Lloyds describes Athena as an “AI knowledge hub” which helps its customer service staff search large volumes of information.
Lloyds Banking Group has implemented its first large-scale generative AI product, Athena, designed to improve customer service efficiency for its 28 million customers.
Described by the bank as a “one-stop knowledge shop of information for customer facing colleagues”, Athena is capable of rapidly searching through the group’s 13,000 internal knowledge articles, enabling customer service staff to find answers to queries quicker. According to Lloyds, the system has reduced average search times 66% from 59 seconds to 20 seconds.
Since the beginning of the year, Lloyds says approximately 21,000 of its employees have incorporated Athena into their workflows, generating 2.1 million searches. The banking group expects this figure to reach 40 million by the end of 2025 as the system expands to additional customer support personnel.
The rollout of Athena continues Lloyds’ broader AI strategy, which the group projects will generate “at least £50 million in revenue growth and productivity improvements in 2025”.
In April, Lloyds transferred its core machine learning and generative AI platforms to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. The following month, the banking group appointed former HSBC executive Aritra Chakravarty as head of agentic AI.
Source: https://www.fintechfutures.com/
