Lloyds Banking Group and the University of Glasgow have officially launched a four-year research partnership designed to explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence within software and data engineering.
Over the course of the collaboration, the partners will investigate how large language model-based coding tools—specifically agentic AIs—can effectively support and enhance the daily workflows of human engineers operating within a massive enterprise environment.
As the UK’s largest digital bank, serving approximately 28 million customers, Lloyds Banking Group is currently investing significantly in developing new digital software and services, alongside rolling out new training and skills development programs for its colleagues.
Real-world testing across global hubs
To gather rigorous empirical data, the partnership will implement a structured testing methodology. Each quarter, Lloyds Banking Group will task its software and data engineers located in Bristol, Manchester, and Hyderabad to work directly alongside their agentic AI counterparts on varying types of tasks. The primary aim of these quarterly experiments is to meticulously measure the AI’s impact on both the quality and the speed of product delivery.
As the partnership matures and the Group improves its understanding of how to safely harness these AI benefits, successful projects and workflows will be systematically rolled out across the wider data teams, and eventually deployed to all software and data engineering teams within the organization.
Bridging the gap between academia and industry
The collaboration offers a unique opportunity to study large-scale engineering transformation in a real-world setting, bridging a critical gap in current industry research. To support this academic endeavor, the partnership will fund and create three new positions at the University of Glasgow: a PhD, a Masters of Research, and a post-doctoral research associate role dedicated to working directly with Lloyds’ engineering teams.
The University’s side of the partnership will be spearheaded by Dr Tim Storer and Dr Peggy Gregory from the School of Computing Science.
“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,” Dr Storer explained. “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.”
He added: “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.”
Responsible scaling and open-source insights
Lloyds Banking Group’s contribution to the project will be led by Dr Shane Montague, head of research engineering, supported by executive sponsorship from Professor Andrew McDonald, enterprise data provisioning, technology platform lead.
Dr Montague emphasized that the initiative aligns closely with the bank’s broader corporate goals.
“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,” Montague stated. “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.”
Ultimately, the partners plan to share their findings with the broader technology and financial sectors. Together, they will publish regular research papers documenting their ongoing work and develop comprehensive best-practice documents. These resources are intended to help organisations of all scales effectively integrate AI into their own software and data product development processes.
