Intuit Stock Sinks 12% Despite Earnings Beat as AI Fears Cloud 2027 Guidance

Intuit Inc. shares plunged as much as 12% to about $315 despite beating fiscal fourth-quarter estimates with adjusted earnings of $4.03 per share and revenue of $4.35 billion, up 14% year over year, because the company guided fiscal 2027 revenue growth of just 9% to 10% and first-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.44 to $2.48 per share, far below the $4.02 consensus. Intuit executives cited slowing TurboTax growth, flat-to-down Mailchimp revenue, and shrinking Desktop software, with generative AI tools pressuring its products, as the company pivots to an AI-driven expert platform.

Intuit beat every Wall Street estimate this week, then guided investors to brace for a growth slowdown so sharp the stock got crushed anyway. Intuit beat Wall Street on every number that mattered on Tuesday. Adjusted earnings came in at $4.03 a share for the fiscal fourth quarter, well past the roughly $3.59 analysts had penciled in, and revenue climbed 14% from a year earlier to $4.35 billion, also ahead of estimates. Investors sold the stock anyway. Shares plunged as much as 12% in after-hours and premarket trading, sliding toward $315, because the guidance attached to that beat told a very different story about the year ahead. The company that makes TurboTax and QuickBooks told investors to expect fiscal 2027 revenue growth of just 9% to 10%, translating to $23.28 billion to $23.51 billion in sales. That's a sharp step down from the 14% pace Intuit just posted, and it fell short of what Wall Street had modeled. Worse for anyone watching the near term, Intuit guided first-quarter fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings to a range of $2.44 to $2.48 a share, less than two-thirds of the $4.02 consensus estimate. That's not a miss. That's a different planet. Three businesses are dragging the outlook down, and Intuit's own executives named all of them on the earnings call. TurboTax revenue growth is guided to just 2% to 3% for the coming year, a direct result of the company cutting prices to win back do-it-yourself filers who had drifted to cheaper competitors. Online paying customers grew only 3% year over year in the just-completed quarter, a soft number for a company that has spent years selling investors on customer growth as its core story. Mailchimp, the email marketing platform Intuit bought for roughly $12 billion in 2021, is guided to revenue that's flat to down 1% next year, with rising customer churn only partly offset by price increases. It's becoming its own reportable segment in fiscal 2027, a structural change that reads like management wants a clearer view of just how much trouble it's in. And the Desktop software business, Intuit's oldest product line, keeps shrinking. Behind all three sits a threat the company can no longer wave off: generative AI tools that can now do a version of what TurboTax and basic QuickBooks bookkeeping do, for a lot less money. Intuit framed its response on the call as a bet on becoming what it calls an AI-driven expert platform, building what it terms a financial system of intelligence that increasingly does the work itself for consumers, small businesses and accountants. That's the pitch. But a company doesn't cut its own flagship product's pricing and guide full-year growth down by roughly a third unless it's genuinely worried about what happens if it doesn't. Marvell Stock Rallies 27% in a Month Before Do-or-Die Earnings Thursday https://startupfortune.com/marvell-stock-rallies-27-in-a-month-before-do-or-die-earnings-thursday/ Marvell Technology shares jumped 4.84% on August 25 to close at $240.38, capping a 27% one-month rally as chip stocks rebounded from a Treasury-yield-driven selloff. The real test lands Thursday, August 27, when Marvell reports fiscal second-quarter earnings expected to show revenue growth slowing to 35% from 57.6% a year ago. - marvell stock earnings report Thursday August 27 https://startupfortune.com/marvell-stock-rallies-27-in-a-month-before-do-or-die-earnings-thursday/ - chip stocks rally 27 percent in month https://startupfortune.com/marvell-stock-rallies-27-in-a-month-before-do-or-die-earnings-thursday/ The rest of software sold off with it Intuit didn't fall alone. Adobe dropped about 3% to roughly $266 and ServiceNow slid a similar amount to around $123 in sympathy, according to reporting from 24/7 Wall Street and Yahoo Finance. Neither company reported anything that day. Investors simply read Intuit's guidance as a preview of what AI-driven pricing and product pressure could do to any subscription software business built around tasks a language model can now approximate. In a market where beating last quarter's estimates has stopped being enough, the SaaS names trading on steady, compounding growth are the ones getting punished first when a bellwether admits its growth curve is bending. None of this means TurboTax or QuickBooks are going away. Intuit still has roughly 100 million customers and a distribution advantage that a chatbot doesn't replicate overnight, particularly among small businesses that need actual bookkeeping, payroll and payments infrastructure, not just a tax form filled out. But the company just told its own investors, on the record, that it's cutting prices and accepting weaker near-term profit specifically because the competitive ground under DIY tax prep has shifted. That's not a hypothetical about AI disruption hitting legacy software someday. That's Intuit's own fiscal 2027 guidance, filed this week, saying it's happening now. Fifth consecutive quarter of beating Wall Street on revenue and earnings, and the stock still got hit harder than most misses would produce. That gap, between the quarter Intuit just delivered and the one it says is coming, is the whole story. 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