Does being an early adopter to AI protect a company in an AI-induced market panic?

Apparently not, based on the experience of Intuit, best known for TurboTax and QuickBooks—and the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 as this year opened. It was a twist in fate for the software company: Intuit is a big name in tax and personal accounting software, and its stock is Wall Street royalty, smashing the S&P Index over the company’s 33 years as a publicly traded company. But in January and February, even as tax preparation season began, it took a drubbing in a market scare—the so-called SaaSpocalypse. Investors were suddenly gripped with the fear that AI would annihilate software companies of every kind.

For Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, the stock’s plunge was painfully ironic. Far from being caught off guard by AI, he was an early AI adopter. Years before most CEOs, he made AI a centerpiece of his company’s strategy, seeing it as a powerful tool, not a competitor. He told Fortune in 2020: “In five to ten years, undisputed, it will be as powerful as the impact of electricity and the internet.”

And he didn’t just talk the talk: That same year, Goodarzi laid off 715 employees—unprecedented at Intuit—and hired some 700 new employees who could advance AI throughout the company. Those moves made Intuit a leading-edge business model in the AI era—a high-profile example of how to go all-in on AI and simultaneously all-in on humans. The company’s example was seen by many as a portent of the AI future.

That reputation offered little protection during the SaaSpocalypse: Indeed, Intuit was the stock investors hammered most ferociously. “We got sold even more [than others] in the first six weeks of the year because we were trading so much better than our peer companies,” Goodarzi says. As the stock plunged, Intuit couldn’t fully respond to investors because a company quarter was closing at the end of January, so it had to observe the normal silent period.

Intuit’s stock price has rebounded partially to around $350 at publication time, with a valuation of shy of $100 billion—nowhere near its 2025 year-end level and less than half its all-time high of just over $220 billion, reached last summer. Many investors still think it’s only a matter of time until the major AI companies—OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, Perplexity—steamroll all companies that sell software-based services.

Intuit’s strategy, which has delivered double-digit annual growth over the past five years, is built not just on AI, but also on the ancient, deep-seated magic of human interaction, Goodarzi says: It has “combined software and people into one.”

Born in Tehran and sent to a New Jersey boarding school at age nine, Goodarzi joined Intuit in 2004 and rose quickly. Along the way, he was put in charge of the company’s biggest businesses, TurboTax and QuickBooks. When CEO Brad Smith handed off the job to him after his own highly successful run, he said, “Sasan is better prepared to be CEO than I was 11 years ago.”

On his way up, Goodarzi had three insights that formed his strategy as CEO. They are:

“People don’t want to do anything that has to do with their money. They want us to do it for them.” For consumers and owners of small and medium businesses, wrong financial decisions can be ruinously expensive. Most people need help avoiding these: They don’t want to be finance experts; they want to focus on their lives and running their businesses.

“In our category, the spend on experts—tax experts, accounting experts, bookkeepers, auditors—is 7x what it is on software.” The company’s customers liked Intuit software but didn’t think it was enough. Intuit’s software-based strategy wasn’t playing where the real money is. They also needed experts, whom they had to find by themselves.

“People don’t buy software. They buy confidence.” That’s why people were spending so much money on experts: Many customers weren’t fully confident without a human in the picture.

Thus the strategy: In addition to using AI to upgrade the company’s software and improve operations, Intuit offered customers the option of bringing humans into the picture, at a range of price points. Those humans are live, U.S.-based professionals including CPAs, bookkeepers, lawyers, and other experts who are available via on-screen chat and phone, or one-way video in which experts see customers and guide them through complex scenarios. For business owners, Intuit will even arrange a dedicated bookkeeper.

For Goodarzi to complete his overhaul of Intuit’s strategy, he bought two companies: Credit Karma, for its enormous cache of consumer credit data to combine with Intuit’s taxpayer data, at $8 billion; and Mailchimp, to help QuickBook users build their businesses through online marketing, for $12 billion. Those acquisitions were Intuit’s most expensive by far, almost quadrupling the capital invested in the company—often a red flag. Yet Intuit’s performance improved. “They’ve been able to digest those acquisitions, put them to work, integrate them—that was quite impressive,” says Bennett Stewart, a corporate finance authority. Of Goodarzi he said, “He’s doing a very good job.”

Still, those moves were not enough for the SaaSpocalypse to spare Intuit. Goodarzi’s job now is to stay focused on the business, which means pushing past the stock price and confronting the fear that ignited the sell-off—that the leading AI companies will eat software makers.

“The big question with this massive technological transformation is, who will own the customer interaction layer?” he says. “Is it going to come down to a few companies like Google Gemini, Anthropic, Open AI?” He is intent on preventing that from happening. Intuit, as a heavy user of AI, has made deals with Open AI and Anthropic, and “it’s in the contract,” Goodarzi says, “we own the customer experience and the customer relationship.”

Investors remain leery. But Intuit is performing well by financial measures, and Wall Street analysts overwhelmingly rate it “buy” or “strong buy.”

The next few years will show the results of Intuit’s pioneering AI-plus-humans experiment. Whatever happens, Sasan Goodarzi owns it.