Ivan Lazarov has a pragmatic but visionary approach to keeping innovation at the forefront—one that comes down to continual learning, experimentation, and a willingness to explore the art of the possible.

As vice president of technology, he is driving the How Intuit Works initiative to transform all of Intuit’s workforce processes by incorporating AI. The objective? Maximize and accelerate productivity across product development and business teams, and deliver increased velocity, value, and efficiency gains across the organization. 

But, as Lazarov emphasizes, mere efficiency is just AI table stakes. The real objective is to fundamentally rethink products, redefine business processes, and reshape the future of work. Bain’s Ann Bosche and Jue Wang, partners in our Technology practice, recently sat down with him to discuss the pivotal contribution of AI to Intuit’s workforce of the future.

Q: How has Intuit approached its AI journey?

Lazarov: We began investing heavily in AI talent, AI research, and AI product and platform capabilities more than seven years ago. We’ve been exploring how to deeply embed AI into our offerings, resulting in about 60 billion daily machine learning predictions, while leveraging generative and agentic AI to deliver done-for-you experiences for our customers. Simultaneously, we’ve been focused on combining human expertise with AI to provide customers with personalized recommendations and reduced call times.

These efforts have created significant synergy and convergence, particularly with the emergence of generative AI. This has notably enabled agentic workflows in product experiences, where AI can provide automated insights and autonomously make decisions and take actions. In July 2025, Intuit released a virtual team of AI agents for QuickBooks Online to automate tasks, provide insights, and simplify work for businesses. This laid the foundation for at-scale customer efficiencies and largely advanced our mission to power prosperity worldwide through an AI-driven expert platform. In November 2025, we released additional AI agents and made all of them available across the globe in 13 languages. We have also enabled AI agents in our TurboTax and Credit Karma product lines.

But we’re not just innovating with AI in our products; we’re also leveraging AI in internal processes and execution to boost productivity and accelerate employee innovation. We’ve established a center of excellence (CoE) with dedicated resources to drive the transformation. Leveraging a playbook from Bain, we’ve identified key enterprise roles that have the highest acceleration potential. We’ve established functional teams with accountable leaders and dedicated investments. As a result, we’ve tested multiple use cases across product development, marketing, sales, and customer success, and are already measuring business and enterprise outcomes at the executive level. Our rapid learning and proactive approach have driven these wins, helping us stay ahead of this fast-evolving technology.

Q: How are you guiding Intuit teams to set ambitious goals for leveraging generative AI?

Lazarov: We’ve asked teams to think about AI at three levels. Level one is what you believe is achievable and you’re comfortable committing to a roadmap, with the understanding that you will be held accountable for delivering it in a finite timeline. 

Level two is the aspirational goal, things that don’t look achievable right now but that people are open to exploring. Since technology will rapidly evolve, this requires making some near-term assumptions that we can deliver in a flexible timeline. 

Level three is big and audacious. What would you do if you had a magic wand, if you could imagine the future, and nothing is stopping you? What would it look like, and how much efficiency would you gain? How would it massively transform the business to a point where going backward is unimaginable?

In some cases, I say, “Tell me the audacious ambition, and then let’s take it down a notch.” Bain has well prepared us to be bold as a center of excellence, so our teams are unafraid to dream and innovate without losing sight of the deliverables and locking in the iterative gains.

Q: Has early success with generative AI impacted development metrics?

Lazarov: Absolutely. It is already showing a very healthy impact on development metrics, with a more than 40% velocity increase and 39% more code produced per developer compared to last year. They are commenting that it feels like having exoskeleton powers to boost their software development. As an example, we recently hosted our biannual event known as Global Engineering Days (GED), where engineers, designers, and product managers pause day-to-day work to prototype new ideas, tackle tech challenges, and innovate customer solutions. This past session, over 50% of submitted projects included gen AI.  

We have similar successes across general-purpose AI tools, with a majority of our workforce choosing to work with AI tools on a regular basis. Using targeted training and communication tactics to promote the value of AI, we have won the hearts and minds of our workforce, and now people are organically taking agency to innovate in their respective roles. Our menu of tools includes Gemini, Glean, and ChatGPT Enterprise, to name a few, allowing employees in every role to become more productive and innovative. We also celebrate individuals and teams using AI in unique and impactful ways by sharing their stories on our AI-focused intranet site. This encourages more people to explore AI’s capabilities, and we’ve further reinforced that behavior change with role-specific AI training, dedicated AI resources, and learning incentives.

Q: How does the People team contribute to Intuit’s AI-driven workforce of the future?

Lazarov: Our People & Places team has been integral. By understanding, internalizing, and strategically aligning on the value of change, they communicate it effectively before implementing new processes, allowing them to drive change at a pace that is at least half a step, if not a full step, ahead. 

As partners on the CoE team, we are reimagining the next iteration of Intuit’s workforce together. We are focusing on proactively identifying and cultivating the mindset shifts essential to maximize the benefits of advanced AI tools—ensuring readiness, not reaction.

Q: Tell us about your employees’ reception of these changes. 

Lazarov: Our technology teams were already well ahead and largely engaged in both adoption of code-assist technologies and building AI within our own products. Not much surprise there.

For our general workforce, we hosted immersive hands-on training sessions for our People & Places, BizOps, Marketing, Finance, and Legal & Privacy teams to inspire them for the transformation ahead. We put AI code-assist tools right in their hands and showed them how easy and powerful it is to solve difficult problems, even for those without a technical background. It demonstrated in real time how quickly AI adoption is reinventing our jobs. 

These were “wow” moments. The reception was incredible, with audience members saying they felt both intimidated and empowered to experiment and do things that they’d never imagined. And that is incredibly impactful, because you cannot simply persuade people to embrace AI. They must convince themselves by seeing it in action and experiencing firsthand the powerful combination of fear and excitement that defines the future.

Q: Tell us about some unexpected use cases. 

Lazarov: We see a trend of nontechnical employees picking up code-assist tools and starting to ideate to build new automated ways to do their jobs. They started learning the tech lingo and recognized the power of platform security, scalability, and quality in ways that were previously reserved only for engineers. We also see a spike of creativity and experimentation across all functions by people simply testing the limits of what is possible and reimagining their day-to-day work. This suggests vast potential for driving both organizational productivity and the speed of innovation.

Q: How will AI change and improve Intuit’s products, services, and workforce? 

Lazarov: We’re seeing waves of maturity with AI. The first wave is just about educating and empowering the workforce—researching faster and better, coding faster and with higher quality, delivering marketing campaigns faster and more effectively, or completing accounting tasks more efficiently and with better insights. AI is absolutely capable of making every job more automated and dramatically more productive, driving better business outcomes.

The second, more significant wave we see is AI becoming adept at understanding and adapting to individual function needs, fundamentally changing how we approach work by building, marketing, and selling products as well as running the Intuit enterprise. AI is poised to seamlessly augment every human in the workforce, embedding itself as a core component of our digital workplace.

Q: What’s next on Intuit’s AI journey? 

Lazarov: The next phase is defined by the recognition that progress is iterative, not instantaneous. We have always embraced the nonlinear nature of innovation, anticipating that both surprises and challenges will be the essential markers along the path to creating a profoundly AI-driven future.

We strategize four to six quarters ahead, anticipating the continuous progress of model performance and planning its seamless incorporation into our tools and employee experiences. This proactive approach is underpinned by significant investment in our GenOS capabilities, which will dramatically accelerate the time to market for our key customer offerings. We are adopting a “high velocity” mindset to ensure we can fully capitalize on AI and achieve truly transformative results.

Ultimately, we must be audacious enough to envision the impossible and bold enough to build it.