Lloyds Banking Group has launched an AI recruitment drive for 300 tech experts, weeks before its chief executive, Charlie Nunn, announces a strategic plan for the 261-year-old lender.

The bank said it intended the recruits to work on its use and development of agentic AI by September, referring to autonomous AI models that can plan and execute tasks with minimal human oversight.

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.

The initiative comes as many of the world’s biggest banks adopt AI to simplify processes and cut costs. The Spanish owner of Santander UK said it aimed to save more than £400m by 2028 through automation and hoped to generate another £300m in extra income. All of its 185,000 staff worldwide, including about 15,000 in the UK, will be given access to AI tools.

Trystan Davies, the group head of data and AI science at Lloyds, 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.”

In January, Nunn acknowledged that the bank would have to “reduce some jobs in some areas” owing to AI. Last month, Standard Chartered announced 7,000 job cuts, due in part to AI. Its chief executive, Bill Winters, later apologised for describing the move as “replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital”.

News of Lloyds’ hiring drive comes weeks before Nunn is expected to inform staff and investors of a new multi-year strategy for the banking group next month. He is closing out a current five-year strategy, which included a big push towards online banking involving hundreds of branch closures, as well as a renewed focus on pensions and wealth management.

Davies said the AI cohort would be deployed to a range of projects, including identifying and preventing scams and fraud. Some would be working on how AI models could be used internally, including to distill and search reams of documents in the HR department.

But one of the key focuses will be on making online banking more accessible and personalised, letting customers interrogate their spending habits, and ask plain language questions about their finances, including which investment versus savings products might best suit their circumstances. “It results in a much better customer experience because our systems are kind of geared up in the right way,” Davies said.

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 – which creates new content based on patterns in vast, existing datasets – 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.

However, research suggests that some UK banks are becoming reliant on AI faster than they are preparing for outages of the technology. 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.

Rob Smith, the UK head of regulatory and risk advisory at KPMG UK, said: “The industry’s optimism about its ability to continue business as usual if a critical AI system fails at scale could mean one of three things: one, firms have invested considerably in model validation, contingency planning and risk prevention; two, firms’ use of AI tools is relatively simplistic; orthree, they don’t yet have a complete grasp of their exposure.

“Firms have invested time and money, but without regular, robust testing, how do you know what you’re doing is working? And, crucially, how do you prove your resilience to the regulator, customers and stakeholders?”