What small businesses want from their banks' AI

• Key insights: Research from small-business payment company Stax says most small businesses want to use AI, but are skittish about deploying it for functions that include sensitive information. 
• What's at stake: Banks and large payment companies are deploying new forms of AI internally, and also looking to pair the technology with other services to attract business clients. 
• Expert quote: "There's going to be a huge shift over the next 10 years toward AI in small businesses," —Andrews Jamison, Extend. 

To attract corporate clients, banks and payment companies are pushing mainstream uses for new forms of artificial intelligence, a strategy that is finding a welcome audience but still has hurdles when it comes to turning over more sensitive tasks to machines.  

"Things are moving from whether small businesses should use AI to where they should use it," John Cimba, CEO of Stax, told American Banker. 

Stax Payments surveyed 500 U.S.-based small and midsize business technology decision-makers in June 2026, considering AI adoption, business applications, perceived benefits, trust considerations and future investment plans.

The payments company found that 80% of small businesses say they've used AI for work they would have otherwise used a consultant or expert to perform.

"Businesses will use AI when it saves time, but also have boundaries around accuracy, compliance and accountability," Cimba said. 

What Stax found

As financial institutions and payment companies have discovered AI drives internal workflow benefits, attention is also being paid to how new forms of AI can be packaged as part of product pitches to clients that include payments and ancillary services such as enterprise resource planning, marketing, staffing and inventory. Stax focuses on small to midsize businesses. Its competitors include payment firms like Stripe, Square and PayPal, and small-business banks. Stax leaders said AI is delivering measurable business value for small to midsize businesses.

"Everything is about their dollars. They have payroll, rent, suppliers. …" Cimba said. "As soon as they find that AI can accelerate that goal, they will be more trusting of the technology."

Nearly all of Stax's respondents have used AI at least in some limited form, and have had a positive experience. Ninety six percent said AI helps them make business decisions more quickly; 95% said AI has increased their confidence in decision-making; and 94% said AI has helped them better serve customers.

Eighty percent of respondents expect their organization's use of AI to increase over the next six months, demonstrating that businesses view AI as an increasingly important part of their long-term operations.

But most adoption is for lower-risk, time-intensive work, according to Stax. Marketing and content creation was the most common use case at 61%, followed by graphic design (49%) and business planning (45%). For more sensitive tasks with ties to legal or compliance risk, adoption was lower, with human resources work coming in at 25%, accounting and tax preparation (25%), legal services (22%) and insurance (16%).

Larger businesses will likely adopt AI for more sensitive financial and business functions at a faster pace because they're more likely to have a team of technology staff to manage AI strategy, according to Cimba. 

"Larger businesses have a bit more tolerance for learning," Cimba said.  "Smaller businesses can't afford a mishap." 

Small-business needs

Small-business banks are already using AI to aid SBA lending, with payment companies anticipating more usage in the coming years as small businesses get more comfortable with the technology. 

"There's going to be a huge shift over the next 10 years toward AI in small businesses," Andrew Jamison, CEO of small-business payment company Extend, told American Banker. 

AI enables small businesses to get a more granular view of their capital and cashflow with less need for financial management staff — agentic AI can perform much of the  work, according to Jamison.

"That's not just about using AI to quickly get a financial statement," Jamison said. "They want to connect to accounting software to suck in more data, to be able to go beyond what's on the P&L for a more accurate look at where the business is growing."

Visa and Mastercard recently introduced tools that help card issuers and businesses to determine potential uses for agentic AI, along with AI-powered aid in dispute resolution. AI contributes to a broader small-business strategy at the card networks, which have found small businesses use cards more than consumers. Visa reports that 44% of small-business bank revenue globally comes from cards. And in North America, average small-business revenue is more than five times the average consumer revenue, according to Visa.  

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"Small businesses are constantly managing the gap between when they need to make payments and when they get paid," Jonathan Kolozsvary, global head of small business at Visa, told American Banker, adding Visa's small-business research shows they have distinct needs around improved digital processing for payroll, supplier payments, and working capital that require solutions designed specifically for how businesses operate, not consumer banking products.

"Increasingly, we've seen small businesses are looking for integrated banking experiences that bring together payments, lending, deposits and cash management," Kolozsvary said.