How to Drive Grassroots AI Innovation? Tap into a Diversity of Ideas

At Intuit, we’re committed to helping small businesses thrive. When a small business gets paid by credit card, the payment may be delayed or prevented if there are signs of fraudulent activity. In the worst-case scenario, a business may not be able to access hard-earned cash to buy equipment or pay employees.

To tackle this challenge, our team launched the QuickFund AI model in QuickBooks Payments to assess risks associated with processing payments to small businesses. By reducing holds on funds, we can facilitate instant deposits. With this innovation, we’ve significantly improved risk detection, allowing Intuit to process an additional $1.5B of invoices over the past 12 months that small businesses can cash out instantly: a win-win for Intuit and our customers.

How did we come up with this solution? We asked our team for ideas.

In fact, this was just one of hundreds of ideas submitted by our employees that have directly and positively impacted our business, and ultimately our customers. That’s because, at Intuit, we recognize that diverse and inclusive teams are the engines of innovation.

We also know that behind every big bold innovation is a cadre of contributors, tweaking and perfecting an inventor’s vision. For example, while Thomas Edison gets credit for inventing the light bulb, a critical element of his bulb, the filament, was created by a young black man named Lewis Latimer.

That’s why we take a grassroots approach to unlocking AI innovation by creating an environment where all innovative ideas are heard.

Each year, we gather innovative ideas and contributions from the entire A2D organization (A2D stands for Analytics, AI and Data). We kick off our yearly planning cycle with a call for innovation papers from all employees — an inclusive approach to planning where employees at all levels have an equal opportunity to participate.

As a result, we get diverse ideas and suggestions for ways to solve customer problems in ways we’d never imagined. In FY22, we received 100+ papers from across the organization, and 53% of those papers influenced our strategy and plans for FY23. The large majority of submissions (74%) came from employees closest to Intuit’s products: individual contributors working across AI and data.

Innovation paper submissions by role type

All papers are read and scored by our senior leadership team. (Intuit Chief Data Officer, Ashok Srivastava, fired up his air fryer for his paper review session earlier this year while munching on warm snacks on a Saturday afternoon).

For the entire organization, it’s energizing and inspiring to see the level of engagement, diverse views and creativity shining through. Best of all, we’ve implemented new data strategies and built new models to drive AI innovation at scale for our 100M+ consumer and small business customers across our product portfolio. All in support of our mission to power prosperity for the people and communities we serve with TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp with our global financial technology platform.

6 steps for driving grassroots innovation

Although this program is focused on AI, data and analytics here at Intuit, the following steps can be applied to any organization at any level to drive an inclusive, grassroots approach to problem-solving where everyone’s ideas are heard.

Step 1: Create the message. Make the call for papers resonate! Explain the process, why it’s important, how the input will be used, and when the papers are due.

Step 2: Create guidelines and a template. Our guidelines state that innovation proposals/papers should be a maximum of 2 pages, and the focus should be on the innovation and ideas rather than a polished paper. We provide an example of a successful, well-written paper from the past. We ask that a director or equivalent review their team’s papers.

Step 3: Create repositories for collecting papers and leader scoring worksheets, with appropriate permissions.

Step 4: Score the papers.

Step 5: Evaluate the ideas against strategy. Once papers are scored, they are evaluated against a set of strategic pillars for relevancy and written into goals.

Step 6: Communicate the results. We hold a global team meeting where we recognize all submitters and announce which papers/ideas have influenced our strategy for the coming year.

Customer obsession. Falling in love with big problems.

At Intuit, our passion for delivering for customers is the backbone of what we do. So, our innovation papers program is just one avenue Intuit uses to generate grassroots ideas of all types from all areas of our company.

For example, Intuit holds Global Engineering Days (GED) twice a year, empowering our technologists (software developers, data scientists, data analysts, ML engineers, etc.) to dedicate a full week to work on projects they’re passionate about.

Especially close to my heart is the Scott Cook Innovation Award, named for and awarded by Intuit’s founder. Each year, the company recognizes examples of breakthroughs that delight our customers, employees, communities, and/or shareholders. We look for innovations of all types from all areas of our company.

I’m proud to have been among the award recipients in 2012. It all started with a light bulb moment. I spent an entire weekend crafting a vision and high-level design to re-imagine a key IT service for which I was responsible. The real magic happened when I pulled together a small, diverse group of employees on Monday to critically review the idea, question my assumptions, and fill in blanks. Together, we reinvented the company’s help desk in ways I never thought possible, transforming it into what is now known as the Intuit TechKnow Bar.

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