Lloyds Banking Group has announced the launch of its new AI customer knowledge hub, the bank’s first large scale generative AI tool designed to support its customer service employees.
The bank said the rollout of the tool, which is called Athena, marks a significant milestone in its digital transformation journey, adding that it will improve the customer experience by reducing customer waiting times.
Lloyds Banking Group has 28 million customers, with the bank helping around two million customers each month through telephone and online banking.
Each customer needs information specific to their query, which means customer service employees can spend “considerable” time navigating the Group’s 13,000 internal information articles to understand the information within the relevant pages.
Athena aims to reduce the time employees spend searching for the relevant information, with the length of searches having been reduced by around 66 per cent from 59 seconds to around 20 second since introducing the tool.
Lloyds estimates that this will save 4,000 hours of time spent searching for employees in telephone banking.
Since the start of 2025, Lloyds said 21,000 employees have used Athena to search 2.1 million times.
By the end of the year, the Group aims to introduce Athena further staff members working in relevant customer support roles, hitting an estimated 40 million searches.
Customer support colleagues were involved in building Athena and helped to test it to ensure its accuracy as well as providing a feedback loop to ensure the quality of the knowledge base.
As a tool for enhancing the customer experience, Lloyds said AI is an important accelerator for the Group’s transformation and is expected to bring at least £50 million in revenue growth and productivity improvements in 2025.
“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. This technology isn’t just an upgrade—it’s a revolution,” said Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds Banking Group. “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. The future of work is here, and we’re leading the charge!”
