Intuit is betting big on artificial intelligence and machine learning as it looks to infuse the technology into its products and customer experiences. As a result, Intuit is hiring flexible thinkers as well as data scientists to deploy AI broadly.
We caught up with Ashok Srivastava[1], senior vice president and chief data officer at Intuit, to talk shop, where machine learning ends and AI begins, and managing a data science team.
Here are some of the highlights.
Ashok Srivastava
How does Intuit utilize AI and machine learning[2]? Srivastava said Intuit looks at AI through a portfolio approach. The areas break down like this:
- Building AI and machine learning into products.
- Customer care to help employees get better information to solve problems. "We are creating augmented intelligence to help get the consumer the right information at the right time and context," Srivastava said. "For something like tax, answering questions requires access to information beyond Intuit."
- Security, risk, and fraud.
- Central data services for HR, sales, and marketing.
- And engineering optimization to make code and systems more robust. "This one is new for us," Srivastava said.
What AI platforms are built versus bought: Intuit is standardizing its machine learning on Amazon Web Services and building a data lake, Srivastava said. "That technology takes you to a certain point, but all the algorithm deployment is done by all team," he said.
(Image: Intuit)
The difference between machine learning and AI: Srivastava said he sees machine learning and AI as an overlapping Venn diagram. AI covers areas of research that can take many years. Machine learning is inclusive