opportunity for next year. The second thing is we bought Credit Karma so that ultimately we could have one consumer platform to engage customers year-round. Credit Karma this year contributed to about a point of TurboTax growth. There is still a lot of friction in that experience. Those two things are really for us exciting in terms of all the work that we are doing right now to make the experience easier and much more intuitive so that we can win as a service. That is what is exciting as we think about the next year.
Great. We are looking forward to next tax season. I'm sure competitors are trying to figure out what to do too as they launch here. Let's switch to the S&B side of things. Online and desktop, the online ecosystem revenue still grew at 20%, very consistent this year, even with Mailchimp decelerating. What do you think were the major reasons for that? I mean, obviously, the mid-market did very well. Anything besides that? I mean, it looks like payment volume still held up. Anything you can point to that were the key drivers?
Yeah. You know, I often get this question, which is how have you sustained the online growth in the business group? I would just say it's because we've built out a platform where in one place, a business can grow their customers, manage their cash flow, make sure their books are done right, and their accounting is done right all in one place. Really, for us, it's all the investments that we've made in AI and HI. For us, we never want a dead end to appear for a customer. We want our data and AI investments to do as much of the work for our businesses, to help them with marketing campaigns, optimize cash flow, make sure that they're taking care of their workforce.
We have also built in the capability so that there is always a smooth handoff between our technology and a human-powered expert that can do the work for customers. Because we can do everything in one place, that is what is fueling our growth. That is ultimately what is fueling payroll growth, payments growth, and the overall growth of the platform because it is a one-stop shop. A business can leverage us to run their entire business in one place. We have become really the backbone of what drives growth for a business. That stickiness is what is driving our 20% growth.
Yeah. Clearly, one of the criteria is having the full suite with payments, payroll, working capital, short-term needs, and all that.
That's right.
Again, similar to what you saw in terms of additional driving the tax side, the S&B, I guess, the Global Business Solutions Group now, getting quite a bit of boost from the mid-market. You have two products now, QuickBooks Online Advanced and IES, Intuit Enterprise Suite. They've grown, I think, at 40% or higher every single quarter this fiscal year.
That's right.
I guess one question will be, what is the typical profile for a customer for IES, and how is it different versus QBO Advanced?
Yeah, great question. Just again, for your audience, mid-market is about one-third of Intuit's total addressable market. It's nearly $100 billion of addressable market in context of our overall $300 billion in TAM. We define mid-market as businesses that are between $2.5 million in revenue up to like $100-$150 million in revenue. By the way, we're not going to stop there. We plan to serve our larger businesses. For now, that's the way we define mid-market. We really win because of experience, because of price, and because of total cost of ownership. These are businesses that we know very, very well. Everything that they do, their needs are the same.
The scale of what they do, the number of customers they serve, the number of vendors they have, the number of employees that they have, the complexity just happens to be different than a smaller business. We have built out a platform, an Intuit Enterprise Suite, that really helps our customers grow with our platform and helps us acquire new customers. We win based on the merits of what I just shared. When I spend time, I spend about half of my time with customers, prospects. The biggest thing I hear from them is I can now see everything in one place. You're helping me spend less money because before, they were spending a bunch of money on a lot of different apps. Their data was trapped in a bunch of different apps. They did not really understand how their business was performing.
Now they can see they have a cockpit of their KPIs in one place. Based on all of our AI investments, we actually help make recommendations of what they should do to optimize their cash flow, what they should do to optimize inventory, what they should do to make decisions to fuel growth. We will actually execute the actions on their behalf. We will let them know which customers are overdue in payments. We will follow through and make sure they get paid, all of it done by our AI capabilities. I use those as illustrative examples in terms of what differentiates Intuit Enterprise Suite. I think to end with where you started, online ecosystem growth grew 20%. Our small business grew 17%. Our mid-market, which is advanced Intuit Enterprise Suite, grew 40%.
We are excited about what is possible because we just launched our Intuit Enterprise Suite last September. There is just a lot of runway ahead of us in terms of really disrupting the mid-market segment.
Yeah. I remember the launch at the Analyst Day, and you highlighted some customers that had multiple entities being able to consolidate on Intuit.
That's right.
What, I guess, maybe a different way in terms of asking what the customer profiles are different there is, what did IES unlock in terms of the type of customers you're able to serve that would have gone elsewhere compared to QBO?
Yeah. I'll use just an example of one industry to make it real. If you take a construction company that has $50 million in revenue, they may have 10 commercial entities or commercial projects. They may have 15 residential projects. Those are all different entities that they're trying to manage from a growth goal for each project, margin goal, how to allocate cost is one, overrunning or underrunning the cost that they'd allocated or assumed in the bidding process. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can have all of those entities. You can see all of them aggregated to understand the performance of your overall construction company. You can dig down by each commercial entity, each residential entity, compare how each project is performing versus others, see if your cost of goods are higher or lower in one entity versus another, and the why behind it.
