Intuit to lay off 10% of workforce to focus on AI

Financial and fintech firm Intuit recently announced plans to lay off about 1,800 employees to further pursue the company's artificial intelligence efforts.

This is a restructuring of the company, with approximately 10% of the workforce planned to be laid off. CEO Sasan Gudarzi is said to have emailed 1,050 of those who were fired saying their performance did not meet expectations. Another 300 people were said to have had their positions cancelled.

The era of AI

The layoffs were clearly unrelated to the company's bottom line. Per Goodrzy, “We don't make layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case. The CEO attributed the layoffs to a changing technology landscape and the company's ongoing AI efforts.

But in a possible twist on the theme, the workers will not be replaced by artificial intelligence. Instead, they seem to be replaced by human workers who specialize in AI.

In Intuit's blog post:

“We will hire approximately 1,800 new people, primarily in engineering, product and customer-facing roles such as sales, customer success and marketing.”

The reorganization appears to cost the company between $250 million and $260 million, according to regulatory filings. The company's stock fell about 3.6% on the news.

On social media, the response has been somewhat negative.

Tech expert Dere Obasanjo said the ad was “a reflection of the simultaneous feast and famine that is today's tech industry.” Obasanjo said the company had “branded” the sacked workers by publicly identifying most of the sacked workers.

Under the section of the blog post announcing the layoffs titled “Taking Care of Our People,” Gooderzi wrote:

“We have significantly raised our expectations for employee performance, resulting in approximately 1,050 employees who did not meet company expectations and who we believe would be more successful outside of Intuit.”

The company said it is offering severance packages, 60 days' notice and career transition services and six months of continuing health care benefits to those being laid off.

Related: Intuit Introduces Big Language Models for FinTech Proprietary with GenOS