Lloyds Banking Group has announced a four-year partnership with the University of Glasgow to explore how agentic AI could support the work of the group’s software and data engineers.

Each quarter, Lloyds engineers will be given a different type of task to complete in collaboration with AI, and the results will be analysed to understand its impact on quality and speed of delivery.

Lloyds said in a statement that the partnership will help the bank to improve its understanding of “how to harness the benefits of agentic AI,” with successful projects rolled out to wider teams in the Group.

A PhD, a Master of Research and a post-doctoral research associate position will be created at the University of Glasgow to facilitate this work.

The partnership will be led by Drs Tim Storer and Peggy Gregory, of the University of Glasgow, and Dr Shane Montague, Lloyds’ head of research engineering. Dr Storer said: “Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.

“However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project.

Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase its software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.”

Earlier in March, Lloyds announced its intention to become “the UK’s biggest FinTech” by monetising customer data and automating compliance procedures. Shortly afterwards, a glitch in its software exposed the data of almost half a million customers.

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