Intuit to lay off 17% of workforce

Intuit will lay off 17% of its workforce. Intuit chairman and CEO Sasan Goodarzi announced the layoffs today in a company-wide message, which was also posted on its blog. The intention is to be a leaner, more agile organization in order to scale its platform, create a unified ecosystem, and grow its presence with mid-market businesses and accounting firms. 

Processing Content

"Over the past several months, we have spent significant time evaluating how we focus the company with greater velocity and discipline to achieve what I outlined above," he said in the message. "We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers' success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure to become a faster, leaner and more focused company. This required us to make a set of difficult decisions that impact our people. Today, we are reducing our full-time workforce by approximately 17%. These are valued colleagues and friends who have been vital to shaping the company we are today. Saying goodbye is never easy, and I want to acknowledge the weight this news carries for all of us."  

This has several implications, organization-wise. For one, Intuit said it intends to streamline its leadership structure after identifying areas where too many organizational layers have inhibited information flow and slowed decision-making. This simplified structure will have less need for coordination-heavy roles that were needed to manage complexity. As part of this simplification, Intuit will also be reducing overlap and eliminating redundant roles between the TurboTax and Credit Karma teams so they can operate as a single unified team and platform. 

goodarzi-sasan-intuit.jpg
Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The company is also planning to co-locate teams within strategic hubs to drive more collaboration, which involves winding down its Reno and Woodland Hills offices as well as reducing its presence in other locations. An Intuit spokesperson added further context by saying their site strategy is to grow and maintain the company's footprint in geographies that give them access to top, diverse technical talent and ensure teams are co-located so that they can operate with speed.

Further, it will be reducing investment in certain areas such as Mailchimp, as well as reworking its engineering and product organizations to better align with its long-term goals. 

"These changes are a necessary evolution to reduce complexity and architect an organization that operates with the velocity required to fuel our growth engines," said Goodarzi. "We are fundamentally re-engineering our operating model to increase accountability, accelerate decision making, and ensure our execution is as bold as our strategy."

The blog said U.S. employees will get 16 weeks of base pay as well as two additional weeks for every year at Intuit, plus a paid transition period, including July restricted stock unit vesting and bonus eligibility, before they leave the company with a last day of July 31, 2026. Employees outside the U.S. will receive a country-specific package, based on local requirements. The company will maintain employee health insurance coverage for at least six months, as well as access to mental health support, plus career transition and job placement services.

The company also pledged to provide immigration support, with an extended transition period to give those on visas more time to find a new job, as well as access to external immigration experts for advice and support at no cost.

Despite the bad news for 17% of the workforce, the CEO remained optimistic about the future. 

"As we look ahead, this is an incredible inflection point for our customers and Intuit. We have navigated many moments of strategic reinvention over our 40-year history, and once again, we are making the deliberate, hard choices required to ignite higher-velocity progress across our Big Bets and play to win in our core business. Our customers have ambitious goals, as do we. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity and a lot of important work ahead of us to power economic growth for those we serve," he said. "What will carry us forward in this moment is what always has: supporting one another, staying deeply connected to our customers, and moving forward with purpose and determination."

The spokesperson added later that while AI is important to how the company is evolving, the decision was not driven by a desire to replace humans with AI. She pointed to Intuit's continued investments in training and development programs to support the effective use of AI.

"We believe the best outcomes for our customers come from combining AI with human expertise, and we're focused on enabling our teams to do both," said the spokesperson.


For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Technology Intuit Layoffs
MORE FROM ACCOUNTING TODAY
Load More