Oh, okay. Awesome. Thanks, everybody, for joining this afternoon. Steve Enders as part of the software research team here at Citi. I wanna welcome everybody to day one of our tech conference today. Here in this session, we have the newly promoted Head of the Consumer Group, Mark Notarainni.
Hi.
Mark, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
Maybe just to start off, since you are newly promoted into the role, maybe you can give people a little bit about your background and your time at Intuit.
Sure, sure. Yeah, I started at Intuit 15 years ago, actually. It feels like yesterday, actually, since I joined. It's an incredible company that really embraces change and innovation, and we are on the precipice of even more change and innovation coming forward, for those of you that saw our announcements. But I started in the TurboTax organization, what we call our Consumer Group, 15 years ago. Had a career there, moved into a chief customer success officer role for the company about five years ago, and had been building capabilities, and we were responsible for the capabilities behind our Virtual Expert Platform, which is the infrastructure and the capabilities for our Live products.
And I actually started that in TurboTax when I was in CG, and then when I went into the ecosystem role five years ago, carried that forward and built that out for the company. And then two and a half months ago, was asked to go back to CG and lead the Consumer Group, heading into next tax season, and incredibly excited to be back in the Consumer Group. It's a great product that we offer for customers, and a very important service that we provide to customers, which is always inspiring for me, and it's an incredible team. So very happy to be back leading Consumer Group.
Great. No, great, great to hear. And before we jump into, you know, I guess, more focus on, on the tax business and the consumer side, I do wanna ask about the Intuit Leadership Program, 'cause that was- that did come up quite a bit on, on the last earnings call. So just wanna ask you, I guess, what's details of this, and what's been your experience with, with that program?
The Intuit Leadership Program?
Yeah.
Yeah. So, you know, we place a great deal of value on leadership at Intuit, and we've seen, you know, our last two GMs pop out and become CEOs of companies. But the Intuit Leadership Program is really a meticulous program that's focused on development of leadership, driving experience, leadership as well, right? So being able to move... I think Sasan talked a little bit about this. We have kind of a three to five-year window where we look at mobility, which is a big part of it. Sasan led many different parts of the organization before he became CEO. Brad, before him, did the same thing.
And so it's very intentional for us to look across the organization, deliver and develop the leadership skills, but then also put those leaders in positions across the company to lead different parts of the organization. And that's really, really helpful, right? Both at a consumer or a segment level, right, or a business unit, but also in the ecosystem and platform roles. So that's cultivated over the years. Like I said, I've been in this role before this exactly five years, so it was time for me to try something new and move into the business unit.
Okay, great. I know you had your Innovation Day today
Right
... and I'm sure a lot of people in the room, being in meetings, probably missed some of that.
Yeah.
So, can you just give us a little bit more detail about what Intuit announced today, and what's new on the AI?
Awesome
... on the AI front?
Yeah, for sure. So it turns out that generative AI is kind of a big deal. And so, the Innovation Day was really centered around our efforts in generative AI. A couple months ago, we actually announced our platform work that we did, I think two and a half, three months ago. And it's called GenOS, right? It's our platform for generative AI and how we built the components for our product teams to go build experiences, generative AI experiences. What we announced today is the second phase of it, right? Which is, what are we doing for customers, and how are we delivering breakthrough experiences, leveraging generative AI? We call it now Intuit Assist.
And Intuit Assist is a set of experiences built on the GenOS platform that allows us to use our data, right, which is a key element of any LLM, right? At the core of any LLM is data. And we've been working on data for the last five years, actually organizing it, structuring it in a way that we could use AI, traditional AI, and now generative AI capabilities on top of that. And it's also leveraging our investments in our knowledge engines that we have. That's also part of our traditional AI. We have a Tax Knowledge Engine, right, specifically for tax products. And the combination of data plus our tax products layered on top of that is our generative AI experience.
