Lloyds Banking Group reportedly has rolled out a new generative AI-powered knowledge hub to reduce the time it takes employees to find information and respond to customer queries.
The system, known as Athena, is the U.K. bank’s first major deployment of generative artificial intelligence (AI), according to Finextra.
Designed to serve as a centralized knowledge base, Athena can sift through 13,000 internal articles to provide quick answers to frontline employees in branches, call centers and other customer-facing roles.
The bank said this has cut the average time to find information from 59 seconds to 20 seconds, a 66% reduction.
For telephone banking teams, the bank estimates that Athena will save 4,000 hours annually that would otherwise be spent searching for information or keeping customers waiting.
“Athena is a monumental leap in our digital and strategic evolution, as we harness the power of generative AI to supercharge efficiency and elevate the customer experience,” according to Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds. “This technology isn’t just an upgrade – it’s a revolution.”
The system has seen wide adoption across the organization since its rollout earlier this year. According to the bank, 21,000 employees have used Athena to conduct more than 2.1 million searches so far in 2025.
Lloyds says it plans to expand the tool’s use to more employees in customer support roles, targeting as many as 40 million searches by the end of the year.
“We are freeing up thousands of hours as Athena puts critical information at our colleagues’ fingertips, leaving them free to help our customers with more complex, bespoke needs,” Boteju said.
Athena builds on Lloyds’ broader strategy to embed AI across the organization. Earlier this year, the bank announced it was developing a new machine learning and generative AI platform on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. The platform is expected to drive both revenue and productivity gains, with a projected value of at least 50 million pounds ($70 million) in 2025.
Lloyds is developing an underlying architecture for AI agents that can be deployed for different use cases, including financial advice, software development or underwriting.
Working with Google engineers, the bank was able to develop a working prototype of an AI agent after a 12-week sprint. The agent would interact directly with consumers to give financial guidance. The bank is planning to launch a consumer-facing AI agent as early as August.
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