Huntington Bank has launched The 1866 Studio, an AI system for small business owners that the bank built on Google Cloud's Gemini platform. The Columbus, Ohio, lender announced it on October 19, 2026, and opened early access sign-ups the same day. Access is not limited to Huntington customers.
The launch is a useful marker for where bank AI is heading. A bank is not just adding a chatbot to its app. It is offering agents that help with work outside banking, such as registering a company or writing ad copy, and tying that work back to the moment an owner needs a loan.
What The 1866 Studio does
According to Huntington's press release, the bank calls the product an "operating system" for small businesses. The name comes from the year Huntington was founded. The release lists three initial capabilities:
- Business launch support. Built-in AI agents walk owners through the steps to start a business, from entity selection and registration to licensing and operational setup, and generate a customized action plan.
- Marketing and campaign creation. Owners use multimodal Gemini models to generate marketing collateral, digital ad copy and social media campaigns.
- Loan readiness assistance. Agents help owners evaluate whether they are ready for financing by identifying gaps, explaining what lenders expect and recommending steps that can strengthen eligibility for future financing.
Vijay Konduru, Huntington's head of innovation and AI products, said the agentic workflows are "one part" of the system. Alongside them sit personalized expert content and an AI assistant that helps owners monitor operations and finances and manage daily work. The release says the system retains business context across tasks, which lets owners coordinate decisions across separate tools.
Konduru also described where the product is meant to go. "As the product evolves, it's intended to increasingly support the full range of those jobs across the business lifecycle, from turning an idea into a business to running and growing it, and ultimately preparing for succession, sale or exit," he said.
How it is built
Huntington built The 1866 Studio with Gemini platform, which the release describes as Google Cloud's AI platform for building, scaling, governing and optimizing agents, combined with Google's multimodal Gemini models. The product builds on a multi-year strategic partnership between Huntington and Google Cloud that, per the release, covers technology modernization and "governed AI capabilities."
Rohit Bhat, general manager and managing director for financial services at Google Cloud, said Huntington used "Gemini platform and Gemini frontier models" to build it.
Huntington is a large regional bank, not a fintech experiment. The release describes Huntington Bancshares as a $284 billion asset bank holding company with more than 1,400 branches in 21 states.
Why it matters: bank-built agents vs outside agents
The timing is notable. Separately, The Verge reported that JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab confirmed they are blocking outside AI agents from accessing customer accounts because of security concerns. We covered that wider pattern in Why Your AI Agent Keeps Getting Blocked.
Huntington's launch shows the other side of that choice. Some banks are wary of third-party agents reaching customer accounts. Huntington is instead offering agents it built with Google Cloud. The bank keeps control of the experience, and the agent lives next to the bank's own lending products. The loan readiness workflow makes that link explicit.
The same theme is running through Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas this week. SoundHound, which is demonstrating banking agents there, said agentic AI is one of the core themes of this year's program. World, the human-verification network co-founded by Alex Blania, used the event to launch World ID for banking and finance, which includes AgentKit, in beta, a way for a person to delegate certain proofs to an AI agent so it can act on their behalf and show that a real human stands behind it. Bank-built agents and verified outside agents are two different answers to the same trust problem.
What we do not know yet
The release leaves several practical questions open:
- Price. Huntington does not say whether The 1866 Studio is free, bundled with accounts or paid.
- Rollout. Early access sign-ups opened October 19, but the release gives no date for general availability.
- Data use. The release does not explain how business data entered into the system is used, or whether it feeds Huntington's lending decisions.
- Results. There are no usage numbers or outcomes yet. This is a launch, not a case study.
For small business owners, the pitch is one place to plan a launch, market it and get loan ready. For the banking industry, it is another sign that the big AI bet is not a better chatbot. It is agents that take on real work, inside systems the bank controls.
