Huntington opens sign-ups for an AI business platform, including for noncustomers

Entrepreneurs do not need a Huntington bank account to register for its new AI business platform. Huntington opened early-access sign-ups for The 1866 Studio on October 19, 2026, pitching a connected service built with Google Cloud’s Gemini platform to help owners start businesses, create marketing materials and prepare for financing.

Huntington calls the product a small-business “operating system”: a single experience combining business guidance, financial intelligence, digital tools and human expertise. Its intended audience includes aspiring and existing owners. The name refers to 1866, the year Huntington was founded.

From startup paperwork to financing readiness

Huntington describes agentic workflows—AI systems designed to help carry out tasks—for developing business plans, identifying funding sources and planning growth. Its initial examples include:

• Business formation: Built-in agents are intended to guide owners through choosing a business entity, registration, licensing and operational setup. The service can generate a customized action plan to organize the steps from idea to launch.
• Marketing: Using Gemini models that work across different types of media, the platform is designed to generate tailored marketing materials, digital advertising copy and social media campaigns.
• Loan readiness: Agents are designed to evaluate financing readiness, identify potential gaps and explain what lenders expect. They would recommend actions that could strengthen eligibility for future financing, rather than make a lending decision in the workflow Huntington describes.

Keeping business context between tasks

The connecting mechanism is retained business context. Huntington says the platform carries relevant information across tasks, helping owners coordinate decisions across separate tools while remaining in control.

The agents are only one part of the proposed experience. Konduru says the platform also brings together personalized expert content and an AI assistant for monitoring business operations and finances and coordinating daily work.

Google Cloud supplies the platform for building, scaling, governing and optimizing the agents, alongside Gemini models. Huntington says the product builds on the companies’ multiyear strategic partnership, pairing that infrastructure with its own small-business and financial expertise.

Konduru says the platform is intended to support more of the business lifecycle as it evolves, eventually including preparation for succession, sale or exit. Those are future aims, not capabilities presented as part of the initial offering.