With tech talent in short supply, a recent report by Deloitte highlights that tech leaders have an opportunity to “reimagine the workforce and workplace to focus on the skills – both human and technical” and tap into employee experiences designed to elevate the talent they already have in place. But how does an organization in today’s evolving world of work not only attract talent, but effectively unleash their skill sets to the benefit of their customers?
One example can be found in Intuit’s bi-annual Global Engineering Days (GED).
Twice a year, Intuit—the company behind products like TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp—gives its engineering community a week of uninterrupted time to work together across sites and teams to expand their skills and ensure the company continues to deliver on its promise to power prosperity for millions of customers.
The week-long event is essential to the growth and innovation that underpins the leading AI-driven global technology platform’s engineering culture. Engineers around the world—from Bangalore and Tel Aviv to Toronto, Edmonton, and Mountain View—step away from their day-to-day work to create new features and tools to better deliver for more than 100 million consumer and small business customers.
“The goal is to empower our people to choose their own innovation adventure, and through that experience, take advantage of a unique opportunity to expand the horizons of their skill set,” said David Marquis, vice president and country manager, Intuit. “As new technologies bring about changes to how we work—such as low code no code—softer skills like creativity are becoming more important, and this event is an essential aspect of how we help and encourage our technologists to get creative, take big swings, and solve complex customer problems.”
Marquis added that the event isn’t simply a hack-a-thon or innovation competition— the goal is to hone skill sets and improve the experiences, big and small, that customers have on the platform.
“Many GED projects actually make it into production, reaching our customers and helping them to better manage their finances. In fact, of Intuit’s more than 2,400 patents worldwide, many originated from GED, which is something our teams are very proud of” said Marquis.
Generative AI takes center stage
Since the last GED, held in November 2022, the rise of generative AI (GenAI) has permanently redrawn the boundaries of the technology landscape globally. For GED Spring 2023, Intuit launched GenStudio, a dedicated internal development environment, enabling rapid experimentation with GenAI for hundreds of projects throughout the week.
Over the course of the week, Intuit technologists found creative ways to apply GenAI for a number of use cases.
“We’ve been experimenting with GenAI for years and have only deployed it in a limited number of use cases to ensure that experts and customers have the best experience possible,” added Marquis. “We’re excited about the game-changing potential, and we’re moving quickly to enable our teams to build more GenAI tools on our platform to continue creating personalized experiences that inspire the trust and confidence our customers count on.”
Following GED, Intuit announced an expansion of its platform architecture to include a proprietary Generative AI operating system (GenOS) with custom-trained financial large language models (LLMs) that specialize in solving tax, accounting, marketing, cash flow, and personal finance challenges.
The operating system is designed to empower Intuit technologists to design, build and deploy breakthrough generative AI experiences with speed and at scale, with the goal of solving customers’ most important financial problems while driving durable growth for the company.
“Our top talent and AI platform architecture have reinforced our long-standing leadership position in fintech. Given the depth of our customer data, this proprietary platform expands upon that competitive advantage, while creating another pathway for us to evolve as technologists and unlock new opportunities to serve our customers,” said Marquis.