It's called Intuit Assist, and that's a platform and a capability that's going to be embedded in every single one of our products from TurboTax, to QuickBooks, to Mailchimp, and to Credit Karma. And it's an experience of leveraging data and our knowledge engine to drive personalized experiences, create more confidence in our experiences for our customers, and also be a gateway to our expertise as well. So we have, for five years, we declared an AI-driven expert platform. This is the next and the greatest iteration of that, in Intuit Assist, and it's really gonna power the next phase of growth for Intuit across all of our product lines.
Okay, great. And so I guess with Intuit Assist now being out there, what does this mean specifically for TurboTax and Consumer Group?
Mm-hmm.
What does that end up looking like for the end consumer, who then will now be using Intuit Assist for their taxes or, you know, whatever other solution in Intuit going forward?
Yeah. For TurboTax in particular, you know, TurboTax has historically been a very linear product with a structured flow-
Mm-hmm
... that's based off of, tax forms, right? With Intuit Assist, we're actually able to break that, and break that, that linear flow and actually provide a much more, personalized, and engaged experience. It's more human-like. And so we're gonna be able to do that through the Intuit Assist platform, and there are two ways that we're using Intuit Assist. One is in an embedded, generative AI format. So as you're going through the product, in key moments of truth, we'll be able to use your data, to personalize your tax situation and be able to explain it, in a very personal way.
And so if you owe money at the end of your tax return, we'll be able to explain why in very detailed ways, and that's very personal to you, versus generic ways that we'd have to do it in the past. So those are embedded experiences. And then we have the Intuit Assist component, which is, in essence, a digital financial assistant that's following you around as you engage in our product and helps you make the right decisions for you, right? So whether it's a tax strategy or helping you manage through tax forms and making sure that it's accurate and there are no errors, that's all happening in real time. And then the third part of it is it connects into our expertise, right?
So it's our gateway to our expert network, which is also the Virtual Expert Platform, is also leveraging Intuit Assist to drive more personalization, to drive more automation, and empower our experts, actually, to drive the relationship with our customers versus focused on workflow or processes. And so it really is going to permeate our entire product flow. The other part for us that is really exciting, and this is the most probably the newest part of our strategy, is we're applying Intuit Assist into our shopping experience.
Mm.
Right? And that's where we have about 40 million people that come to TurboTax.com or one of our landing pages and actually don't start the product, right? So they've shopped around, and then they leave. They obviously aren't finding what they're looking for. Intuit Assist is going to be embedded in that experience so that we can help navigate customers through questions and answers, and data capture to personalize the experience and actually get them started way upstream in the product. And we believe that's a big game-changing experience as well, so it's a big part of our, you know, if you wanna call it our shopping experience as well going forward.
Okay, that's great to hear. And I do wanna keep this engaging, so if there's any questions in the audience, we'll make sure to get to those when they come up. I guess staying on the AI theme, though, you know, we think about the landscape for AI. I guess, how does this kind of fit into, you know, maybe a broader AI opportunity?
Mm.
How do you view maybe, like, potential disruption in the market from others who might be looking to incorporate AI for-
Mm
... various use cases that Intuit works on?
Yeah. So, for us, when you look at the AI landscape and the generative AI, it certainly enables a lot of new innovation. You know, my kids are creating an app using generative AI, right? So it really does break down development barriers. But what's really critical, especially in the industries that we're in, right, highly compliance, where accuracy is a premium, the number one asset actually in making any LLM work is data.
Mm-hmm.
And we have 60,000 attributes, data attributes, per consumer, in our platform. We have 500,000 attributes in small business, right, per small business. That's very difficult to get, and that's actually what feeds, an LLM and trains the model, and makes it a valuable, model that is more accurate, in how it answers and manages customer experiences. So that's at the. It's one of the big cornerstones of it. And I'll tell you, five years ago, we started on this journey to become an AI-driven expert platform, and we started with data. And that work, we've made some, acquisitions over those, over the years, that have really helped us organize and structure that data in a way that's incredibly consumable by these LLM models. That's one.
Second, we have what we call a knowledge engine, right? That's another element of our AI strategy and has been for a number of years. In our tax situation, in our tax environment, the Tax Knowledge Engine is the engine that takes forms and converts it into code.
