The data: Among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), 75%  will use at least one AI feature offered by their financial institution in the next two years, per PYMNTS Intelligence research. They are most interested in expense tracking, followed by budgeting, cash management, supplier discovery, and product comparisons.

Zoom out: Intuit’s AI strategy for SMBs is a telling case study of how quickly the technology has evolved. It started with a conversational assistant, a domain-expert chatbot introduced in 2023, a year after ChatGTP’s general release. The concept was that it would understand accounting data, transactions, and cash flows and be able to work on the customer’s behalf. By 2025, it had become much more sophisticated. 

But Intuit misread the appetite for an AI-forward interface. The engine behind the chatbot was designed to own the digital layer between a model provided by a company like OpenAI or Anthropic and Intuit applications like QuickBooks. Customers revolted against the agentic features that followed. Intuit backed off the bot interface and put the AI platform in the background to automate bookkeeping, business analysis, and project management. It also raised issues for human review, leaving the bot as a Q&A tool. These are practical features businesses want: The study cites interest in AI-powered expense tracking.

Implications for banks: Banks’ knee-jerk response to AI-driven competition is to implement a digital banking chatbot. Fundamentally, it is a response to friction in the interface: The customer wants a question answered, and the quickest answer comes from a chatbot, if it works. SMBs offering cash management platforms should revisit what sets them apart from an accounting tool with a checking account.

Intelligent automation, with AI agents on the back end and explicit human control on the front end, is the future of SMB digital services. Average SMB digital banking currently is built on a platform that dates back to the mid-2010s, making it difficult to compete with tools built on modern architecture.

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