Is OpenAI Coming for Intuit Next?

Earlier this month, OpenAI started rolling out a personal finance experience inside ChatGPT for its Pro subscribers in the U.S. Once users connect their financial accounts, the chatbot can display a dashboard of their spending and upcoming payments and answer questions grounded in their own data. OpenAI says more than 200 million people already bring financial questions to ChatGPT every month, so the feature mostly formalizes behavior that was already happening.

That lands uncomfortably close to Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU), the financial software company behind TurboTax and Credit Karma. For more than a year, investors have worried that generative AI could chip away at exactly these kinds of products, and that fear has helped cut Intuit's stock roughly in half in 2026. A consumer finance assistant built directly into the most popular AI app makes the threat feel more concrete.

But the picture is messier than a clean rivalry.

Tucked into OpenAI's announcement was a note that Intuit support is 'coming soon' to this very feature. And last November, the two companies unveiled a multiyear partnership to build Intuit-powered apps inside ChatGPT, with Intuit agreeing to pay more than $100 million to run OpenAI's models in its own products.

So is OpenAI a competitor here, or a customer? It looks like both.

Image source: Getty Images.

A rival that doubles as a customer

The overlap is real, especially on the consumer side. Credit Karma, Intuit's free money platform, earns its keep by matching people with loans and credit cards as they manage their finances -- close to the job a ChatGPT money dashboard is now angling to do. And TurboTax sits in a category where AI-native tools could eventually walk a simple tax filer through a return.

Intuit's answer is that financial decisions carry consequences a general-purpose chatbot can't easily absorb.

"In our category, accuracy, compliance, security and trust of financial decisions are critical," CEO Sasan Goodarzi said on the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call last week, "given the liability that comes with that."

The idea is that a wrong tax return or payroll filing is not a low-stakes error, and that Intuit's decades of data, paired with human experts, are hard to copy quickly.

The partnership cuts both ways, too. Putting its apps inside ChatGPT could give Intuit a new front door to the hundreds of millions of people already asking the chatbot about money. But leaning on a partner that is simultaneously shipping competing features is not the most comfortable spot, and it hands that partner a close look at how a financial assistant should work.

A solid quarter, a much cheaper stock

For all the disruption talk, the business kept growing. In its fiscal third quarter of 2026 (the period ended April 30, 2026) -- seasonally its biggest, since it captures tax season -- Intuit grew revenue 10% to $8.6 billion and raised its full-year outlook. Management now expects fiscal 2026 non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share of roughly $23.80 to $23.85, representing about 18% growth. The company also kept returning cash, repurchasing $1.6 billion of stock in the quarter -- more than double the year-ago period -- and authorizing another $8 billion.

Look closer, though, and two things stand out.

First, growth is cooling: revenue climbed 17% in the fiscal second quarter (the period ended Jan. 31, 2026) before easing to that 10% pace in fiscal Q3, the slowest expansion since 2024. Second, the CEO was unusually blunt about where Intuit stumbled.

"We lost on price," Goodarzi said of the most price-sensitive do-it-yourself tax filers, those earning under $50,000 a year.

Intuit is leaning instead into TurboTax Live, its assisted product, which it expects to reach 53% of TurboTax revenue this year. That may protect margins, but it also concentrates more growth in assisted filing -- the very niche where AI helpers could eventually press hardest.

Also worth noting, Intuit said it would cut about 17% of its workforce to move faster.

The biggest shift, though, is in the stock. As of this writing, Intuit trades near $310, down more than 50% from where it began 2026 and well off its high near $800 last summer, even as the broader S&P 500 has gained this year. At that level, the shares carry a price-to-earnings ratio of about 19 -- a long way from the multiple in the thirties that Intuit commanded for years. Even more, the stock's forward price-to-earnings ratio is just 12.

The market has quietly stripped away most of the premium it once paid for this business.

Overall, I think Intuit's business will probably keep doing well; its products are deeply embedded, its guidance is drifting higher, and AI still looks as much like a tool it can wield as a threat it has to outlast. But the lower, more conservative valuation premium for the stock could be justified all the same. The next decade may simply be more competitive than the last, with well-funded AI rivals -- a partner like OpenAI among them -- circling the same customers. A company that might have to fight harder to grow shouldn't necessarily trade like one that never will.

Seen that way, Intuit's cheaper stock isn't so much a bargain as a more honest price.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intuit. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.