Mm.
And that's really critical, because accuracy is non-negotiable for us, right? You cannot have an LLM model hallucinate. You can't have it give incorrect answers because the implications to consumers are significant. And so that knowledge engine is also one of the cornerstones of training our LLM, and it actually allows us to keep our LLM updated, right? Which every tax season there are changes and pivots, whether it's weather related or you know, we've had stimulus related changes throughout the course of a tax season. So it's accuracy and completeness is really, really critical-
Sure.
and that's what our knowledge engine allows us to do. We've spent, since I've been here 15 years ago, we actually started our work around our Tax Knowledge Engine, and now it's basically the engine behind all of TurboTax. That's another really big element. And then for us, three years ago, we actually started work on a type of LLM called natural language processing, right? And our NLP, like we've actually digitized the 550 million minutes that we spend with customers every year on the phone or in chats. And we've structured that, and we've organized that so that we can understand what customers are calling for. We actually automate a lot of our expert work already off of that NLP.
But now that NLP work that we've done is a critical part of training the model as well, so that it creates kind of those human-based learning loops.
Mm-hmm
... back into our LLM, so that we can actually start answering long tail questions within the product, and then actually take that content and distribute it out to our experts through the VEP as well.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, those are the three big elements for us as we think about making this work. This is why, you know, yes, you can, in essence, take some forms and create code, leveraging LLMs, but that's only one element of driving accuracy.
Sure.
And so those other two elements, right? The knowledge engine, the data, and the LLM-NLP, those other three areas are very difficult to do. And we are very fortunate that we started that work five years ago, in our declared strategy, and it's really starting to pay off and enabling us to go much bigger, in generative AI, and, and, and Intuit Assist, than I think a lot of others would be able to do. Because, again, we're a compliance-based business in many, in many, in many ways. So...
Sure. Okay. No, great, great answer there. Maybe shifting gears a little bit because you are the new head of the Consumer Group. I guess how should we be thinking about what your top priorities are for, you know, your first year in that role, and the biggest areas of investment that you're focused on?
Yeah, there are four really big areas. The first one is the one that we-I just talked about, right?
Sure.
The investment in technology and the transformation and capitalizing on that. Right, we have opportunities in shopping. We actually have opportunities within the flow of the customers that have started with us and don't finish, right? So there's big opportunities there. And our whole Intuit Assist platform is addressing that. We also have a big opportunity to disrupt assisted. And because we're a tech first and a tech-forward service and with the work that we've done over the last year in particular, we've gotten to product-market fit in a assisted category. And so we'll be able to go and serve those 87 million customers that use an assisted service today, in ways that we haven't been able to in the past, which is incredibly exciting for us.
In that, we also have a business tax offering that we have never had before. These technology investments have enabled us actually to create the form sets and build the tax preparation process for business tax. And so we're going to be launching a complete suite of business taxes across the U.S. and Canada, and that's about 12 million potential customers that we've never been able to serve before. So that whole work is incredible. And then the last part, and this is really exciting for us, is our partnership and what we call Better Together with CK, Credit Karma, and TurboTax this year, connecting and serving Credit Karma members-
Mm-hmm
... with a complete suite of financial services, including doing your taxes. Last year, we grew that business 5x. And what we really focused on there was simplifying and removing friction, largely in our identity system, so that customers could move more freely between Credit Karma and TurboTax. And we saw a huge lift, a 5x growth, of customer acquisition. But it's just getting started there, and we'll have a much more embedded experience with Credit Karma customers and serving them in Credit Karma with our full suite of product offerings across TurboTax.
Okay.
Yeah, and so those are, those are three really big areas. The fourth one for us is our, our go-to-market opportunities that we have. So, we talked a little bit about this. Sasan talked a little bit about this in the investment day. But local is a very big part of the assisted category, right? 80% + of the assisted customers, right? That 87 million that I mentioned earlier, over 80% of them choose a local pro.
Hmm.
