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Lloyds Banking Group's AI Recruitment Drive 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. Focus on Agentic AI Development 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. Potential Impact on Jobs While the hiring drive 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." AI-Driven Projects and Benefits 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 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. Future Outlook and Challenges 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 a significant outage, only 47% had carried out a single test around AI disruption, while 26% had not conducted any.