TurboTax in ChatGPT & Claude

Customers were already doing their taxes in ChatGPT. We needed to be there.

When OpenAI launched its Apps SDK in October 2025, it wasn't just a new distribution channel. It was a signal that the "doing" use case in AI platforms had arrived. Customers were already asking ChatGPT for tax guidance, refund estimates, and filing advice. The question was whether TurboTax would be present at that moment of intent, or invisible.

Orders came from the top: move fast. With hundreds of millions of weekly users on these platforms and consumer behavior shifting toward completing real tasks inside AI interfaces, waiting wasn't an option.

Design led first. Then pulled the org behind it.

Before a single line of code, design moved. Working across design leadership, the team built a portfolio-spanning point of view: a suite of features showing what TurboTax could uniquely do inside ChatGPT, from refund estimates without authentication to expert connections to tax prep checklists. We took those concepts to our GM and a group of VPs and SVPs to galvanize the org and create runway.

The timing created real pressure. We were mid-season delivery when this landed, so a grassroots cross-team was formed to run both tracks in parallel. We advocated to leadership for dedicated headcount focused solely on this initiative, and hired an AI Design leader empowered as our AI Incubation lead, with the mandate to become our subject matter expert on GPT and Claude, from design systems to the technical layer. Code was his primary medium.

The process with ChatGPT was genuinely new for everyone, including OpenAI. We were learning alongside them, which made the collaboration unusual but also gave us real influence over how the patterns evolved.

Built once. Adapted for each platform's language.

The technical foundation was MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools and actions. One core build, deployed across both ChatGPT and Claude. What changed between platforms wasn't the functionality, it was the design language.

Claude's design team pushed back on images, feeling they read as ads inside a conversational interface. So for Claude, we adapted to icons. It was a small change that reflected a bigger principle: these aren't ports, they're platform-native experiences. Respecting how each host platform thinks about its own product made the TurboTax integration feel like it belonged there.

Four features shipped in the ChatGPT app: a refund estimate that works without requiring authentication, filing options to guide users toward the right product, expert connect to book a live tax professional, and a tax prep checklist to help customers get organized before they start filing.

Post-launch customer learnings

How might we deliver something fundamentally different that only TurboTax can do?

Users are already prepping their taxes inside ChatGPT and Claude: building checklists, organizing documents, asking questions. But when it comes time to actually file, re-entry is fully manual. Every answer, every document, every decision has to be entered again from scratch. And no conversational AI is an IRS-authorized e-file provider.

The hypothesis is straightforward: if TurboTax lives inside the AI prep workflow from the start, we own the full journey. Documents and data staged in the conversation carry directly into TurboTax. Users who arrive pre-loaded skip the friction that causes drop-off. And the conversion data already suggests that high-intent users who find us in these environments convert at a higher rate.

TurboTax is uniquely positioned to close this loop. IRS-authorized and AI-native, with the tax engine and data advantage no AI platform can replicate. The gap between "AI helped me prep" and "I filed" is ours to own. No AI can file. No tax product owns the prep workflow. Yet.