University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group announce groundbreaking agentic AI research programme

• The University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group have launched a four‑year research partnership to explore how AI can support software and data engineering.
• The project will help Lloyds Banking Group implement agentic AI at scale within their software engineering practice, while giving University researchers a unique opportunity to study large‑scale engineering transformation in a real‑world setting.
• The partnership will create a PhD, a Masters of Research and a post‑doctoral role.
• The project’s findings will guide how Lloyds Group scales the use of agentic AI across wider data and engineering teams and contribute to the development of best practice, national policy and industry standards.

A new research partnership between the University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group is setting out to explore the potential of AI to support software and data engineering. 

Over the next four years, the partners will explore how large language model-based coding tools called agentic AIs could support and enhance the work of software and data engineers at Lloyds Banking Group. 

Agentic AIs are software tools which act as semi-autonomous ‘agents’ to complete tasks of varying complexity. In software and data engineering, they are already being used to write and debug code, solve technical problems, and perform a variety of project management tasks.

As the UK’s largest digital bank, Lloyds Banking Group is investing significantly in developing new digital software and services, alongside training and new skills for colleagues, to support its 28 million customers.

The University’s research team and Lloyds Banking Group will work together to design experiments that test the efficacy of agentic AI for high priority activities in individual software teams.  The team will use a variety of empirical software engineering research techniques to gather evidence, such as data mining.

The project will help Lloyds Banking Group implement an agentic AI approach to software and data engineering and measure the impact across their organisation. At the same time, it will provide software engineering researchers at the University with a rare opportunity to study and contribute to a large-scale transformation to software and data engineering practice.

The collaboration will create a PhD and a Masters of Research position at the University, along with a post-doctoral research associate post to work with Lloyds’ software engineering teams.

Dr Tim Storer, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, will lead the University’s side of the partnership along with colleague Dr Peggy Gregory. 

Dr Storer said: “Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.

“However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations. 

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project. Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase their software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.”

Lloyds Banking Group’s contribution will be led by Dr Shane Montague, Head of Research Engineering, with executive sponsorship from Professor Andrew McDonald, Enterprise Data Provisioning, Technology Platform Lead.

Dr Shane Montague said: “Lloyds Banking Group’s mission to Help Britain Prosper means leading innovation that genuinely improves how engineering gets done, with a focus on delivering enhanced digital services for our customers.

“We’re excited to partner with the University of Glasgow to gather rigorous, real-world evidence from day-to-day engineering work, so we can understand what really works and how agentic AI can be applied effectively and responsibly at scale.” 

Each quarter, the partnership will task Lloyds Banking Group’s software and data engineers in Bristol, Manchester and Hyderabad to work with their agentic AI counterparts on a different type of task with the aim to measure the impact on quality and speed of delivery. 

As the partnership continues, the Group will develop and improve their understanding of how to harness the benefits of agentic AI. Successful projects will be rolled out across the Group’s wider data teams, and eventually to all software and data engineering teams.

At the same time, Glasgow researchers will work alongside the teams to gather evidence on each project’s impact on efficiency, workflow and the day-to-day work of the teams.

Together, the partners will publish regular research papers documenting their work and develop best-practice documents to help organisations of all scales integrate AI into their software and data product development processes.