CEO Sasan Goodarzi informed staff that the massive headcount reduction was a necessary step in simplifying the tax-software giant’s corporate structure so it can look more like OpenAI.
Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi announced on Wednesday that the tax software giant will lay off roughly 3,000 employees, citing an urgent need to reduce corporate complexity and free up capital to aggressively pretend to be a generative AI startup. In a memo distributed to the newly streamlined workforce, Goodarzi explained that employing thousands of human beings who require salaries, benefits, and office space had become an unacceptable drag on the company’s ability to use the phrase "artificial intelligence" in forward-looking statements.
The restructuring will eliminate layers of middle management, customer support, and product development, replacing the convoluted friction of human labor with the elegant simplicity of announcing new automated features that do not yet exist.
When you look at our balance sheet, the single biggest obstacle to achieving a trillion-dollar valuation is the fact that we still employ people who need to eat.
Vancamp noted that while the outgoing employees had successfully built and maintained TurboTax for years, their organic, carbon-based brains were simply incapable of scaling up investor hype at the speed of a modern neural network. The layoffs are expected to fund a massive internal pivot toward integrating large language models that can confidently invent tax deductions for millions of small business owners.
Wall Street reacted warmly to the mass termination, with Intuit shares rising 3% in early trading. Analysts praised Goodarzi’s decisive leadership, noting that firing 10% of a workforce is currently the most reliable way for legacy software executives to signal to the market that they have read an article about ChatGPT.