Financial software giant Intuit is adding a customer-facing AI assistant to work with individuals and small businesses. Intuit Assist is being integrated across Intuit products starting with TurboTax and expanding to QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp. Assist will be embedded across Intuit’s products via a common user interface, allowing customers to get personalized recommendations via contextual datasets. The generative AI assistant was built using Intuit’s Generative AI Operating System, a proprietary corporate model dubbed GenOS, launched in June. Intuit is working with OpenAI to accelerate GenAI app development on GenOS.

According to VentureBeat, Intuit Assist “can understand natural language queries and respond in clear sentences, but is also built to ensure accurate answers based on real data, and is not susceptible to the ‘hallucination’ challenges seen in other generative AI bots,” including Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Assist will also be able to automate routine Intuit program functions that typically require human attention, such as invoicing and conceiving and implementing marketing campaigns, as detailed in a press release.

Intuit has been working on AI integration since 2019, the year Sasan Goodarzi, who previously ran TurboTax and QuickBooks, was elevated to corporate CEO. In an interview with Fortune, Goodarzi said he had a “lightbulb moment” realizing that “building out a platform for our customers to do the work was not actually the future. The future was, it’s done for you.”

Putting AI at the center of Intuit’s business involved “two major acquisitions costing $20 billion in total, firing hundreds of employees, and investing heavily into AI, years before the technology made a blockbuster debut into the public consciousness,” Fortune writes.

TechCrunch says the severed employees had “obsolete skills,” reporting the company “added a similar number of new roles to mark the shift.” The early AI advancements paid off, helping Intuit generate “810 million AI-driven customer interactions per year.”

GenOS “comprises four blocks: GenStudio to interact with large language models, GenRuntime to allow automatic orchestration, GenUX to provide customer-facing applications for user interaction and user flows based on large language models and, finally, large language models themselves, which include both the third-party ones and Intuit’s in-house models,” per TechCrunch.