You could never do that before Intuit Enterprise Suite. You may have three projects in an Excel spreadsheet, two projects in a QuickBooks, three projects in another app. You never knew how everything was performing holistically and what decisions to make holistically. Now you can with Intuit Enterprise Suite. That is the profile of the type of customers. Take that and multiply it by wealth management, IT services, real estate, landscaping company, a trade like an electrician. Those are the types of customers now we are able to serve.
Yeah. The whole support for multiple entities is a big advantage. They may have multiple instances of QuickBooks Online as well as other solutions.
That's exactly right.
You can consolidate that. In the mid-market, like on my X or Twitter feed, I actually see ads from NetSuite saying, you know, haven't you outgrown Intuit? Come to us, switch over to us. There are companies like Oracle NetSuite, Sage, Sage Intacct, which I acquired, Epicor, and others. Some of the questions we get from investors are, what is Intuit's right to win here? I mean, the first most obvious thing seems to be price, which is disruptive. I think there are other things also beyond that, just overall TCO as opposed to just price. What would you say some of the key things are that make them stay with you as opposed to supposedly graduate to something that's much more expensive and complex?
Yeah. You know, before Intuit Enterprise Suite, it was actually exactly what you articulated. They would have to graduate and move on from Intuit. The biggest thing that we hear now from customers that have moved on to Intuit Enterprise Suite, that are now on it and using it and evaluated us versus others, they touch on three things that I mentioned earlier. One is it's drop-dead easy experience. This is not an enterprise-level ERP where it's hard to use. It's straightforward and easy. You don't need a bunch of professional services and a year to migrate. The migration typically, or the upgrade, is typically a couple of days up to maybe a couple of weeks. It is experience, drop-dead easy. It's the total cost of ownership. Then the price. For us, it's a huge ARPC uplift.
Relative to the alternative for the customer, we're actually very disruptive in price. Those are the three reasons why we win. I think it's only going to improve as we continue to build out very specific vertical capabilities on the platform to be able to serve very niche industries. Those are the reasons why we win.
Yeah. I think price alone makes a big difference when it starts. QBO Advanced starts in, I think, low $1,000. And the NetSuite oftentimes is mentioned as $20,000 and up. It can be very disruptive. We have maybe five, ten minutes left. We have not touched on AI, which you have put in a lot of the foundational work early on, even before ChatGPT came out. You recently announced four different agents, along with pricing going up for QBO, actually QuickBooks Online, desktop, legacy products as well, all that. That should start kicking, I think, July 1st and August 1st. It is really a boost for fiscal 2026. I think the agents are a big part of that, the reason why there is there should be willing to pay for more value.
Can you talk a little bit about the thinking behind the enhanced pricing and the way you plan to monetize all these AI agents?
Sure. First of all, I'll start with what I mentioned earlier. This has been years in the making. Ultimately, what we're delivering is a step function change in delivering done-for-you experiences. What's coming in the next several months, actually, we have several hundred thousand customers that are already on the platform using these capabilities, is really a virtual team of AI agents and AI-enabled human experts that will do a lot of the work for our customers. We're launching a customer AI agent, a payments AI agent, a payroll AI agent, and an accounting AI agent, just to name a few.
What is remarkable about what is in market today and then being launched and generally available in the next couple of months is these AI agents work together in harmony, leveraging all of the data and data services that we've invested in to do the work for customers. What does that mean? It's helping a customer manage a hot lead in their Gmail. It's to optimize their cash flow, money in and money going out, where we will let a customer know in their business feed, these are the choices and decisions you should make, like following up with 10 customers to get paid for work you've already done. We'll do that for you. We just want to make sure that you're OK with us executing against the action. Our AI accounting agent doing all the categorization and bookkeeping for the customer.
It is a huge step function change to we're helping the customer do the work so they can feel their success. They're always in control. Because we do not want any dead ends, it will automatically also hand off the work to a human agent that will actually finish off that last mile, depending on what it is. That is being launched, going GA in the next couple of months. We are very excited about it. The customers that are using it now love it and are giving us feedback for some final sort of pivots that we are making. We are making a lot of the AI agents available in our more higher-end SKUs. One, we are pricing for the innovation.
There are certain modules, like project management AI agent, where we'll manage your entire project for you on your behalf, will be an extra charge module available in things like QuickBooks Online Advanced or Intuit Enterprise Suite. It is both price for the value of the innovation and also some standalone modules that we'll be pricing. That is all getting rolled out in the next several months. We are quite excited about it.
Yeah. I think customers should be excited as well. I mean, there's some for as a customer agent, so many things that will help them. I know it's early, maybe not too early, but everyone's starting to start thinking about fiscal 2026. The pricing for QBOA, just QBO actually, looks like it's about a lift of about 15% to 17%. How should we think about when we rank order the drivers for GBS next year? Where does pricing stand? Is it more from up-tiering of people? Some of the higher tiers also come with more users. Is there a user lift or new customer onboarding? Is there a way to think about that?