Our Virtual Expert Platform has been, from the beginning, even in its very early days, a local business, right? We've just never leveraged it from a go-to-market perspective, right? So we're within a 10 mi drive for over 80% of the U.S. and Canadian tax-paying and taxpayers.
Sure.
Which means we're more local than anybody. And what that means is we'll be able to actually open up new channels for marketing, like Google Near Me searches, on Google Maps, things like Yelp, where we'll show up as a local provider, right?
Hmm.
Because we have local experts in virtually every market across the country and countries, including Canada. And so that just opens up an opportunity for us to go- to- market in a very different way. We'll also execute very differently. Our matchmaking that we've done in the past has largely been around skills and capabilities and matching those to customer needs. We're still obviously gonna have that. That's a key part of it, but now we're gonna have a local dimension as well, where we'll be able to match our customers with the best-skilled, closest expert to them, which is very, very important for that category, right? That assisted category. It's also how most biz tax , right, small businesses get their taxes done, as well as-
Sure
... that local element.
Okay. No, that makes sense. If we could just dive in, I guess, a little bit more on the Live opportunity-
Mm-hmm
... because, you know, as you mentioned earlier, you did primarily drive that creation and that. So I guess, what was, like, the key insight that you saw that then led to TurboTax Live? And then how do you view kind of the market opportunity evolving, and how are you attracting those Live-specific customers-
Mm
... that might have been going into a local tax professional before to TurboTax Live now?
Yeah, you know, about six years ago, we launched something called SmartLook. This was a scrappy little team, where we were looking at, "How can we bridge the digital divide between software and services?
Mm-hmm.
And it was largely... I know it sounds funny now, given kind of how we all operate, but it was basically a video-based interaction, embedded within our product, connecting customers to our experts via video and screen sharing channels. It's, like, very normal now, you know, with Zoom and everything, but six years ago it was very novel. Our first iterations of that were not great in terms of experience, 'cause the technology wasn't quite ready. But when it worked, what we heard from customers was, "Wow, this is like having an expert in my kitchen, sitting at my kitchen table, helping me.
Mm-hmm.
It was like: Whoa, that's an opportunity for us, right? It really does create this depth in software that we didn't have before. So we figured out the technology components thanks to an amazing tech team that we have at Intuit and our CTO organization. But we figured that out, and we started to scale that, and what we found was we have an opportunity to create a service for the first time, right? Where it's a customer doesn't have to be alone, and we bridged that digital divide. It's not the same as picking up the phone and talking to somebody.
That's like a call center, kind of work, and that's great, but, this depth that we created with, this video, capability was groundbreaking for us, and that's when we said, "You know what? We can start to disrupt, assisted, and we're gonna need to," right? 'Cause you could see, you know, there's still secular trends that we're very excited about in the DIY space.
Mm-hmm.
But the real growth opportunity for us is in assisted. And that was kind of the product that launched it all, and the capability. We called it SmartLook. That was an internal name. We never productized it, right? Until we got to a point where we said, "We can actually put CPAs, enrolled agents, behind this service, and we can start delivering a new way of delivering assisted services," which we deployed in TurboTax Live five years ago.
Mm-hmm.
And it grew, and it took off. And, it was really an experience that bridged software and humans, and it was kind of a, what we call a do-it-with-me solution. That's largely what we started with. About two, two and a half years ago, we started with Full Service , where people could drop off, their, you know... virtually drop off all their documents, and we'd do their, their taxes for them. This year, our Full Service product, got product/market fit, right?
Mm.
So we've been working on it for about two, two and a half years. We've been working on product-market fit , right, meaning our customers loved what we did. This year was a big breakthrough for us. We got the highest product recommendation score in the company, at an 84, with a Full Service offering, and we were able to do it in a little over two hours for customers, right? Which is also groundbreaking. You know, I shared this story in one of the reviews. At 9:00 A.M. on April 18th, one of our very last Full Service tax returns that we did was a police officer that was pulling somebody over.
