Small business owners and self-employed individuals typically face financial and operational challenges. Artificial intelligence is giving them a leg up through applications such as smarter accounting software and fintech services like expanded access to capital. At the recent AI Frontiers conference in Silicon Valley, Ashok Srivastava, chief data officer at financial software firm Intuit, the creator of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint, spoke to Knowledge at Wharton about how his firm is using AI to “power prosperity for the current and future generations.”         An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge at Wharton : How did you get interested in AI and data sciences? Ashok Srivastava : It’s an interesting story. In some ways you might say it was predestined. My father was a mathematician and a statistician who worked in many areas of information science, experimental design and so forth.…