RED: Giving Small Businesses Big Business Capability

The opportunity presented by artificial intelligence is not to replace people, but to give small businesses access to capabilities that have traditionally belonged to much larger organisations.

That idea has shaped the way we’ve approached AI at Big Red Cloud.

It would have been easy to build another chatbot, tie it to a single AI provider and market it as the future of accounting. Instead, we started with a different question: if AI is going to become part of business software, what principles should guide us?

The first was that professional judgement should remain with people. AI can retrieve information, identify patterns and suggest possibilities, but it shouldn’t become the decision-maker. Business owners, accountants and advisers remain responsible for the decisions that matter.

The second was that customers should be free to choose the AI assistant that best meets their needs. The pace of change in AI is extraordinary and no one can confidently predict which platforms will lead the market in two or three years’ time. We don’t think customers should be locked into a particular model simply because that’s the one their accounting software vendor happened to choose.

The third was transparency. If AI is going to access financial information, the connection between the accounting system and the AI should not be a black box. Customers and developers should be able to understand how it works, inspect it and improve it.

Those principles led us to Red

Red isn’t another accounting package and it isn’t another AI model. It’s a conversational connection between modern AI assistants and the information already held in Big Red Cloud. Instead of navigating menus, building reports or exporting spreadsheets, you can simply ask questions about your business.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been using Red ourselves in ways that would have seemed unusual only a year ago. We’ve used it to draft statutory accounts, prepare monthly management accounts, produce business performance reports, investigate accounts receivable and accounts payable, identify possible bookkeeping mistakes and suggest how they might be corrected. We’ve also used it to carry out authorised actions such as creating invoices.

None of those activities are new. What is changing is the interface. For decades we’ve expected people to learn how to use accounting software. Increasingly, accounting software is learning how to communicate with people.

Why We Chose an Open Approach

We have deliberately built Red on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to business systems. Today we’re demonstrating Red with ChatGPT and Claude because they currently offer the best experience for this approach. Tomorrow it may be different, and we want our customers to benefit from improvements across the AI ecosystem rather than being tied to a single platform.

For the same reason, we’ve decided to make the Red MCP server open source. We don’t think the connection between business software and AI is where value should be captured. Our job is to build great accounting software and great customer experiences. Open standards and open source help create trust, encourage innovation and give customers confidence that they remain in control.

Looking Ahead with Red

Red is still an early beta and we have a great deal to learn. The most valuable feedback won’t be about prompts or protocols. It will come from understanding how business owners and accountants naturally want to interact with their information when conversation becomes the interface.

This week we’ve invited thousands of businesses and accountants to join our webinars and see Red in action. We’ll demonstrate what it can do today, discuss where we think it can add value immediately, and explain how we see it evolving over the coming months.

Start the Conversation with RED

Whether you’re running a business or supporting clients, discover how RED helps you ask better questions, uncover trusted insights, and work seamlessly with your favourite AI, including ChatGPT, Claude and Mistral. Join the session that’s right for you.

🔴 Live Webinar

📅 Businesses | Jul 2nd, 2026 12:00 PM Dublin

📅 Accounting Professionals | Jul 2nd, 2026 02:00 PM Dublin

Register for Businesses

Register for Accountants

The technology itself will continue to change rapidly. The principles shouldn’t. If AI can help give a ten-person business access to capabilities that once required an enterprise budget, then it has the potential to do something genuinely important. We think that’s a future worth building.