Why Lloyds is Investing £100m in AI, Skills and Careers

Oh, splendid. Lloyds Banking Group is committing £100 million ($135.3m) to 'future skills' — banking's term of art for teaching 67,000 colleagues to smile bravely while the agentic AI they are being trained to deploy quietly rewrites their job descriptions. The programme has been branded the AI Academy and Leading with AI initiative, because nothing says 'we value you' like being reskilled for your own replacement. And they are not even pretending otherwise: the phrase 'agentic AI deployment' sits in the same release as 'responsible AI use', two concepts introduced to each other for the first time at this very party.

The tell-tale phrase is 'agentic AI deployment': the bit where the AI no longer needs you to click the button at all. Meanwhile, 'pathways for young people into work by 2030' is a poetic way of saying the next generation will be trained to manage the AI that manages itself — and will be very lucky indeed if the AI Academy has a few spare places left by then.

Still, credit where it is due — Lloyds is spending the money before the inevitable restructure, which puts it several rungs above rivals who wait until the deluge. The £135.3m American conversion is presumably there to assure investors on both sides of the Atlantic that the bank remains serious about 'future-ready capabilities', a phrase destined for internal slide decks until the day the AI Academy's graduates are declared redundant by the AI Academy's own alumni. One day, presumably, the bank will train its AI to work out whether the return on £100m of reskilling was ever going to beat the return on simply letting the AI do the job. Splendid stuff. Pass the sick bag.