Scottish university partners with bank on agentic AI research programme

A Scottish university has partnered with the UK largest digital bank to explore how artificial intelligence can be used to support software and data engineering.

The four-year partnership between the University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group will look at how agentic AI can be used to help write and debug code.

Agentic AI urges large language models to help it autonomously make decisions about next steps based in previous outcomes.

The university and bank will design experiments to test the efficacy of agentic AI in software teams, measuring the impact on efficiency, workflow and the day-to-day work of the teams involved.

These experiments will see software and data engineers in Bristol, Manchester and Hyderabad work with agentic AI on various tasks, with impact on quality and speed of delivery to be measured. Successful projects will be rolled out across the organisation.

Dr Tim Storer, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, will lead the university’s side of the partnership along with colleague Dr Peggy Gregory.

Storer said: “Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.

“However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations. We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project.”

The partnership created a PhD and a Masters of Research position at the university, and a post-doctoral research associate post at the bank.

Dr Shane Montague, head of research engineering at Lloyds Banking Group, said:  “We’re excited to partner with the University of Glasgow to gather rigorous, real-world evidence from day-to-day engineering work, so we can understand what really works and how agentic AI can be applied effectively and responsibly at scale.”