Small and mid-sized businesses have long been the engine of the global economy — and for just as long, they have been the last to benefit from enterprise-grade technology. That dynamic is changing. Sage (FTSE: SGE) — the global leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for SMBs — has announced a major expansion of its strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), unveiled on-stage at the Sage Future event in San Francisco. The goal: bring agentic AI directly into the financial workflows of millions of growing businesses — faster, more affordably, and with far less disruption than has historically been possible.
The Problem Being Solved: AI Is a Massive Opportunity SMBs Can't Easily Access
IDC projects that global spending on AI will grow at 31.9% annually between 2025 and 2029 as organisations move from experimentation to embedding AI across core business operations. The opportunity for SMBs within this wave is enormous — but for most smaller businesses, the cost and complexity of modernising legacy finance systems have remained the primary barriers to capturing it. Many SMBs are still running traditional desktop financial software — products that pre-date the cloud, let alone the era of AI agents. Moving to a modern, AI-enabled finance platform has historically required significant technical resources, extended migration timelines, and disruption to core accounting processes that most small businesses simply cannot afford.
The Sage–AWS collaboration is designed to directly address this gap — combining Sage's deep SMB product expertise with AWS's cloud infrastructure, migration tooling, and AI services to make the transition faster, more affordable, and significantly less disruptive for the millions of businesses that depend on Sage's platform every day.
Four Strategic Areas That Define the Partnership
The collaboration is structured around four concrete focus areas that together create a complete pathway — from AI-powered innovation through to cloud migration and marketplace distribution:
1. Expanded Innovation & Go-to-Market
Sage and AWS will jointly develop and bring AI-powered financial software to more Sage customers, combining Sage's deep understanding of SMB needs with AWS's cloud-native innovation capabilities. This joint go-to-market strategy accelerates both the breadth of reach and the speed of delivery for new AI features.
2. Sage Developer Solutions on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Sage AI Developer Solutions — built exclusively on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore — will be available directly through AWS Marketplace. This enables Sage partners to build their own AI agents on AgentCore, creating a growing catalogue of intelligent financial automation tools that SMBs can discover, purchase, and deploy directly within their existing Sage systems — on their own terms and timeline.
3. Seamless Technology Integration
The partnership removes the technical barriers that have traditionally prevented SMBs from putting AI to work in their operations. Deeper integration between Sage's platform and AWS services creates a more consistent, scalable foundation for Sage's developers and ISV partners — reducing integration overhead, increasing customer choice, and enabling AI capabilities to be embedded directly into the financial workflows businesses rely on every day.
4. Accelerated Migration from Desktop to Cloud
For the significant number of SMBs still running traditional desktop Sage products, the partnership creates a faster, more affordable, less disruptive path to modern cloud-native finance. Combining Sage's product knowledge with AWS cloud infrastructure and migration tooling, this pathway gives businesses access to real-time financial insights, embedded AI capabilities, and a broader range of solutions without requiring a complex, expensive, or lengthy transition project.
"AI presents a massive opportunity for small and mid-sized businesses. But they need AI they can trust, with the right support, tools and infrastructure to adopt it. This is what makes our collaboration with AWS so powerful. We're making it easier and faster for our customers to have greater access to trusted intelligence, built into the way they run their business."— Steve Hare, CEO, Sage
What AI Agents Will Actually Do for SMB Finance Teams
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is the technical foundation that makes the Sage AI agent ecosystem possible. It provides the managed infrastructure for building, deploying, and scaling agentic AI systems — handling the orchestration, memory, tool integration, and security requirements that would otherwise require significant internal engineering investment. By building Sage AI Developer Solutions on AgentCore, the partnership creates a secure, managed, enterprise-grade foundation for AI automation that SMBs can access without needing specialist AI engineering capabilities in-house.
In practice, this means AI agents that can operate autonomously across the core financial workflows of any SMB — automating time-consuming, high-volume tasks that have historically consumed disproportionate amounts of finance team capacity:
- →Accounts Payable — automated invoice processing, approval workflows, and payment scheduling without manual data entry
- →Cash Flow Management — real-time cash position monitoring, forecasting, and early warning of liquidity risks
- →Payroll Processing — automated payroll runs, tax calculations, and compliance checks with reduced manual intervention
- →Compliance Reporting — automated generation of regulatory reports, reducing the risk of errors and the time cost of period-end compliance activities
Critically, these agents will be available through AWS Marketplace — giving SMB customers a streamlined, trusted channel to discover and adopt AI capabilities within their existing financial systems, without needing to evaluate, procure, and integrate separate AI tools from multiple vendors. The marketplace model makes the entire ecosystem accessible on the SMB's own terms and timeline.
Why This Matters: Democratising AI for the Businesses That Need It Most
The significance of this partnership extends beyond the technology itself. For too long, the most powerful AI capabilities have been accessible primarily to enterprises with large IT budgets, dedicated AI engineering teams, and the capacity to navigate complex procurement and integration projects. SMBs — which account for the majority of businesses and employment globally — have been consistently last in line.
The Sage–AWS collaboration directly challenges that pattern. By embedding agentic AI into a platform that millions of SMBs already use for their most critical business processes — delivered through AWS Marketplace in a format that requires no specialist technical capability to adopt — it makes enterprise-grade AI accessible, affordable, and genuinely practical for the businesses that stand to benefit from it most. As Julia White, CMO at AWS, puts it: "Small and mid-sized businesses shouldn't have to choose between powerful technology and simplicity."
With IDC projecting 31.9% annual growth in AI spending through 2029, the businesses that embed AI into their financial operations now — automating accounts payable, cash flow forecasting, payroll, and compliance — will enter the next phase of this growth cycle with a structural operational advantage over those that continue to rely on manual, fragmented, desktop-era financial processes.