The program, which will take place over four years, will explore how AI can be used for data and software engineering.
“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,” said Dr Tim Storer of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science.
“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.
The program aims to assist Lloyds’ own implementation of agentic AI within its software engineering, while also granting university researchers the opportunity to study agentic AI development and transformation on a large scale.
This comes as Lloyds, which is the largest digital bank in the UK, is majorly investing in digital solutions and training its staff. The adoption of agentic AI for autonomous planning and task execution saw the bank generate £50 million in 2025, a number it expects to double in 2026.
It currently uses the technology to analyse customer complaints in a single second and has halved the time it spends on coding.
It also launched a £4 billion investment in data, technology and AI in 2023 and has partnered with Microsoft, using GitHub Copilot for almost 5,000 engineers to speed up software development.
The latest partnership hopes to bolster that further and “support its 28 million customers”, according to a release by the bank.
“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,” said Lloyds Banking Group’s Dr Shane Montague, head of research engineering.
“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.”
Montague will lead Lloyds’ half of the partnership, supported by Professor Andrew McDonald, enterprise data provisioning, technology platform lead.
Lloyds data incident
The partnership comes just weeks after Lloyds disclosed that it had accidentally exposed the data of almost half a million people due to a glitch in its systems.
Lloyds Banking Group said that on 12 March, as many as 447,936 customers of itself, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax were potentially exposed when a software glitch resulted in users seeing the transaction details of other customers in the banking app.
The fault came after the bank ran an overnight update to the app. According to Lloyds, 114,182 customers clicked on transactions that were not theirs, meaning they may have accessed the data of other users.
Data includes account details, national insurance numbers, and payment references. This also included the data of non-Lloyds customers.
So far, Lloyds has reportedly paid compensation to 3,625 customers, totalling just over £139,000 (roughly A$268,650), and said that it formally notified the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours of the incident.
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