Intuit to cut 10% of workforce amid plans to boost investment in “key growth areas” such as AI
US financial software provider Intuit is set to cut 10% of its workforce – around 1,800 employees – as the company looks to “accelerate our innovation and investments in the areas that are most important to our future success”, according to a note sent to employees on Wednesday by CEO Sasan Goodarzi and shared on the company’s blog page.
Intuit to cut 1,800 jobs
Goodarzi writes that the Californian tech firm, whose subsidiaries include the likes of Credit Karma, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and QuickBooks, has identified the need to increase investment in “key growth areas” including artificial intelligence (AI), amid what he describes as the “AI revolution” and “one of the most significant technology shifts of our lifetime”.
“Today we will be communicating to approximately 1,800 employees, which is 10% of our workforce, that they will be leaving Intuit,” says Goodarzi.
“We do not do layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case,” he adds, saying that “the changes we are making today enable us to allocate additional investments to our most critical areas to support our customers and drive growth”.
In what is being described by Goodarzi as a “critical moment” in the firm’s history, Intuit is set to leverage the funds saved from the job cuts to hire “approximately 1,800 new people primarily in engineering, product, and customer facing roles such as sales, customer success, and marketing” in a bid to enhance Intuit’s range of AI-driven products and services.
“Companies that aren’t prepared to take advantage of this AI revolution will fall behind and, over time, will no longer exist,” writes Goodarzi.
Of the 1,800 employees being let go, whose last day will be 9 September 2024, around 1,050 have been characterised as those “who are not meeting expectations and who we believe will be more successful outside of Intuit”, says Goodarzi.
In addition, the CEO says the number of company execs will decrease by approximately 10%. The firm is also planning to close two of its sites in Edmonton and Boise, which have over 250 workers, “with a certain number of employees relocating to other sites within Intuit or leaving the company”.
Also, the firm intends to consolidate 80 technology roles to “sites where we are strategically growing our technology teams and capabilities”, including New York, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Atlanta, and Bangalore.
