Business Tech News: Intuit Rolls Out Agents For QuickBooks

Forbes

2 days ago

Signage for financial software company Intuit at the company's headquarters in the Silicon Valley ... More town of Mountain View, California, August 24, 2016. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).
Here are five things in tech that happened this week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?
This Week in Business Technolody News
Business Technology News #1 – Intuit introduces ground-breaking virtual team of AI agents to fuel growth for businesses.
Intuit has launched a groundbreaking suite of AI agents embedded in its QuickBooks platform to help businesses automate workflows, gain real-time insights, and improve cash flow. Key features include a Payments Agent that predicts late payments, automates invoicing, and helps businesses get paid up to 5 days faster. An Accounting Agent automates bookkeeping, transaction categorization, and reconciliation for cleaner, more accurate books. The Finance Agent offers KPI analysis, scenario planning, and forecasting to support smarter financial decisions, and a Customer Agent manages leads, drafts emails, schedules meetings, and tracks sales opportunities. This marks a major shift from AI as a background tool to AI agents actively completing tasks on behalf of users while keeping them in control. (Source: Intuit)
Why this is important for your business:
Intuit – like most other major software application providers – has one big challenge. It's not creating and rolling out agents. It's actually getting people to use them! Accounting software users are generally accountants and we accountants are a conservative bunch that doesn't like taking risks or doing things differently. Many of these same users are terrified that the agents will replace their jobs. Business owners should be learning – not relying (yet) – on this AI tech. But also investing in training too.
Business Technology News #2 – The Google for Startups Gemini kit is here.
Google has released its Startups Gemini AI Kit – a free, all-in-one toolkit designed to help startups quickly adopt and scale AI using Google's Gemini models. The kit provides instant access to Gemini API via Google AI Studio, a full-stack development tools like Firebase Studio to build and launch real apps, and up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits through the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Developer resources include the Gemini API Cookbook and extensive documentation. Additionally, developers are offered training & support through Google Cloud Skills Boost, immersive workshops, and live sessions. This initiative is part of Google's broader push to make cutting-edge AI accessible and practical for entrepreneurs. (Source: Google)
Why this is important for your business:
This is great, assuming your startup employs a $150K per year full stack developer. This stuff didn't exist even a year ago and now even the smallest of businesses can take advantage of tools to create their own AI solutions. But just know this isn't something you just download and implement. It's a development project.
Business Technology News #3 – Meta's $14 billion bet on Scale AI: A game-changer for small businesses?
Meta has invested $14.3 billion for a 49 percent stake in Scale AI – a leading data-labeling and AI infrastructure company. CEO Alexandr Wang is joining Meta to lead a new superintelligence lab focused on advanced AI development. Meta's own Llama 4 models underwhelmed developers, so this move aims to boost model performance and close the gap with rivals like OpenAI and Google. (Source: OpenTools)
Why this is important for your business:
Meta says it plans to use this AI boost to power tools that automate ad creation, targeting, and optimization – making advanced marketing more accessible to small businesses, enabling them to run campaigns with minimal effort or expertise.
Business Technology News #4 – Amazon deploys its millionth robot.
Amazon has just hit a major milestone in automation: it's deployed its one millionth robot in a fulfillment center in Japan. The company has launched a new generative AI model called DeepFleet, which acts like a smart traffic system for robots – improving their route efficiency by 10 percent – helping to speed up deliveries and reduce costs. Robots now assist with 75 percent of Amazon's global deliveries. The company has upskilled over 700,000 employees through training programs as it moves toward a future where robots and humans work side by side, with AI driving smarter logistics. (Source: Newser)
Why this is important for your business:
It's not just robots. Amazon is leveraging AI and doing a bunch of other things that business owners should care about.
Business Technology News #5 – Are AI chatbots replacing search engines?
OneLittleWeb published its study comparing AI chatbots vs. search engines over a 24-month period. They found that AI chatbots grew 80.92 percent year-over-year, reaching 55.2 billion visits between April 2024 and March 2025. Search engines saw a slight decline of 0.51% in the same period, totaling 1.86 trillion visits. Despite this growth, chatbots still receive 34 times fewer visits than search engines. The study also included implications for SEO indicating that it remains a major factor in search results and AI-generated answers. Though blogs may decline in relevance, new platforms will create fresh SEO opportunities. The bottom line is AI chatbots are rising fast, but search engines remain the dominant gateway to the web for now. (Source: OneLittleWeb)
Why this is important for your business:
This is an important report to read, particularly if your business relies on online advertising. Clearly, the money is still with search and that looks to stay the same for at least the next year or two. But I'm expecting AI chatbots to significant eat into this market share over time.
Each week I round up five business technology news stories and explain why they're important for your business. If you have any interesting stories, please post to my X account @genemarks