Lloyds Banking Group has launched an AI recruitment drive for 300 technology professionals, weeks before chief executive Charlie Nunn announced the 261-year-old lender’s strategic plan.
The bank said new employees will be working on using and developing agent AI by September, referring to autonomous artificial intelligence models that can plan and execute tasks with minimal human oversight.
While the hiring drive will likely increase Lloyds’ headcount in the near term, the group did not rule out wider adoption of AI leading to future job cuts.
Trystan Davies, group head of data and AI science, said: “AI will reshape the structure of organizations. AI will change roles and ways of working. And we are investing in training our colleagues through that transition.”
Nunn acknowledged in January that banks would have to “reduce some jobs in some regions” because of AI. Last month, Standard Chartered announced 7,000 job cuts due in part to AI. The company’s CEO, Bill Winters, later apologized for the move, which he described as “in some cases the replacement of low-value human capital.”
News of Lloyds’ recruitment drive comes weeks before Mr Nunn is expected to inform staff and investors about the banking group’s new multi-year strategy next month. He is set to wrap up its current five-year strategy, which includes a massive push into online banking, including hundreds of branch closures, and a new focus on pensions and wealth management.
Davis said the AI cohort will be deployed in a variety of projects, including identifying and preventing fraud and fraud. Some of you may be working on how AI models can be used internally, such as in HR departments to extract and search large amounts of documents.
But one key focus is on making online banking more accessible and personalized, allowing customers to examine their spending habits and ask questions about their finances in plain language, such as whether investment or savings products are best suited to their situation. “Our systems are well-tuned and will significantly improve the customer experience,” Davis said.
The new employees will be part of a 1,000-strong AI team made up of similarly retrained Lloyd’s staff who will deploy existing large-scale language models, such as Anthropic’s Claude, and build them to the bank’s own specifications on top of public LLMs such as Google’s Gemini.
Lloyds’ AI program is already delivering financial benefits, with generative AI, which creates new content based on patterns in vast existing datasets, adding £50m to the company’s balance sheet last year. The group expects to make a profit of £100m this year from the increased use of agent AI models.
However, research shows that some UK banks are increasing their reliance on AI faster than they are preparing for the outage. KPMG’s latest Financial Services Sentiment Survey found that while 93% of UK bank executives believe they can continue operating in the event of a major disruption, only 47% have conducted at least one AI disruption test, and 26% have not conducted any.
Rob Smith, UK Head of Regulatory and Risk Advisory at KPMG UK, said: “The industry’s optimism that business as usual can continue even in the event of a major failure of critical AI systems could mean one of three things: First, companies are making significant investments in model validation, contingency planning, and risk prevention; second, companies’ use of AI tools is ‘relatively simple,’ or third, companies don’t yet fully understand their risks.”
“Companies have invested time and money, but without regular, robust testing, how will they know that what they are doing is working? And most importantly, how will they prove their resilience to regulators, customers, and stakeholders?”
