{"id":57889,"date":"2026-06-07T15:43:59","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T15:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/57889\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T15:43:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T15:43:59","slug":"lloyds-scales-up-targets-for-ai-value-creation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/57889\/","title":{"rendered":"Lloyds scales up targets for AI value creation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Longtime technologist Rohit Dhawan was appointed to the role in August of that year to define and deliver the bank\u2019s AI vision. He also leads Lloyds\u2019 AI Centre of Excellence, which was established alongside his role.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Dhawan\u2019s wider team includes around 500 people spread across the UK and India.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically, when you have new technology, it takes a while for it to proliferate across the organisation and be embedded in different business units,\u201d Dhawan says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside shaping the bank\u2019s overall AI and advanced analytics strategy, Dhawan\u2019s remit includes a parallel track for \u201cresponsible AI\u201d, on which Lloyds has been gradually creating more roles over the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

Career history: Rohit Dhawan<\/p>\n

2024\u2013: Group head of AI and advanced analytics, Lloyds Banking Group<\/p>\n

2020: Regional head of data and AI strategy, Asia-Pacific, Amazon Web Services (Singapore)<\/p>\n

2018: Consulting director, Accenture AI (Singapore)<\/p>\n

2015: Senior industry consultant, SAS (Australia)<\/p>\n

2012: Programme leader, decision science and analytics, Deloitte (Australia)<\/p>\n

2007: Manager, data and AI delivery, IBM (Australia)<\/p>\n

Workforce impact <\/p>\n

It all begins with talent, Dhawan says, with Lloyds\u2019 approach being to upskill and reskill<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The accelerated hiring push coincided with the bank\u2019s launch last year of \u201cLeading with AI\u201d, a six-month, 80-contact-hour programme run for its senior leaders in collaboration with Cambridge university.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of the bank\u2019s leaders are set to take part in the programme by the end of this year.<\/p>\n

Lloyds also rolled out its \u201cAI academy\u201d in January to upskill teams across the bank, with learning tracks based on each employee\u2019s appetite and role.<\/p>\n

As a first step, the bank\u2019s 67,000 colleagues will complete a short module on \u201cWorking with AI Responsibly\u201d to promote its safe and ethical use.<\/p>\n

Sourcing talent from outside the bank too, Dhawan looks for a combination of \u201cmindset and skill set\u201d.<\/p>\n

More than 100 data science graduates joined Lloyds last year, the bank\u2019s largest ever intake into one of the UK\u2019s biggest data science graduate programmes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d Dhawan says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen is not job replacement, but more increased efficiency and productivity,\u201d he adds. As an example, the bank\u2019s back-office teams that had large backlogs can now process queries in days rather than weeks. <\/p>\n

This comes as a lot of the bank\u2019s existing teams are pivoting to AI-linked roles, many of which are roles that never existed previously. <\/p>\n

Amid the shift, Lloyds recently advertised a job for a \u201cmanager \u2014 reinvent work with AI\u201d role: a position in the HR team to assess what the future of the workforce will look like with AI.<\/p>\n

Recommended
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How AI is driving a structural shift in UK banks\u2019 hiring strategies<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA traditional project manager will now become an AI product manager,\u201d Dhawan says. \u201cA 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what I\u2019m seeing is a pivot of traditional roles into more AI-centric roles as AI becomes more important. There\u2019s the pivot part, then there\u2019s a net new, and then there are some roles that didn\u2019t exist at all, especially in areas like responsible AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tangible benefit<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOur general direction is that we want to build things ourselves, but obviously not build from scratch,\u201d Dhawan explains. \u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

While it can be difficult competing with smaller, more agile firms, such as neobanks, Dhawan notes the benefits that Lloyds\u2019 scale provides. <\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the breadth of services that we provide and the number of customers we have, if we deploy something \u2014 even if it takes slightly longer \u2014 the scale\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and 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,\u201d Dhawan says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you get the deployment going right, the scale can be unprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyds is currently working on more than 200 AI use cases, stemming from a combination of traditional machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI.<\/p>\n

Last year, more than 50 GenAI use cases were operationalised, delivering more than \u00a350mn in interlocked value. <\/p>\n

This year, Lloyds\u2019 targets are \u201csignificantly higher\u201d than the \u00a350mn achieved, he adds, declining to give specific numbers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lloyds has committed \u00a34bn in incremental investments up to 2026 to transform its digital offering more broadly, although Dhawan did not indicate the percentage of Lloyds\u2019 technology budget that is spent specifically on AI-related initiatives.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI has become embedded into different business cases<\/a> \u2014 it\u2019s hard to extract basically the AI tag from the wider investment envelope. Right now, it\u2019s just built in. It hasn\u2019t been explicitly identified because often, AI is part of a wider initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dhawan looks forward to implementing more externally-facing customer experience use cases, which are typically \u201charder\u201d to deploy.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfrontrunner\u201d among its peers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are constantly speaking to the [Financial Conduct Authority] about this project. Even if we don\u2019t initially roll out a full agent that can do everything for customers \u2014 such as transferring money to another account \u2014 we want to make sure we introduce something carefully and learn from it,\u201d Dhawan says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we successfully deploy a customer-facing agent within one of our apps, and it\u2019s received well and gives us the right insights to build on, that will be a good achievement for us,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lloyds Banking Group established the role of director of AI and advanced analytics in 2024, as the technology…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21256],"tags":[24561,2861,27398],"class_list":["post-57889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lloyds-banking-group","tag-emerging-technologies","tag-lloyds-banking-group","tag-tech-vision"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116709599658790080","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}