Lloyds Banking Group Plc is using thousands of its staff as guinea pigs for an AI financial assistant it’s designed to help customers manage their spending, saving and investments.

The British bank said the tool will roll out next year to coach customers through their finances, with extra features added gradually to cover the lender’s full suite of products, according to a statement on Thursday.

For example, a user can chat about a payment with the financial assistant, which will then break down the requests, plan, and execute the transaction — an ability known as agentic AI. The assistant will pass customers to human specialists when needed, Lloyds said. To date, some 7,000 Lloyds employees have run 12,000 tests of the AI assistant.

Ranil Boteju, chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds, said the tool is underpinned by “robust” guardrails to ensure “safe, explainable and regulated” interactions.

Lloyds has been in regular dialog with the Financial Conduct Authority on how to deploy AI safely, including around the potential uses such as financial guidance, Bloomberg reported earlier this year. While the new tool will use banking data to provide tailored help to customers, it won’t offer regulated financial advice.

Banks have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of AI tools, in the hope of speeding up processes and saving costs  — as well as potentially replacing thousands of jobs. Many customers are already using AI in their financial lives, with a poll by Lloyds finding that 56% of adults had used it in some form over the past 12 months to help manage their money.

Lloyds has spent several years overhauling its technology estate more broadly, including assessing thousands of technology staffers in the UK and dismissing or moving some workers. The bank has said it has 200 live AI use cases, including generative AI solutions like Athena that supports 30,000 customer-facing employees, and machine learning models that are streamlining tasks like mortgage applications.

— By Aisha S Gani (Bloomberg News)