Lloyds rolls out Athena, its first major GenAI tool, to boost service speed and streamline staff access to internal knowledge.
Lloyds Banking Group has deployed Athena, its first large-scale GenAI platform, to support faster, more accurate customer service. Designed as a knowledge assistant, Athena helps frontline staff rapidly search through 13,000 internal knowledge articles. This GenAI tool cuts the average search time from 59 seconds to 20, a 66% improvement in speed.
So far, over 21,000 employees have used Athena to conduct 2.1 million searches since its launch in early 2024. Lloyds expects that number to hit 40 million by the end of 2025 as Athena expands across more support functions. The GenAI system is part of the bank’s wider transformation plan to enhance productivity using AI.
Athena’s rollout builds on Lloyds’ migration of its machine learning and GenAI infrastructure to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI in April. This move has allowed the bank to scale up AI deployment while improving performance and flexibility. In May, Lloyds appointed Aritra Chakravarty, formerly of HSBC, as its head of agentic AI to accelerate the next phase of AI-driven automation.
The bank projects that its AI initiatives—including Athena—will unlock at least £50 million in new revenue and operational efficiencies by 2025. With Athena, Lloyds is advancing from experimentation to enterprise-level GenAI adoption, signaling a broader shift in financial services toward embedded AI for frontline staff enablement.
