Lloyds Banking Group has launched an AI recruitment drive for 300 tech experts, weeks before its chief executive, Charlie Nunn, unveils a strategic plan for the 261-year old lender.
The bank said it intended the recruits to work on its use and development of agentic AI by September, referring to autonomous artificial intelligence models that can plan and execute tasks with minimal human oversight.
While the hiring drive is will increase Lloyds’ headcount for now, the group did not rule out its broad adoption of AI leading to job cuts in the future.
Trystan Davies, group head of data and AI science, said: “AI will reshape how organisations are structured. It will change roles and how we work, and we are investing in training for colleagues through that transition.”
In January, Nunn acknowledged that the bank would have to “reduce some jobs in some areas” owing to AI. Last month, Standard Chartered announced 7,000 job cuts, due in part to AI. Its chief executive, Bill Winters, later apologised for describing the move as “replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital”.
News of Lloyds’ hiring drive comes weeks before Nunn is expected to inform staff and investors of a new multi-year strategy for the banking group next month. He is closing out a current five-year strategy, which included a big push towards online banking involving hundreds of branch closures, as well as a renewed focus on pensions and wealth management.
Davies said the AI cohort would be deployed to a range of projects, including identifying and preventing scams and fraud. Some would be working on how AI models could be used internally, including to distill and search reams of documents in the HR department.
But one of the key focuses will be on making online banking more accessible and personalised, letting customers interrogate their spending habits, and ask plain language questions about their finances, including which investment versus savings products might best suit their circumstances. “It results in a much better customer experience because, our systems are kind of geared up in the right way,” Davies said.
The recruits – who will be part of a 1,000-strong AI team also made up of retrained Lloyds staff – will be deploying existing large language models such as Anthropic’s Claude and building on top of public LLMs such as Google’s Gemini to the bank’s own specifications.
Lloyds’s AI programme has already delivered financial gains, with generative AI – which creates new content based on patterns in vast, existing datasets – providing a £50m boost to its balance sheet last year. The group expects a £100m benefit this year, thanks to its growing use of agentic AI models.
However, research suggests that some UK banks are becoming reliant on AI faster than they are preparing for outages of artificial intelligence. KPMG’s latest financial services sentiment survey showed that while 93% of UK bank executives believed they could keep operating in…
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