BehaviourAI Lab

BehaviourAI Lab is a behavioural intelligence and regulatory technology (RegTech) platform dedicated to identifying and mitigating human risk in AI-enabled financial services. As AI reshapes how financial decisions are made and how work is performed, organisations face a new class of behavioural vulnerabilities that traditional UX, compliance, or risk frameworks are not equipped to detect.

Regulatory friction occurs when AI driven journeys confuse, overwhelm, or unintentionally steer customers toward poor decisions. Under Consumer Duty and the FCA’s scrutiny of sludge practices, these behavioural risks now carry regulatory consequences. Cognitive friction arises inside organisations as employees interact with AI tools, leading to automation bias, over trust in model outputs, and skill decay. These issues weaken judgement and long term capability.

BehaviourAI Lab helps financial services firms address both challenges through behavioural diagnostics, intervention design, and scientific validation. Our work supports organisations seeking to eliminate sludge, strengthen customer understanding, calibrate trust in AI systems, and build resilient, human centred decision environments. We serve financial services firms and AI enabled enterprises, with a particular focus on organisations preparing for Consumer Duty and the behavioural risk expectations emerging around AI adoption.

BehaviourAI Lab emerged from a clear pattern we observed across the financial services sector: as technical innovation accelerated, the human experience was falling behind. In Scotland’s growing financial technology ecosystem, algorithms were becoming more advanced, yet customer and employee journeys were becoming more confusing, more effortful, and more prone to behavioural distortion.

The company was founded in Edinburgh to close the widening gap between academic behavioural science and the fast paced demands of digital financial institutions. We recognised that in high stakes environments, human risk is not a soft concept; it is a structural vulnerability that affects regulatory outcomes, customer trust, and internal decision quality.

In our early development, we saw that traditional consulting often produced abstract recommendations without measurable evidence. This led us to create our proprietary Hook-Fix-Proof methodology. We refined it by stress testing real digital journeys and identifying where cognitive biases were being triggered, where choice architecture was misaligned with user goals, and where AI enabled processes introduced new behavioural vulnerabilities.

The framework evolved into a structured approach: diagnosing behavioural friction, redesigning decision pathways, and validating improvements with quantitative measures that demonstrate real world impact. This commitment to evidence became the foundation of BehaviourAI Lab’s work and the basis for the behavioural risk tools we continue to develop.

Shiyu Chen

Behavioural Scientist & Founder