Generative AI delivered £50m of value for Lloyds Banking Group in 2025, with the firm predicting it will create more than £100m in additional value this year.
The company rolled out more than 50 AI use cases last year, focused on areas such as enhancing customer interactions and query resolutions, as well as providing support to frontline colleagues.
It said this resulted in quicker and more accurate in-app search experiences, with the Athena Knowledge Management Tool also helping colleagues find information to answer customer queries faster. Currently used by 20,000 colleagues, it has reduced search times by 66% on average.
Lloyds CMO Suresh Balaji has been vocal about the “AI transformation” taking place at Lloyds. The company has also created an AI blog, firstly documenting ‘Project Turing’, which in partnership with Ogilvy One.
The impact of AI was assessed on end-to-end marketing campaign development, as three ring-fenced teams tackled a real product launch brief. These included a team with no AI access, one augmented by Open AI and one only using AI.
The challenge was to “win back customers travel spend” by launching a “travel proposition to high income professionals”.
It was found that AI “significantly amplifies human creativity, excels at rapid data collection, and boosts project momentum”, exemplifying the “irreplaceable value of human insight in connecting ideas and achieving genuine creative craftsmanship, but that “the future of marketing lies in human–AI collaboration”.
An example of one finding is that “while AI excelled at surfacing observations, it struggled to connect them to underlying human needs”, though this gap will “likely close quickly”. AI alone also “fell short of making the crucial leap from information to compelling ideas, particularly lacking the craft and execution needed at a creative level”.
Lloyds plans to build on the project, saying it is “only just beginning to scratch the surface of AI’s potential in marketing”.
The group will “accelerate” AI adoption this year, including more AI and agentic AI use cases as well as the launch of an AI Academy for 67,000 colleagues across the organisation.
This year will also mark the full customer rollout of Lloyds’ AI-powered financial assistant giving quicker, tailored answers to customers. The assistant will eventually expand to beyond everyday banking, helping customers with borrowing, savings, investment and protection.
Ron van Kemenade, group chief operating officer at Lloyds Banking Group, said by “scaling the most impactful technologies across the group” the team can “unlock new opportunities to better support our customers, strengthen our operations and realise further financial benefits in the years ahead”.
This comes as Lloyds is creating a new role, its first-ever AI lead for group corporate affairs, as the company looks to use AI to support its storytelling. The appointed person will build and evolve the AI strategy for communications so AI becomes “a natural part of how we plan, create and deliver”, the business says.
Reflecting its efforts, the group rose 12 places in the Evident AI Global Index last year, the strongest improvement of any UK bank.
Lloyds has also entered 2026 with a new brand platform, ‘Bank on Lloyds’, positioned as a “bold creative reset”.
The platform is designed to offer “consistency across the customer journey”, with Balaji saying at the time that the company is “significantly investing” in brand.