And he called us from the squad car, and we got his taxes done in about a half hour, and then he went and took care of the return. No one can do that, right? It was a Full Service. We downloaded all the documents, we did all the work for him, and then we reviewed the return. That's like... That was like, that was a really fun moment for us, but also just reiterated, like, the amount of innovation that we've developed and how we can actually reach new customers in very unique ways, and in ways that don't make them get up and take time out of their schedule.
Mm.
Right? They could literally, right, in this case, right, you could just operate in, within your time and when you have time.
Sure.
And so, we're really excited about the Full Service opportunity now going forward. We did that not quite as a pilot. It was generally available, but we controlled our funnel there because we really wanted to get ensure we had product-market fit , achieve that great breakthrough in terms of innovation and experiences for customers, and now next year it's a big part of our portfolio, and it's going to be a big part of our growth engine for the next few years to come.
Sure. So yeah, do your taxes from a cop car now.
I know, huh?
Yeah.
That sounds like an ad campaign, doesn't it?
Yeah. I don't know, it's an ad campaign I want to be a part of. Yeah, I understand that.
It depends on which side.
Yeah, I guess so. That brings up an interesting point, though, with, you know, Live and, and the Full Service capabilities and, and now going into Business Tax. I guess, how are you viewing where customers are, are going to be coming from that are going to be using the Live and Full Service capabilities? Like, is this, is this primarily people that maybe before would have graduated from TurboTax and then trying to use a Full Service accountancy, or is it trying to drive the, you know, H&R Block of the world and people are using CPAs already to TurboTax? Just how do you think about-
Yeah, so there's obviously, even within our base, right, customers grow and change, and their complexities change, and therefore their requirements change. So we have a big opportunity within our portfolio already, to make sure we graduate customers, even from our free product, right, to an assisted product, and we see that happening today. And so there's a big opportunity for us there. It drives a lot of retention. And so you'll see, Intuit Assist play a big role, in ensuring those customers that are currently in our franchise know that we have these capabilities. In the event that they have a life event, and they think they may need to move because they want an assisted experience, we've got it, and we can help them.
And so that's a big opportunity for us as just natively within our product. We also, as I had mentioned, there's a lot of activity in terms of making tax decisions in this near me local world.
Sure.
That's where we're gonna acquire a lot of our customers, right? Because now we're gonna be there locally for them. What we've seen in the tests that we run is our TurboTax brand is incredibly strong. We actually have data that we look at within our own search parameters, right, where customers are looking for TurboTax near me.
Mm.
And it's not an insignificant number. And so we believe that's just a massive acquisition opportunity for us, right? To be able to say, "We're right there. We're next to you. You don't have to meet with us," right? In fact, many, many assisted customers actually don't meet with their pro physically.
Mm.
They maybe drop off their forms on their doorstep, at their door, right? Or, all their documents, they may, you know, email them, right? So, we actually have an opportunity to create a much more secure environment and also a very local environment. So that's another area where we'll acquire customers. In fact, about 12 million customers every year are searching for a new assisted provider.
Mm.
Right? And almost half of them actually do near me searches, and they're looking for someone close by.
Mm.
Right? So that's, that's a, an acquisition opportunity. The other, area for us from a, a customer acquisition perspective, as I talked about this earlier, is we've got an incredible platform, with Credit Karma members, that don't use TurboTax today. We'll be able to market, to them with these services, but also we're embedding, our tax product directly into QuickBooks. So our QuickBooks customers can not only manage their books, manage their accounting, they can actually, within QuickBooks now, do their business taxes.
Mm.
Right? And so that's another customer base today that has raised their hand and said, "You know what? This is a great way for us to close the loop on compliance in small business," 'cause for a small business, compliance means, at the end of the day, filing accurate taxes. And so that's another acquisition channel for us.
Sure. Yep, we have a question in the middle here.
A broad question about small-
There's a mic coming. Yeah.
Um...
Thank you.
Yeah, just sort of a broad question about small businesses, because you, you know, you said you've offered accounting for a long time. You're now gonna offer taxes. There's so much more you could potentially offer, whether it's payroll, or inventory, or CRM, or-
Mm-hmm
... payments, or I'm sure there's a list of, like, 30 things. How do you decide what to go after and what not to go after?
