• Huntington announced The 1866 Studio on October 19, 2026, an AI-powered operating system for small business owners built with Google Cloud.
• Early access sign-up opened the same day, and the product is open to small business owners and entrepreneurs, not only Huntington customers.
• The initial features are business launch support, marketing and campaign creation, and loan-readiness assistance.
• The release gives no pricing or general launch date, and does not describe data privacy or security measures.
• Loan-readiness coaching puts the bank into the pre-application stage, where eligibility advice and underwriting criteria sit close together.

Huntington Bank announced The 1866 Studio on October 19, 2026, an AI-powered operating system for small business owners built with Google Cloud, according to the bank's own release. Early access sign-up opened the same day and is not limited to Huntington customers. The release names three initial capabilities and gives no pricing, general launch date or data-handling detail. The most consequential of the three is loan readiness, because it places the bank's advice before the credit application.

What Huntington says the product does

Huntington describes The 1866 Studio as combining business guidance, financial intelligence, digital tools and human expertise, run through agentic AI workflows that retain business context across tasks. The initial features are business launch support covering entity selection, registration, licensing and setup with a tailored action plan; marketing and campaign creation using multimodal Gemini models; and loan-readiness assistance. The bank also says an AI assistant will help owners monitor operations and finances and manage daily work. These are the bank's descriptions, not independently tested capabilities.

Open to non-customers, with a lending adjacency

Huntington says early access is open to small business owners and entrepreneurs, not only its own customers. Combined with a feature that flags financing gaps, explains lender expectations and recommends steps to strengthen eligibility, the structure is a front door to the bank's lending business. That reading is an inference from the feature list, not a stated strategy. Whether a non-customer's loan-readiness work later carries into a Huntington application is not addressed in the release.

What Google Cloud supplies

The release says the product is built with Google Cloud's Gemini platform, uses its multimodal Gemini models, and relies on Google Cloud tools to build, scale, govern and optimize agents. It describes the work as building on a multi-year Huntington and Google Cloud partnership. Rohit Bhat, general manager and managing director of Financial Services at Google Cloud, is quoted saying the future of small business banking is about delivering expertise and guidance in the moments customers need it most.

What the release does not say

The release does not state pricing, a general launch date or user numbers, and it does not describe specific privacy or security measures. It says owners "remain in control" and highlights human expertise, but does not set out how human review or override works. Those gaps matter most for the loan-readiness feature, since eligibility guidance that shapes a financing decision invites questions about the data used and who answers for the advice. Huntington has not addressed these questions in the release.

What this means for small business owners and rivals

For owners, the practical step is to treat early access as a trial of the bank's guidance and to check what business data the tool asks for and how it is used before connecting accounts. For competing banks, the release shows a large regional lender, with about $284 billion in assets by its own account, pairing a general-purpose cloud AI platform with a non-customer sign-up. What to watch next is pricing, general availability and any disclosed data terms.