Yeah. First of all, for the company, volume and mix is always the largest driver of growth and price to a lesser extent. Specifically to your question around the business group, volume and mix will be a larger driver of growth in FY 2026 than price. The price contribution that we just talked about for FY 2026, our next fiscal year, will actually be a lesser contributor next year than it was this year, and partly because of just the volume and mix coming from mid-market. Mid-market is just a big growth driver, a big ARPC growth driver, while being disruptive on price. Overall, we've not guided to FY 2026 yet. Ultimately, when you hit the total key, price will play a role, but it will actually play a lesser role next year than it did this year.
That's great to know. When people think of AI, also think about internal efficiency. When you raised guidance after Q3, I think the implied margin expense for this year went up from about 60 basis points to 100 basis points. You're already at around 40%, very healthy. What is AI doing in terms of internal efficiency? I mean, I guess most people mention customer support. I think there are other things that can help.
It's all the investments that we've made in our technology, in particular AI, to reinvent experiences for our customers. It's also the same focus that we've had to drive automation of tasks and workflows internally. As you said, we're going to be growing 15% this year, margins of about 40%. It's a one-point expansion from last year. All of it is because of just our platform leverage internally. I think we've had a four-point increase in our margins just in the last several years because of all the platform investments that we've made. My view is that's going to continue as we look ahead. We've made so much investments to make our teams far more productive that the one thing I don't worry about and we don't worry about is margin expansion because of just the investments that we've made.
Our view is we're going to continue to grow revenue double digits. We're going to continue to grow operating income faster than revenue. Our margins should continue to expand because of all the investments that we've made.
Great. Great. Maybe we touch a couple more quick topics. Mailchimp, big acquisition. It was growing well. Obviously, the product turned out to be a little too complex for some customers. The growth was decelerated, a bit of a drag to the overall GBS, which is doing well. It looks like you do have a new leader in there working to return that to double-digit growth at some point. Just wanted to see how you're thinking about that process to recovery. Eventually, obviously, the drag will be gone. It'll be sustained by mid-market.
Yeah. A couple of things I'd say about Mailchimp. One is we innovated a lot in the last couple of years, really focused on serving mid-market. It made the product too complicated for the solopreneurs and small businesses. I feel very good about the team that we have in there to really this is about our own execution. It is about how we ensure that the product is drop-dead easy and simple for solopreneurs and small businesses while we serve the needs of larger businesses. The compass I'd have you look at is we're in the fourth quarter of our fiscal year 2025. This time next year, Mailchimp is going to be far healthier in terms of growth than it is now. We'll be back on our way to double-digit growth.
That's only going to be accretive over time to the current strong 20% growth rate we have in the business group.
Yeah. Obviously, a strong complement to the platform, plus.
I think that's the most important piece, which is that it really helps us be that platform from lead to cash to help fuel the success of businesses, both large and small.
Yeah. Yeah, to those not from Mailchimp, the customer marketing.
That's right.
Maybe the last question. You made a very interesting acquisition recently with GoCo in the mid-market, those HR, payroll, and other offerings. Just if you could explain how that's different than some of the solutions that you already had. What will they do as you move up market with IES and others?
Yeah. Sure. I mean, in mid-market, human capital management is really important. You've got to go far beyond payroll to help a business manage their entire workforce, from paying them to health care benefits to 401(k) benefits. That's where GoCo comes in and really helps us build out the human capital management. It is going to be critically important for the larger businesses that I was articulating earlier that we're focused on serving from sort of $2.5 million in size up to a couple of hundred million in size. We're hoping to have all of the integration done in the coming months to have a really robust human capital management as part of our overall Intuit Enterprise Suite. I think most importantly, just like everything else that we're doing, we want to do the work for our customers.
The investments that we're making around data and AI so that everything is automated is really important. Because our ultimate goal is to automate every task, automate every workflow, and automate all functions for large and small businesses so they can focus on their passion, which is growing their business and fueling their success. This is going to play a very important role from a human capital management perspective.
In terms of serving your customers, is that more for an IES-type customer? Or is it also for QBO Advanced?
Yeah. It'll be for a great question. It'll be for all of mid-market. It'll be both for QuickBooks Online Advanced, which is for emerging mid-market customers, the smaller ones, all the way to Intuit Enterprise Suite that serves up to a couple of hundred million in size. It'll be for both.
Great. Great. I'm going to throw in one more just to wrap up, just on capital allocation. I mean, GoCo is a fairly small project compared to MailChimp and Credit Karma. Back to doing some M&A, obviously generated a ton of cash flow with a lot of returns through share buybacks, dividends as well, and a lot of organic investments. How are you thinking about, at the current stage, the balance between organic and inorganic?
The way I would frame it is our M&A principles are unchanged. However, the big areas where we needed to propel the company forward 5 to 10 years, which is what led to the Credit Karma and Mailchimp acquisitions, I would say that's behind us. Now it's about all of the integration that we're doing across the platform, making sure everything is fueled by data and AI so we can deliver done-for-you experiences. In our future, I don't foresee large acquisitions. I mean, the one you were just asking me about was a small tech tuck-in, small acquihire. We'll continue to look at those. As I look ahead, I don't see a big glaring area where we need to make a big acquisition. It's going to be primarily our organic investments.
Great. Thanks for joining us, Sasan. Great to have you.
Awesome. Great. Thank you for having me.