Yeah.
Just what's the thought process there?
It's a constant question we have internally on prioritization, right? So, we've identified customer problems that we believe that we can address really quite well, both on the consumer side and the small business side. Payroll's one of them. Payments is another. Being compliant is another on the small business side. And so, this is a new-to-the-world offering for us, this biz tax . This is new to the world for us, offering this, and so it was very natural for us to leverage our capabilities. This is one of the biggest transformations that I've seen over the last five years as a company. We're moving to become a platform.
And because we've invested in tax as a platform, and because we've invested in VEP, the incremental lift for us to get to business tax was not nearly as big as it would have been in independent silo capabilities, right? So that's enabled us to move and serve and provide more capabilities and leveraging the same technologies or even processes, right, in the case of biz tax . But we have a thriving payments business. We have $2 trillion worth of invoices that go through our small business platform that we have an opportunity to attach payments to. We have business tax. We're growing our payroll business as well. And then with Mailchimp, we are now helping customers acquire customers.
We're helping small businesses acquire and manage their customer base with Mailchimp. And so all of those have been either recent acquisitions or recent deployments for the most part of capabilities. But what I will tell you is to go back to Intuit Assist, when you, when you're able to see what small business is doing with Intuit Assist, it's a massive connector to all of those capabilities because we know and have information on that customer, right? On the attributes of that small business, and whether they're attaching payments or not, we will know that, and we will offer it, and we will do it for them, right? On an invoice, as an example. That's a major, major unlock. There's the managing cash flow through Intuit Assist, right?
With providing insights and action to do it for them, right? So if you're running low on cash flow, and we're projecting that through our platform, you can actually click a button, and you'll be able to send out invoices and reminders to customers so that you can manage your cash flow proactively, right? So it's really... What's amazing about Intuit Assist is it's the great equalizer for us, right? And it starts to use the data and information in very, very intelligent ways to solve those customer problems, and we believe will unlock a lot more adoption of our capabilities, like payments, like payroll, like biz tax , as well.
Good question. Right here.
Mark, can you just talk us through one or two examples of where you've kind of fly-wheeled Mailchimp and QuickBooks? Because there was quite a bit of talk about, integrating those two and that you really sort of help your customers acquire either more business and upsell out of their existing... what you see in the existing financial data in QuickBooks or, just to be able to drive that CRM capability. Just some one or two granular examples of where that's worked.
Yeah, it's an area that I'm involved in, but not directly, right? I'm on the CG side. But what I can tell you from a Mailchimp perspective is, one, there's a lot of investment going into the core product itself to do more for customers, especially with generative AI, right? Like creating campaigns, managing campaigns, creating content. In terms of the integration between QuickBooks and Mailchimp, that's work that's going on right now to drive data integration to be able to cross-sell and upsell, and is an area where we also believe Intuit Assist is gonna help us as well, right? Because we'll be able to identify whether they're using it or not, which platforms they're using to get customers and manage customers, and we'll be able to deploy those.
In terms of, like, there is a CRM capability that I know the Mailchimp team is deploying over the next year. I don't have all the details on that, but they're leaning into also the CRM space and tying that all together with the customer management. One of the things we do know is that in QuickBooks, a lot of customers use QuickBooks to manage their customer lists and management of their customer relationship. With Mailchimp, that's obviously a much better solution and the teams are working through that data integration and identity, right? It's amazing how much identity plays, right? When you have two different identity systems, it's very hard to integrate.
That's now been fixed. That's now been connected as part of the acquisition, and so there's gonna be a lot more unlock there.
Okay, maybe kind of on a similar line of thought, you know, you did drive the Live idea. Live is being pushed into TurboTax or into Mailchimp and QuickBooks and that part of the business. I guess what are the learnings from, you know, TurboTax Live that can be applied to, you know, into the QuickBooks part of the ecosystem, and, you know, how should we think about how early that opportunity is within that specific product set?
Yeah. It's, it's very, very early on the, on the Mailchimp side.
