AI
Our AI-driven expert platform uses AI to solve the most pressing customer problems and deliver awesome experiences. We define artificial intelligence as machine learning, knowledge engineering, and natural language processing. We use this technology to help small businesses, consumers, and self-employed individuals make more money with less work, while giving them complete confidence in their actions and decisions to help power their prosperity.
For example, small businesses struggle with the complexity of payroll, which includes managing complicated overtime laws by industry, state, and job role. Our Knowledge Engine allows us to digitally encode hundreds of overtime compliance regulations and do a check on our customers’ behalf to determine if the amount of overtime they put in is correct. We have been able to double customers’ compliance rates with this feature from 40 percent to 86 percent. We’re also providing an explanation to customers on how the calculation was completed to help build confidence.
AI holds great promise and can help us solve the greatest challenges of our time, like economic inequality, through democratization of financial services. Government investments in AI research and development, education and skills training for a diverse 21st-century workforce, and opportunities for public-private partnership are critical to encourage the next wave of AI innovations and present economic opportunity for all.
While AI holds great promise for our future, we must ensure we continue to innovate responsibly. This is critical to building trust so everyone can continue to prosper from AI technologies. As governments consider AI regulation, we encourage engagement with both impacted individuals and small businesses, who are often at the forefront of AI innovation and/or rely on AI to focus on the growth of their business. This engagement can provide insights to governments that help them craft risk-based regulations that protect consumers while enabling the positive benefits of AI, including the increased adoption of AI by small businesses.
PRIVACY AND DATA
Data is critical to providing our products and services to our customers, and it powers our AI-driven expert platform. We use data and AI to deliver highly personalized insights, recommendations, and experiences in our products that help transform the financial lives of our consumer, small business, and self-employed customers. For example, QuickBooks Capital uses 26 bill transactions and data points to provide loans to small businesses that might not qualify elsewhere.
As the stewards of our customers’ data, we believe that strong privacy and security protections are a key part of the value we deliver to customers, and not just an act of compliance. We will not sell, publish, or share that data without explicit permission. We also know that customers want control over their data. Therefore, we provide all U.S. customers with rights to download, delete, and update their data via our Privacy Center.
Consistent privacy laws are critical to providing clarity to customers about their rights and to help large and small businesses operationalize privacy laws. Yet consumers and businesses face the prospect of a patchwork of state laws. That’s why we support a strong federal consumer privacy law that sets a national standard for consumer rights, transparency, and customer choice to ensure we balance innovation with protections for consumers.