Intuit thinks it’s found your company’s next CFO: AI

Alex Balazs has spent more than two decades inside Intuit, starting as an engineer working on early versions of QuickBooks Online, when moving financial workflows to the internet still felt experimental. Now, as CTO, he is helping lead a more radical shift: turning financial software into systems that can think and act on a user’s behalf. “This combines the speed and scale of AI with human judgment and accountability,” he tells Fast Company. For decades, financial software has functioned as a ledger, categorizing transactions and generating reports about what has already happened. That model is beginning to break. Advances in AI are pushing the category toward real-time interpretation and action, with software that can execute tasks and manage workflows rather than simply record them. The shift introduces a core tension. Financial systems demand precision, accountability, and auditability. AI systems operate probabilistically, producing outputs based on likelihood rather th