Lloyds Banking Group established the role of director of AI and advanced analytics in 2024, as the technology was expanding from the data science realm into the economic and cultural mainstream.
Longtime technologist Rohit Dhawan was appointed to the role in August of that year to define and deliver the bank’s AI vision. He also leads Lloyds’ AI Centre of Excellence, which was established alongside his role.
Around 250 people work in the centre, which brought together data engineers and other employees from four pre-existing teams in the bank. More than 30 PhD holders are on its books.
Dhawan’s wider team includes around 500 people spread across the UK and India.
“Typically, when you have new technology, it takes a while for it to proliferate across the organisation and be embedded in different business units,” Dhawan says.
“In this case, it made sense to start centrally and then federate the skills and the expertise and the [intellectual property] to other parts of the business.”
Alongside shaping the bank’s overall AI and advanced analytics strategy, Dhawan’s remit includes a parallel track for “responsible AI”, on which Lloyds has been gradually creating more roles over the past 18 months.
Career history: Rohit Dhawan
2024–: Group head of AI and advanced analytics, Lloyds Banking Group
2020: Regional head of data and AI strategy, Asia-Pacific, Amazon Web Services (Singapore)
2018: Consulting director, Accenture AI (Singapore)
2015: Senior industry consultant, SAS (Australia)
2012: Programme leader, decision science and analytics, Deloitte (Australia)
2007: Manager, data and AI delivery, IBM (Australia)
Workforce impact
It all begins with talent, Dhawan says, with Lloyds’ approach being to upskill and reskill its current employees. The bank has also hired more than 4,000 new tech and data specialists since 2022, including 1,500 in 2025 alone.
The accelerated hiring push coincided with the bank’s launch last year of “Leading with AI”, a six-month, 80-contact-hour programme run for its senior leaders in collaboration with Cambridge university.
All of the bank’s leaders are set to take part in the programme by the end of this year.
Lloyds also rolled out its “AI academy” in January to upskill teams across the bank, with learning tracks based on each employee’s appetite and role.
As a first step, the bank’s 67,000 colleagues will complete a short module on “Working with AI Responsibly” to promote its safe and ethical use.
Sourcing talent from outside the bank too, Dhawan looks for a combination of “mindset and skill set”.
More than 100 data science graduates joined Lloyds last year, the bank’s largest ever intake into one of the UK’s biggest data science graduate programmes.
“We’re not necessarily looking for people who can build new technology from scratch or the whizz kids sitting in Silicon Valley who are building new products. We are looking for people who can apply the technology,” Dhawan says.
“What we’ve seen is not job replacement, but more increased efficiency and productivity,” he adds. As an example, the bank’s back-office teams that had large backlogs can now process queries in days rather than weeks.
This comes as a lot of the bank’s existing teams are pivoting to AI-linked roles, many of which are roles that never existed previously.
Amid the shift, Lloyds recently advertised a job for a “manager — reinvent work with AI” role: a position in the HR team to assess what the future of the workforce will look like with AI.
How AI is driving a structural shift in UK banks’ hiring strategies
“A traditional project manager will now become an AI product manager,” Dhawan says. “A traditional workforce strategist will become an AI workforce strategist because they are now looking at the workforce in the context of AI. We have people who are doing traditional risk management, now they are moving into AI linked risk management.
“So what I’m seeing is a pivot of traditional roles into more AI-centric roles as AI becomes more important. There’s the pivot part, then there’s a net new, and then there are some roles that didn’t exist at all, especially in areas like responsible AI.”
Tangible benefit
Lloyds opts for a combination of both internally built and externally provided technology. The bank wants to reduce its dependency on external providers as part of building the expertise and intellectual property within the group.
“Our general direction is that we want to build things ourselves, but obviously not build from scratch,” Dhawan explains. “We want to leverage the foundational tools that are available in the market with our key vendors and suppliers, and build on top of that. But we want to retain the intellectual property.
“Ultimately, the differentiator for banks and financial services organisations at the minute is technology. If you completely outsource the technology, then you become dependent on third parties.”
Lloyds also has technology and data teams in Hyderabad, India, where headcount has increased to 4,000 people in the two years since its facility there was set up.
While it can be difficult competing with smaller, more agile firms, such as neobanks, Dhawan notes the benefits that Lloyds’ scale provides.
“Given the breadth of services that we provide and the number of customers we have, if we deploy something — even if it takes slightly longer — the scale . . . and the impact will be much greater, versus a smaller financial services provider that would deploy something for a smaller segment of customers or for a specific set of products,” Dhawan says.
“When you get the deployment going right, the scale can be unprecedented.”
Lloyds is currently working on more than 200 AI use cases, stemming from a combination of traditional machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI.
Last year, more than 50 GenAI use cases were operationalised, delivering more than £50mn in interlocked value.
This year, Lloyds’ targets are “significantly higher” than the £50mn achieved, he adds, declining to give specific numbers.
Lloyds has committed £4bn in incremental investments up to 2026 to transform its digital offering more broadly, although Dhawan did not indicate the percentage of Lloyds’ technology budget that is spent specifically on AI-related initiatives.
“AI has become embedded into different business cases — it’s hard to extract basically the AI tag from the wider investment envelope. Right now, it’s just built in. It hasn’t been explicitly identified because often, AI is part of a wider initiative.”
Dhawan looks forward to implementing more externally-facing customer experience use cases, which are typically “harder” to deploy.
Lloyds rolled out its first direct-to-customer agent pilot last year, which is currently in beta testing with colleagues. The bank built the chat agent in-house to be a “frontrunner” among its peers.
“We are constantly speaking to the [Financial Conduct Authority] about this project. Even if we don’t initially roll out a full agent that can do everything for customers — such as transferring money to another account — we want to make sure we introduce something carefully and learn from it,” Dhawan says.
“If we successfully deploy a customer-facing agent within one of our apps, and it’s received well and gives us the right insights to build on, that will be a good achievement for us,” he adds.