Companies Have An Obligation To Help Customers By Deploying AI & ML Within User Interfaces

Collecting a ton of personal information from customers means application designers have an obligation to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to make products easier to use. It's the human thing to do. Yet many companies don’t deploy AI and ML.

When we fail to use data and AI to make our customers’ lives better, we're alienating them. Great products are fabulous marketing. Poor products are an invitation for people to look elsewhere.

For more than two decades, I’ve used QuickBooks to manage my bookkeeping, most recently the QuickBooks Online platform.

QuickBooks Online generally does as promised, allowing me, a non-accountant, to do simple things like create invoices, manage my banking, and manage my expenses.

However, QuickBooks Online is kind of terrible at remembering transactions from one month to the next or at guessing what category to assign a transaction. These are problems that can be solved with AI and ML.

A few examples of how frustrating QuickBooks Online is for me:

• I have paid an outside vendor the same amount via ACH bank transfers every single month for nearly four years. Why the heck doesn’t QuickBooks Online remember the transaction from month to month? It randomly assigns the payment to categories I’ve never used for that vendor.
• In a recent payment via wire transfer to a shipping company, the bank details imported into QuickBooks Online included the word “Cargo”. Instead of being assigned to “postage and delivery” the transaction was randomly posted to “education”.  Similarly, the the detail from my bank for another transaction the same month was listed as “wire transfer fee”. It is obviously a charge and should have been assigned to “bank service fee”, but QuickBooks Online randomly put it into “magazine royalties”. Huh?
• Nearly every month I have at least one GoDaddy charge for the dozens of domains I own. The detail of the bank transaction clearly shows it is from “GoDaddy” but QuickBooks randomly assigned this month’s charge to the “Education” category. I must manually change it each time.

I know these aren’t life changing problems.

However, QuickBooks can make changes. They’ve got millions of customers’ aggregated data to work with to train their AI. With the clever use of AI, QuickBooks could be way more efficient, saving me and their millions of customers’ time.

QuickBooks is using some AI.  Intuit Assist is “the new financial assistant that will use the power of generative AI (GenAI) to give you intelligent and personalized recommendations. It will do the hard work for you to fuel your small business and personal financial success.”  So far, Intuit Assist seems to just power a natural language search of QuickBooks data. They need to do more.

If you are creating products and services that can benefit customers by deploying AI, you have an obligation to do so.

Note: The new 9th edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, my international bestseller, will be published on August 20. In it, I have a brand new chapter on Artificial Intelligence for marketing and PR.