Yeah.
What we focused on in Mailchimp is largely on onboarding.
Yeah
... and unlocking all of the capabilities for customers through our expert platform of the Mailchimp platform. And so that's really where our effort has been, and now we're exploring how we bring in more marketing agencies into help customers manage campaigns, write content, et cetera. But that's very, very early stages. On QuickBooks, we decided, when we launched QuickBooks Live, to lead with a Full Service offering.
Mm-hmm.
We are now rolling out a, what we call Do It With Me, right? Where you have access to a CPA or a bookkeeper on demand, much like we have with TurboTax, so we're rounding out our portfolio. That's our learning, is that customers really want the security of being able to on-demand connect with a real expert in this case, in bookkeeping.
Mm-hmm.
And we're seeing very early success signals on our Do It With Me solution, and we're still growing our Do It For Me. But that's a longer runway and a more difficult platform to solve for small businesses. So, we're all in both of those, we're in very, very early stages of launching and perfecting the QuickBooks Live experience.
Okay. Maybe in the last few minutes here, we can talk a little bit about the outlook for the Consumer Group for-
Mm
... for this next year. Yeah, I guess how should we be thinking about, you know, what it means to be conservative and prudent when it comes to the guide you're giving here? And I guess, how should we be thinking about the puts and takes of, you know, Live coming in, kind of where the tax base is for this year, how business tax could come in and augment that as well? Just, yeah, how should we be thinking about that?
Yeah, so, we're coming off of, kind of an unprecedented, two years basically of stimulus right through the pandemic. And it was largely connected to the tax system, right? So you had to file, you had to file a return in order to get credits, right? Whether it's earned income, credits, et cetera. All of that now is out of the system, and when we looked back over a 35-year horizon actually, there were two moments where, kind of post-recession, where there was a two-year drop, in the IRS overall category.
Mm.
One was in post the 2008 financial crisis, right? And the stimulus that we put in there. For two years after that, we had seen IRS decline. The 2020, 2021 pandemic required a lot of stimulus. A lot of it was generated through the tax process. That's now out of the system as well. And over the last past two years, right, we've seen the IRS decline. We've never seen in our data the IRS decline three years in a row. There's only been two other... You know, these are the only two times that we've seen IRS category shrink in successive years, was after 2008 and then after 2020. And so that, we believe, is out of the system now.
We're being prudent in how we think about the future, because we are deploying new technologies, like in Intuit Assist. We're opening up our funnel for assisted and going after the assisted category in a much more aggressive way, and we're implementing this concept of local. And so we just wanna be prudent in how we think about, one, what's gonna happen at the IRS, right? And we're thinking about it as a flat IRS category year-over-year. That's just smart for us to do because we just wanna make sure that we can meet our commitments to y'all, but also plan for customer growth through our innovation and through our new markets like biz tax .
Now, Biz Tax, while we ran experiments this year, and we actually served customers through our Biz Tax platform, it's still year one of the product coming out.
Mm.
Actually, this was kind of a year zero, this year, where we wanted to get the product-market fit . And we got to that, and now we're going to go much, much bigger, in that and offer it through, but we don't have huge expectations around that, this next year. But it's certainly an area where, we believe there's future growth, beyond, what we do. We have to learn how to market to small businesses. We have to learn about their buying patterns and when, they shop for their tax solutions. We need to learn about the integration with QuickBooks and what that means, for QuickBooks. And so that's what being prudent means for us. We've got...
We're coming off of two very unique tax seasons that were on top of two unique tax seasons before. And so we just wanna make sure that that's flushed out of the system, and we don't wanna count on a return of category growth yet. And we've got a lot of new innovation that needs to pay out. We have green shoots there, like I'd mentioned. PRS score is highest in the group, but there's a lot for us to go prove, and we wanna prove it to y'all.
Awesome. No, sounds like, sounds like a plan. So I think we're running up against time here. I appreciate everyone being here.
Thank you.
Mark, wanna thank you so much-
Thanks
... for being here as well.
Thank you.