Intuit, the Bay Area software giant known best for TurboTax, Mailchimp and QuickBooks, is laying off 1,800 employees, or 10% of its staff.

The company announced the move in a Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which included an email sent from CEO Sasan Goodarzi to staff. The executive wrote that employees included in the layoff would get calendar invites for a “Leaving Intuit Discussion” by 9 a.m. Wednesday morning.

Intuit’s massive job cut includes 384 employees in Mountain View, where the company is headquartered, and 215 in San Diego, spokesperson Sara Day told SFGATE. As of Wednesday morning, the company has not filed a WARN notice, which California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires in the event of mass layoffs.

Goodarzi’s email, titled “Investing in our future,” outlined his executive team’s reasoning for the layoffs: Intuit is slashing its staff to invest more money in artificial intelligence technology, a rationale cited by Dropbox, Chegg and Google, SFGATE previously reported.

“We do not do layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case,” the Intuit CEO wrote. “The changes we are making today enable us to allocate additional investments to our most critical areas to support our customers and drive growth as detailed below.”

He went on to explain various “Big Bets,” like a generative AI-powered financial assistant, but not before making an odd promise: Goodarzi wrote that Intuit plans to hire around 1,800 new workers after this layoff is complete.

The CEO said that Intuit “significantly raised the bar on our expectations of employee performance, resulting in approximately 1,050 employees leaving the company who are not meeting expectations.” This group makes up the majority of the layoff round; Goodarzi also wrote that Intuit would be cutting 10% of its executives, as well as fully eliminating 300 roles and shutting sites in Edmonton, Canada, and Boise, Idaho, where 250 total workers were based.

He added that the laid-off U.S. employees will leave the company Sept. 9 and receive, at minimum, 16 weeks of severance pay. They’ll also get six months of health insurance.

Goodarzi finished his note by thanking the employees for their work and promising to answer questions in a meeting July 16. He also looked forward, calling Wednesday “Day 1,” and wrote, “we are positioned to take advantage of this AI revolution.”

By 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, laid-off Intuit workers were already posting to LinkedIn to announce the news and put out feelers for new jobs.

Read full article here