Huntington Bank unveils AI platform for small-business owners

Huntington Bank has announced The 1866 Studio, an AI-powered platform intended to help small-business owners manage work across finance, operations and business planning. The bank says the experience will use agentic workflows to help users move from advice to action while retaining relevant business context across tasks.

The initial features are aimed at entrepreneurs starting or growing a business. Huntington says AI agents will help users navigate startup steps such as choosing an entity type, registration, licensing and operational setup, then generate a customized action plan. The platform is also designed to produce marketing materials, ad copy and social-media campaigns, and to help owners gauge their financing readiness by identifying gaps and suggesting steps to address them.

The platform is built with Google Cloud’s Gemini platform and multimodal Gemini models, according to Huntington. The bank describes it as a combination of AI workflows, business guidance, financial intelligence, digital tools and human expertise. Huntington has not provided performance results or detailed information about how the system will handle particular business decisions; the announced capabilities are plans for the product, not reported outcomes.

Huntington says the service is intended to expand over time to support a broader range of business needs, from turning an idea into a company to running and growing it and preparing for a succession or sale. Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, including people who are not Huntington customers, can sign up for early access beginning Oct. 19, 2026.

The announcement extends Huntington’s existing multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud, which the bank says is also being used to modernize its technology and advance governed AI capabilities.