Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi on the company’s evolving AI strategy and his best leadership advice; healthcare work propels strong U.S. jobs growth; plus, Bill Ackman's big bet on Meta.

Good morning, CFOs. The Morning Ledger this week is putting the spotlight on tech and AI, including a look in yesterday’s newsletter about how Coach owner Tapestry’s CFO thinks about artificial intelligence—and how the fashion brand is using AI to be more efficient.

Keeping with that theme, Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit, joined our colleagues yesterday at the WSJ Technology Council Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., where Goodarzi spoke with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray about Intuit’s evolving AI strategy and his philosophy about leadership and driving change at the company that owns TurboTax and QuickBooks.

More on the CEO here and below are some takeaways CFOs may find useful from that conversation with Goodarzi. Edited excerpts follow:

On investing in AI (and building a company with AI and human intelligence):

Goodarzi: We said years ago that AI was going to be bigger than what electricity sparked, and what the internet sparked. I mean, we couldn't imagine what life would be like if we didn't have the internet today.

On CIO-CEO leadership collaboration (and what he learned from being a CIO first):

Goodarzi: So I wasn't qualified to be a CIO, but it was probably by far the best job that I ever had because I learned how to influence across the company. Because the most important and hardest leadership skill is, how do you influence when you don't have quote unquote “control”?

Best advice for driving change?

Goodarzi: You have to have alignment with the CEO, and you have to have alignment with the leadership team…It's not a CIO-CTO thing only. It's the CEO getting everybody aligned.

So my advice would be: Make sure that you've done your job to be clear about what has to happen and why, for the company to win, to deliver for customers, to reinvent the work internally.

Also, keep the focus squarely on the customer:

Goodarzi: What we declared more than seven years ago was that we were going to become a service company. So what does that mean? A service company means that the essence of what we said is we're going to deliver experiences that are done for customers. We're going to help manage your credit, your wealth, your taxes for you as a consumer.

[S]ociety is getting so wrapped around AI. I want to make sure at least on our end, we don't lose sight of what we're trying to do.

🏈 Bonus question: Do Super Bowl ads pay off?

Goodarzi: We've been running Super Bowl ads for probably 12 to 13 years, and we fine-tuned not just what you do, but how you follow through on it, and so they do, they do absolutely pay off.

Read on below for more details on C-suite leadership and health.

📆 Earnings: Airbnb, American Electric Power, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Applied Materials, Arista Networks, Baxter International, British American Tobacco, CBRE Group, Coinbase Global, DexCom, Entergy, Eversource Energy, Exelon, Expedia Group, Howmet Aerospace, Ingersoll Rand, Iron Mountain, Kimco Realty, PG&E, Public Storage, Tyler Technologies, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, West Pharmaceutical Services, Wynn Resorts, Zebra Technologies and Zoetis

📈 Economic Indicators

The National Association of Realtors reports existing-home sales for January.

The U.S. economy added 130,000 jobs in January, its strongest growth in more than a year and a sign that the labor market may be shaking off its recent stagnation. The January numbers improved on a revised 48,000 jobs in December, according to the Labor Department, while surging beyond the 55,000 expected by analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal, Te-Ping Chen reports.

The gains were highly concentrated in healthcare and social-assistance fields, which include jobs like home-health aides and residential-care workers. Such jobs tend to grow regardless of the economy’s health and have long been an engine of U.S. job growth.

What’s next? The January report is likely to cement the Federal Reserve’s wait-and-see posture and makes it difficult for officials to build a case for further rate cuts on the basis of labor-market weakness.

• What Sweeping Revisions and a Blowout Month Tell Us About the U.S. Job Market
• Job Growth Last Year Was Far Worse Than We Thought. Here’s Why.

📰 Other headlines

• Wall Street’s Top Brass Try to Soothe Investor Jitters About Software
• Kraft Heinz’s CEO Signed On for a Breakup. Now He Has a Plan to Keep It Together.
• Asset Manager Nuveen to Buy U.K. Peer Schroders in $13.5 Billion Deal
• Bill Ackman Makes a Big Bet on Meta
• Where the Battle for Warner Bros. Stands Now
• Anthropic Enters Midterm-Election Showdown Over AI Regulation
• CarMax Taps Hotel Veteran to Lead Turnaround
• Inside NFL Owner Steve Tisch’s ‘Brief Association’ With Epstein
• Here’s What We Learned About the Power Grid During the Cold Snap

📈 Earnings wrapup

• T-Mobile Added Fewer Postpaid Phone Subscribers Than Expected in Fourth Quarter
• Shopify’s Margins Strain Under AI-Driven Growth Push
• Humana Reports Wider Quarterly Loss, Expects 2026 Earnings Decline
• Heineken to Cut Up to 6,000 Jobs Amid Weak Demand for Beer
• Siemens Shares Jump on Lifted Outlook, Market View Beat
• Unilever Sales Growth Picks Up Despite U.S. Slowdown
• Nissan Projects $4.2 Billion Annual Loss on Restructuring Charges

For more earnings coverage, click here.

More than 50% of senior executives in the C-suite may be more prone to getting a chronic disease, according to Chris Jordan, a senior performance coach at Evolve Leadership.

Jordan delivered some key health insights for leaders at the summit Tuesday evening as part of the Leadership Institute's increasing focus on executive resiliency.

“Performance doesn’t come down to how much time I have,” Jordan said. “It comes down to the energy you have in the time that you've got available. If you are exhausted, you can't perform at your best—whether that's at work or at home with your children. Energy is the key, and when we start focusing on energy, that intrinsically means we're managing our health.”

You can watch the full discussion here.

—Belle Lin

This March 23-24, financial leaders will gather in Palo Alto for The WSJ CFO Council Summit to examine how CFOs are navigating market volatility, evolving trade and regulatory policy, and the growing impact of AI on the future of the enterprise. Join the CFO Council and be part of the conversations shaping the future of finance and corporate leadership.

Request Invitation.

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